We talk about what kind of thing free will might be, whether there’s an ordinary notion of free will, whether we should focus on free agency instead of free will, the cost of getting hung up about ‘the will’, the relation between free will and determinism, the relation between free will and indeterminism, the relevance of agent causation, the relevance of moral realism, the relevance of probabilistic thinking, and much more.

In short, we do some philosophy! I hope you enjoy it...

TRANSCRIPT

[The following transcript was generated by AI, so while it’s been checked over, it may contain small errors.]

REBECCA: Hi, I’m Rebecca Lowe and welcome to Working Definition, the new philosophy podcast in which I talk with different philosophical guests about different philosophical concepts with the aim of reaching a rough, accessible, but rigorous working definition.

Today, I’m joined by Peter van Inwagen. Now, at this point I usually list some things about my guest. Maybe their jobs or things they’ve written. But Peter is a bit different. Because I can’t remember not knowing Peter. He was one of my dad’s best friends. A family friend since I was a kid. A great friend to me. One of my favourite people to talk with about anything. So this feels quite special.

I should probably also note however that Peter is one of the best philosophers in the world. Easily. He is John Cardinal O’Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. He’s Research Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He writes on metaphysics, philosophy of religion, many things. Including, of course, the thing we’re going to discuss today, which is free will.

Thanks so much for joining me, Peter.

PETER: I’m very happy to be here, Rebecca.

REBECCA: So, I thought we’d begin by asking what ballpark of a kind of thing free will is. So, is it a power? Is it a capacity? An exercise of a capacity, an ability, a state of affairs, a value, a certain set of conditions, a lack of certain conditions? What kind of a thing are we looking at?

PETER: Oh Rebecca, I’m afraid I’m going to have to begin by deconstructing that question. [laughter] Let me explain what I mean by that. So, back in the 1960s, when I began to write about free will, everybody — all analytical philosophers — knew exactly what they meant by ‘free will’. And it was something like this.

For someone to have free will is when that person is deliberating between different courses of action. He or she is able to perform each of them. Or other phrases, where ‘has it within his power to’, and, well, there were even just ‘can’. But ‘can’ is a radically ambiguous word, so… [laughter] And ‘is able to that not something’. Like, you know, if you promise to do something, you shouldn’t promise to do something, unless you think you’re able to do it, right?

REBECCA: Yep.

PETER: It was that sense of ‘able’. So, we didn’t really think much about the question whether that was the right definition of ‘free will’, because we thought ‘free will’ was a term of art. And it was like, you don’t argue about whether you’ve got the right definition of, say, ‘abelian group’. You know, or a ‘moment of inertia’, right? [laughter]

These are not phrases like ‘exists’ or ‘cause’ or ’knowledge’ or something. So, then people became dissatisfied with this definition, as if there was a reason for being dissatisfied with the definition of a technical term. And well, they began to think that it means something in ordinary speech, ‘free will’.

Well, of course, one thing ‘free will’ means in English is determined by its occurrence in the phrase of ‘one’s own free will’.

REBECCA: Yep.

PETER: Of his own free will, of her own free will, of my own free will, of your own free will. And that just means ‘in absence of coercion’.

REBECCA: You didn’t push me down the hill, I decided to go down the hill. I went down the hill of my own volition. Something like that.

PETER: Of my own free will, yes. Yes. But that obviously isn’t what’s being meant if a psychologist announces that her experiments have shown that human beings lack free will. She isn’t obviously saying that psychologists have proved that human beings always act under coercion.

And you begin to get people saying we’ve got to have something that’s adequate to this actual conception of ‘free will’ that’s in the background. That’s not another phrase of this ‘of your own free will’, but is really what… Well, I mean, suppose a woman picks up the paper and reads about the psychologist who says that her experiments show that no one has free will. She may or may not agree with what she reads, but she thinks she understands it. Right? Yes, no free will, huh?

But actually, what does she mean by that? What does anyone mean by that? I would suggest that ‘free will’ as it occurs, outside that one fossilised phrase ‘of one’s own free will’, doesn’t mean much of anything. It’s a technical term, which has made its way into ordinary speech from philosophy and theology. The way ‘entropy’ is a technical term that’s made its way into ordinary speech from physics.

And it doesn’t mean anything in ordinary language, and not much, anyway. The way probably ‘evolution’ taken into ordinary… doesn’t mean much. I don’t think ‘free will’ means much in ordinary language. It’s one of those things that people think they know what it means, but if you ask them, then nothing would be forthcoming. And that’s because I think there is no such concept.

It’s an extremely interesting question, you know, whether every time you want, you are trying to decide whether to do A or B, you’re both able to do A and able to do B. Or even if, any time, you’re always able to do both those things. There are interesting arguments to show that you must lack the ability to do at least one of those things. That’s an interesting problem, and that’s more or less the problem, which, back in the sixties, we thought of as ‘the problem of free will’.

But now, I’m not going to name the philosophers that have added all these bells and whistles to this concept. They said, well, yes, that’s obviously part of what we meant by ‘free will’, but actually it means ‘ultimate responsibility for what you’ve chosen’. But then, of course, nobody really knows what ‘ultimate responsibility for what you’ve chosen’ means.

REBECCA: So, I wonder if that offers an alternative interpretation of what’s going on. Which is that, rather than there being this one central idea, and then these other things, which kind of don’t really mean anything, or people don’t really know what they mean. That, instead, people have just become concerned about different kinds of ways in which we’re constrained from doing this original thing. Which is something like ‘being able to do either A or B’.

So, you get this classic philosophical question about causal determinism. Maybe understood — I know you talk about it in terms of laws of nature and events in the past. But, when the science…

PETER: But what would it mean to say that causal determinism constrains you from…

REBECCA: Well, something like, ‘if determinism is true, then we don’t have free will’, so…

PETER: Well, wait, wait! That’s free will is what we were trying to define, right? [laughter]

REBECCA: Right, yes. But all I’m saying is something like, somebody might say, look, what the scientist is trying to do when you read the paper in the science journal, and the scientist is saying something like, “Hey Rebecca, you can’t possibly have free will, because it turns out that your brain ‘knew’ what you were going to pick before you decided it!”, or something like this. These kinds of experiments, which seem to show that we were going to do the thing before we became aware of our results of our reasoning, or something like this. I mean, scientists often don’t talk about…

PETER: Yeah, well, but all right. But why does that show that we don’t have free will?

REBECCA: But that would just be another kind of constraint on our capacity to... Because, in other words, there are different reasons for which we might think that we never really had the open choice.

PETER: Ah!

REBECCA: So, one of those is because everything was determined before you were born, because that’s literally how the laws of nature work, and events cause events. Another of them is something like, well, we have this capacity, and determinism in that sense isn’t true, but there’s an evil demon who has come about in the last five years, who is constraining your capacity to exercise your free will. And then there’s a third thing, which is something like, look, just the way your body is and how it works. Like, you don’t have control over your desires, or your brain is actually doing the stuff and not your mind. It’s just, like, your synapses, or whatever the scientists want to say.

It seems to me like these are just different reasons for thinking that it’s not truly the case that when I feel like I could have eaten the apple instead of the pear, it’s not really the case. I was always going to eat the apple.

PETER: Well, that comes back… You came back in the end to the ‘is able to’.

REBECCA: Yeah!

PETER: But the question was, is that actually everything that ‘free will’ is? And what I’m arguing against is the idea that there is this pre-analytical or ordinary language meaning attached to free will, such that we can then decide whether we’ve got it right.

It makes sense to say that this philosopher set out to give a definition of ‘causation’, but he hasn’t got it right. Because ‘cause’ is a word that we use and we understand it, at least in certain contexts. ‘Knowledge’, yes. Have we got the right definition of ‘knowledge’? Yes.

Well, but I say that ‘free will’ is not like ‘know’ or ‘cause’, where it has… It just doesn’t have any real antecedent meaning. Again, outside that one limited phrase. It is a word that occurs in ordinary language. But there I say it’s a word like ‘entropy’ or ‘vibration’ or ‘evolution’, where people just don’t mean much by it. But they think they understand it, but they don’t.

REBECCA: What about the idea of there being some relation between those other uses. Could they be, for instance, parasitic on the narrow original idea?

PETER: Sorry, ask that again. I missed something.

REBECCA: So, let’s say that these are the uses of the term ‘free will’ that don’t really mean anything. But there is this kind of standard understanding, on which ‘free will’ is, how you put it, ‘being able to do either A or B’. And then there are these other uses. Could we say something like: they are parasitic on the ‘free will’…

PETER: Yeah, well the trouble is the other uses have not been adequately explained. That is, I hate to… I don’t want to go mentioning names, proper names, you know. [laughter] But you know who you are, all right? These people who say we have to add something, or maybe even the ‘double ability’ idea gets swallowed up in the new thing, so we don’t have to mention that anymore.

REBECCA: Yep.

PETER: But I say that there isn’t any antecedent meaning to ‘free will’, such that we can say we haven’t got it right in the original one. And this view, I should say, this is my view alone. I think I don’t know of any other — I flatter myself as being a specialist in the problem of free will — I don’t know of any other one, any other specialist in the problem of free will, that would agree with me about this. But then I’m just putting forth my own opinion, here.

REBECCA: It seems like a pretty reasonable opinion to me. It still seems like, even though, if we just reserve the discussion to that one particular thing, we can still have quite a rich conversation about what it is.

PETER: Notice we wouldn’t have to use the words ‘free will’, at all, in that conversation. I could have written… I wrote a book about the problem of free will, called An Essay on Free Will.

REBECCA: Yep.

PETER: I could have written essentially the same book without using the words ‘free will’, at all. That these other philosophers I’m talking about could not state their positions without using the word ‘free will’. And this has led me to accuse them of verbal essentialism.

REBECCA: Yep.

PETER: That is, philosophers are guilty of verbal essentialism, if there’s some one phrase, generally some technical philosophical term, such you could not state your position without using that term.

REBECCA: Yep. So, one concern I think I have about the term ‘free will’, which is a different concern from the concern I think you’re voicing, is that the very idea of ‘the will’ seems to me a bit of a hang up from early modern times.

PETER: Oh, yes.

REBECCA: I worry that it maybe biases our conversation, a little. I mean, if you think of some of the classic understandings of ‘the will’, like Rousseau and Schopenhauer, it’s something external to us. Something that, even if you have these kind of internal conceptions of ‘the will’ being, like, part of me, it still kind of biases you towards saying things like ‘Rebecca’s will acts on her’, as opposed to ‘Rebecca does things’.

PETER: Yes.

REBECCA: So, I would prefer, I think, to frame these things in terms of something like ‘agency’. It seems like what we’re talking about when we say things like…

PETER: Yeah, ‘free agency’ was a term that was often used.

REBECCA: Yeah, so I wonder if it might actually be more useful, when we’re picking out the thing that you think the people are picking out when they really are talking about ‘free will’ — this idea of ‘could Peter really have chosen A rather than B?’

PETER: Yes, well we always said…

REBECCA: This seems to me like a conversation about ‘agency’. And if we make it a conversation about ‘will’, we start going into these weird things like, ‘Oh, Rebecca’s desires caused her to do something’ or ‘Rebecca’s volition caused her’. And this seems like maybe there’s just this kind of unnecessary extra step, which is a hangover from this very weird concept of ‘the will’.

PETER: Well, we always said… There was usually a little paragraph, or a couple of sentences saying, “Of course, the term ‘free will’ is merely a traditional term. The concept of ‘will’ will not actually occur in any of these concepts”.

I mean, there is, you know, Locke said the question is not whether the will be free, but whether man be free. The ‘free will’ meant that the will — that is what you choose to do, what you will to do — is not determined by something that’s beyond your control.

REBECCA: But I think the problem of talking about it as ‘the will’ does lead people to think that my will might be beyond my control.

So, the people who say, “Well, okay, I’ll accept it’s Rebecca’s will, but Rebecca can’t control her will!” Or, “it’s Rebecca’s desires, but Rebecca can’t control her desires.” My worry is that this starts making us think of these things as not something like… I think my desires are some of my psychological states. I don’t think it makes any sense to say, you know, “my desires cause me to do something”.

PETER: Well, well, agreed. The word ‘will’ can only be a source of confusion, if it isn’t properly ignored.

REBECCA: And even Locke himself talks about ‘the will’ as opposed to his ‘desires’. He makes a distinction there, right?

PETER: Not that I recall, but I speak under correction. Not being a Locke expert.

REBECCA: Even Locke, he has this funny little chain of things where it’s like, you know, “Oh, my conclusions about the correct ends have an impact on my conception of the good, and my happiness has an impact on my uneasiness, has an impact upon my...” It’s like all of these little layers, separating out from just, “I did the thing!”

PETER: Well, possibly so. I don’t recognise that part of Locke, but then, I’m no historian.

REBECCA: Yeah, I’m less interested in what I think people in the past said. But that’s my recollection of the agency chapter in Human Understanding.

PETER: Yeah. But suppose we went to the term ‘free agency’ instead of ‘free will’. Then, I would have to say “we don’t know what ‘free agency’ means”! We’re free to use it as a technical term. You know, you say a person exhibits ‘free agency’, just in the case that when a person is deliberating between alternative courses of action, he or she is sometimes able to perform each of them. Not both of them, but each of them.

REBECCA: Yes. So, I think one concern I have is that maybe the term ‘free’ might be redundant here. That the thing we’re talking about is ‘agency’, rather than ‘free agency’.

PETER: Well then, what term would you use then?

REBECCA: I’d probably just use ‘agency’. I feel like ‘agency’ — I’d probably go with Locke on this, it’s the power to reason on things and come to some…

PETER: Yeah, but wouldn’t a person who was absolutely unable to do anything other than what he did still exhibit ‘agency’? After all, he does things. ‘Agency’ is doing things.

REBECCA: Yeah, so this is… I think this is a useful distinction. And this can help us think about, at least, why the free will problem is important. So, I had lunch with a friend today, who basically thinks — he’s a very smart and interesting guy — but his view is something like, me making a choice is the same as a machine making a ‘choice’.

Now, for someone like him, it’s very hard to get them exercised about the free will problem. Because it seems to me this problem arises broadly because you’re like, “Hey, it feels to me like I have these choices. It feels to me like I have the options. But do I really?” Now, if I’m just…

PETER: Yeah, well, why would you think that you’re able to do something other than what you do? Because it feels like you’re…

REBECCA: What would it feel like not to have this thing? What would it feel like?

PETER: Well, to take a very simple example, and this is an adaptation of something from Locke. You are sitting in a room deliberating about whether to leave. Suddenly, you hear a click, the door is being locked.

REBECCA: Yep.

PETER: Suddenly, you’re no longer able to leave the room. If you hadn’t heard the click, you would feel just as able to leave the room. So, feeling doesn’t establish that you’re able to do something.

REBECCA: Oh no, absolutely. I don’t think it does. It’s not something like consciousness, where, you know, the fact that I feel the thing gives me some insight. All I’m saying is that the problem in the first place arises, I think, because we do have these feelings. That’s what makes us ask. If we were just… It doesn’t really make any sense to talk about this in relation to the machine, or the rock. Like, there’s no problem of free agency…

PETER: But there are other reasons. I mean, for instance, we tell people sometimes that they shouldn’t have done something, or that they should do something. Now, it’s an old discovery that, you know, telling somebody that they should do something is like moral advice.

REBECCA: Yep.

PETER: And you don’t advise somebody to do something, unless you believe they’re able to do it.

REBECCA: Yeah, totally.

PETER: Right, I mean, suppose you ask, you know, “What’s a good restaurant for me to take my boyfriend to?” And you say, “Well, how about the Du Paris in Paris?” — “You can’t mean that! I couldn’t get to Paris in a couple of hours, at any rate.” And you say, “Oh, I know you’re not able to take him there, but that’s my advice! You asked for my advice of the best restaurant to take him to. That’s the one!”

No, your advice has to be for something a person is able to do. Moral advice. You can’t tell somebody that they should do something, unless you believe they’re able to do it. But if a person is actually able to do only one thing, then you would never know whether your judgment that a person should do this thing was correct.

You see, it isn’t just psychology or feelings that lead us to say that a person is ‘able to do’ something, when, quite independently of our judgments about determination — it’s our whole system of moral categories are predicated upon this.

REBECCA: Yeah, I don’t disagree with any of that. In fact, I think — at least a standard objection levelled against the people who want to claim that we don’t have free will, is that — we all act as if we have free will. I mean, you get these moral and political philosophers these days who want to say something like, “Look, we know we don’t have free will, but we should still act as if we have free will, and punish the bad people”. I mean, this is kind of hilarious, because acting as if you have free will implies that you have free will.

But yes, I think many people have made the point that we all just act as if we do have free will. It seems like a very ordinary position to have. It seems quite hard to think what you would even do if you didn’t have free will. Like, what the world would look like if we didn’t have free will. Some people just say it would look exactly the same...

PETER: Well, just think about what it would be like to try to give people advice of any kind, if you never knew what people were able to do.

REBECCA: Right, but I mean, you’d still have the problem about yourself. So, if you come to the conclusion that it means something to ‘give advice’, that your ‘giving advice’ can be something. I mean, I think baked into the idea of 'giving advice’ is…

PETER: Yeah, well again, to deliberate seems to be…

REBECCA: That’s right.

PETER: It’s a plausible thesis that to deliberate between A and B, is to have the belief that you’re able to do both A and B. Here’s a case that is from Locke, similar to the one I mentioned.

You’re deliberating about which of two rooms to leave the door by. Suddenly, you hear a click which sounds very much like one of the doors being locked, but you’re not sure whether that’s what it was. But if the door has been locked, then you’re not able to leave by that door. Can you now deliberate about which door to leave by?

REBECCA: Yeah, of course you can, and that to me is the important thing. I can reason about it. I can come to some conclusions. Some of my conclusions might be wrong.

PETER: No, you can deliberate conditionally on the doors being unlocked about whether to leave by it. But you can’t simply deliberate about which door… You can’t be trying to decide which door to leave by, if you don’t believe that both doors are open to you.

REBECCA: Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. But the very fact of the matter that I can do some deliberating at all — I can do some deliberating about whether I should walk over to the door, and see if the door actually is locked.

PETER: Yes, but that, of course, you believe you can do. You can walk over to the door, to see whether it’s locked.

REBECCA: But the problem is just doing that doesn’t prove that I’m actually doing it, does it? Because it could be the case that my deliberation, itself — what I feel like is deliberation — is out of my control. So, my feelings, in the same way that this suffices for, it gives me good reason to think I’m conscious, the fact that I...

PETER: Well, remember what we were talking about is the implications of deliberating for what you believe.

REBECCA: Yeah.

PETER: You can of course deliberate when you’re not able to do one of the things that you’re deliberating about. But you can’t deliberate if you don’t believe that both those things are open to you.

REBECCA: Yeah, I don’t... What are the other things you have to be able to do? Like, what kind of thing could have this power? So, for instance, I already said I don’t think the rock or the bicycle can do deliberation. It seems to me that you have to be alive. It seems to me you have to be able to have psychological states. Do you have to be conscious?

PETER: I would… You have to be able to use language. And I don’t think… Does it make sense to think, speak of a.. Now we’re going beyond metaphysics, right? We’re going into the philosophy of mind, now.

REBECCA: Sure.

PETER: But does it make sense to think, speak of somebody who can speak, use categories, but isn’t conscious? Well, I mean, you know, people talk about AI being able to do this, and it’s doubtful whether there’s anything conscious, there. I mean, I have my own views about AI, but I mean just the…

REBECCA: Do you think AI could be conscious? Is conscious?

PETER: I don’t think that if you’re talking with an AI…. Say you have this chatbot at home that you’ve become infatuated with. [laughter] The trouble is there isn’t anybody on the other end of the line.

REBECCA: I agree.

PETER: Not even an unconscious… Not a machine, not an unconscious thing.

REBECCA: This is my main problem with the idea of AI being conscious. I mean, I don’t think anybody in the world actually thinks AI is alive. And I think only living things could be conscious, in the phenomenological sense. But I think an easier thing for us to pick out than ‘what are the things that are alive?’ is ‘what are particular things?’ And I don’t know what the particular thing is, in the instance of me being told that the AI I’m talking with is conscious.

PETER: Well, there isn’t a particular thing!

REBECCA: That’s right.

PETER: Look, all things are particular things, right? There aren’t any non-particular things. And there isn’t anything that you are talking with, there.

REBECCA: I agree.

PETER: There are a lot of machine parts operating together to produce the illusion.

REBECCA: Yeah, I agree.

PETER: You could have, for example, a group of a hundred human beings each picking a little… One decides you say something. One human being decides what kind of reply you’re gonna get. The next one decides how many words it will be. The next one decides the grammatical structure of the sentence, and so on. So, nobody actually writes the sentence that you hear. Well, then, there’s nobody you’re talking with. AI is something like that.

REBECCA: Yeah, I broadly agree. Can we say something similar about free will? That only particular things that persist across time with identity have free will? Can have free will?

PETER: Well, I mean, you would have to… You can’t have free will unless you make decisions, I suppose.

REBECCA: Yeah, that seems right to me.

PETER: And you can’t make a decision, unless you last a little bit of time.

REBECCA: It seems right to me. It seems like you have to have the capacity to do things like bear knowledge, in order to deliberate. Your point about having a belief about whether the door is unlocked, or the door is locked. So, we can rule out some kinds of things, it would seem, from being the kinds of things that could have free will. Which gets us somewhere in this investigation.

PETER: Of course, we can still talk about what we used to call ‘the problem of free will’.

REBECCA: Yes.

PETER: That is the problem… First of all, this ‘double ability’ — the ability to be able to do both A and B when you’re just trying to decide between them — is that consistent with determinism? Is the world deterministic? Is it consistent with indeterminism? You know, because there are good arguments for its inconsistency with determinism and its inconsistency with indeterminism.

REBECCA: Yep.

PETER: So, all this was part of what we used to call ‘the problem of free will’. And all of that, of course, could have been investigated without using the term ‘free will’, at all.

REBECCA: Yeah, I mean, I think there still has to be this central power, or ability, or something…

PETER: Yes, power or ability. Yes, that… But remember there was always this idea that, well, you can’t simply define ‘free will’ in terms of power and ability. There’s more to it than that. There’s ‘ultimate responsibility’, or something.

REBECCA: Nonetheless, it seems like it’s some feature of being a living thing or something.

PETER: Oh, certainly.

REBECCA: And we want to say, you know, could it be the case that this feature exists if determinism is true, in this sense of — you’ve talked about the sense of, you know, the laws of nature and the past states of the world.

PETER: Yes.

REBECCA: If they make it the case that there’s one ‘unique future’, or however you want to put it. But then of course there does come, as you said, the indeterminism problem.

So, you get something like, “hey, we’ve gotten some part of the way, which is, we think that for free will to be true, for somebody to have free will, it can’t be the case that we have determinism. Therefore, we need non-determinism.” But then it seems like there are some problems with the compatibility of free will and indeterminism, too!

PETER: Well, yes. If you… I mean, suppose you’re deciding what to do and it’s undetermined what you’re going to do. Then, suppose there were a thousand perfect duplicates of you, at that moment. Then, if it was undetermined what you were going to do, wouldn’t some of them do one thing and one of them do the other?

REBECCA: Yeah, I mean, the problem with this… I get that it’s a thought experiment, but I think, the way I see it is that, when I do pick one of the options, I reason on it and I pick that particular option, I worry that we might be kind of stacking the deck to think about it in terms of, you know, going back, and Rebecca could have done this, Rebecca could have done this, Rebecca could have done that.

PETER: I didn’t go back, no. I said, we have a lot of parallel Rebeccas, at the same time. And some of them do… you’re trying to decide whether to have vanilla or chocolate. Some of them have vanilla, and some of them have chocolate. How was it up to you, or within your power, to be…

REBECCA: So, I mean, to me, it’s just going to be quite simple — because I reasoned on it! I have a kind of ‘agent causation’ view.

PETER: Yes, but so did the others! The ones that went the other way. They both reasoned.

REBECCA: Yeah, but the one that’s me, in actuality, reasoned on it and made these choices. I also think that...

PETER: Right, the others weren’t you. That’s true. But they were just like you.

REBECCA: Yeah, but that’s not enough!

PETER: Qualitatively.

REBECCA: That’s not enough to be me.

PETER: But it shows that your qualitative properties were not sufficient, for what you did.

REBECCA: Yeah. So, one problem I do think I sympathise with, is the idea that if Rebecca is like Rebecca, then Rebecca would come to the same conclusion if Rebecca had the same options, or something like that. That seems to be my way of seeing what the problem is.

PETER: Sounds like determinism to me, Rebecca.

REBECCA: Well, that’s right. But, I’m fine — I don’t think I have to come to that conclusion! I’m just trying to translate the problem into something which makes it a problem. But then I’m not going to have that problem, because I’m just going to say something like, “Well, if that is how I reason on the things and come to the conclusion, that’s me coming to the conclusion”. I don’t need to have this extra little problem about ‘Rebecca’s reasoning acting on Rebecca’.

PETER: Rebecca, if it’s your conclusion, of course you came to the conclusion! Otherwise, it wouldn’t be your conclusion. But the question is…

REBECCA: That’s right. And just because I could’ve come to other conclusions…

PETER: But no matter how little free will you have, to use the phrase ‘free will’, you’re still… It’s still gonna be your conclusion.

REBECCA: Yes, that’s right. But I think just because I could have come to other conclusions, and, in fact, it needs to be the case that I could have come to other conclusions for this to mean anything here, I don’t see why that means that that’s a problem for me having come to my conclusion.

So, as I understand it, the problem is something like: because there were lots of different options, in some sense the choice I make is random. Or, it’s up to chance, rather than being up to me. Is that a correct understanding of the problem here?

PETER: I don’t think ‘chance’ and ‘you’ are names of two alternative things it might have been up to. [laughter]

REBECCA: Sure.

PETER: The point is it’s either up to you, or up to no one. Chance is a way of saying it’s up to no one.

REBECCA: That’s right. So, I’m wondering why it is the case that I should conclude that it wasn’t up to me, if I’m willing to accept that I reasoned on it and came to the conclusion by deliberating.

PETER: Well, because all the others were in exactly the same initial position. They reasoned on it, and they came the other way.

REBECCA: But they didn’t, though! [laughter] That could have been the case, but they didn’t. I did…

PETER: Okay. You mean they all came to… All those thousands of…

REBECCA: No, there was only… There’s only ever one Rebecca, and Rebecca did the reasoning! Just because Rebecca could have come to other conclusions, doesn’t mean that Rebecca, what Rebecca did, was not determined by Rebecca. That’s the confusion I have here.

PETER: Well, I don’t think we should use the phrase ‘determined by Rebecca’. The question is: what accounted for the fact that Rebecca came to this conclusion?

REBECCA: Yes, yes.

PETER: You say, “Well, she decided.” All right.

REBECCA: Yes.

PETER: But why did she decide that way? And, I mean, well, let’s try it in terms of replays.

REBECCA: Okay.

PETER: Then you replay… Would you find it disturbing if, when you got replayed a thousand times, seventy per cent of the time you did one thing, and the other thirty percent of the time you did the other thing? And maybe you could imagine people watching you do this, and taking bets on what you would do next, and what the bookies would give the odds on.

REBECCA: Cool.

PETER: Which had better be seven to three. And so on. Looks a lot like chance, what you’re going to do next time.

REBECCA: I don’t understand why I conclude... I’m glad we got to this, because I just don’t really understand the problem. I think the problem is a problem if I’m some kind of, like, probabilistic machine, or something. But as long as part of the story is that the actual Rebecca did reasoning and came to the conclusion, the fact that the actual Rebecca was relatively likely to have done something else doesn’t seem to me to be such a problem.

And I also think that the, kind of, ‘by chance’ nature that I know some people are worried about — although I think you’re saying that’s not the case — seems to me to be much more likely if, for instance, you could say Rebecca was equally likely to do all of the things. So, if it was something like I had five options and — I don’t really know what it means to say ‘Rebecca is equally likely to do all of the things’ — maybe that might lead me to being concerned that it’s not really ‘up to me’, in some sense.

The problem for me is going to arise, though, because I think I, as I was, actually did reason! I also would say, I think in many instances there are multiple options, but I generally think there are some options that you wouldn’t pick, or you couldn’t pick.

PETER: Oh yeah. No question about that.

REBECCA: So, for instance, I’d like to think I couldn’t pick to run a hundred meters in nine seconds.

PETER: Well, you probably…

REBECCA: And I wouldn’t pick to throw the baby off the bridge.

PETER: That’s right.

REBECCA: So, that reduces down the option set. And the reason it reduces down the option set is to do with things like my capacities and my reasoning. The reason I don’t throw the baby off the bridge is because I’ve reasoned it through, and I’ve come to the conclusion I should never throw a baby off the bridge. So...

PETER: Probably has more to do with your moral training than your reasoning, but yeah.

REBECCA: I’m happy to give away quite a lot of things on my moral training. On quite a lot of things. But I can think of some instances where…

PETER: Well, I mean, the reason you would never do something… The reason you would never do something under any circumstances, is that you can’t.

REBECCA: Yeah, so, for instance, I’d like to think, because I’m pretty hardcore about this, that I would never torture another human being.

PETER: Yeah.

REBECCA: Now, of course, if I was being tortured myself, maybe I would be ‘weak-willed’, to use that horrible word again. But the point is that the reason why that option seems to me much less likely is to do with things like my beliefs and my reasoning. And I don’t have a problem with the idea that my beliefs cause me to do things, because my beliefs are just a psychological state of me.

So, it’s a problem if you’re the kind of person who is concerned about your beliefs ‘acting on you’ and ‘causing you to do’ stuff. I’m not worried about that. And it’s also a problem if you’re somebody who thinks only events cause events. I’m somebody who thinks agents can kick off chains of events. So, I’m not really sure why, if I’m buying the idea that I reason on things, and this means some options are less likely than others, that just because there were more options available means that, in some sense, it’s chance.

I just, I don’t — I think I’m just being stupid. I don’t get why someone like you, who thinks it’s smart to believe in free will. You seem to think free will is more likely than the other options. I don’t see why…

PETER: You mean being able to do both things?

REBECCA: Yeah. I think I read that you said… I tried not to read too much of your stuff, although I have read it previously, because I wanted the conversation to be more fun. And it’s more fun if I don’t already know the answers to what I think you’re going to say! But my understanding is you’ve said things like, “it’s even weirder to think we don’t have free will than we do have free will”, or something like that.

PETER: Well, if you go through what I believe are the consequences of it, yeah.

REBECCA: Oh interesting! So, it’s the consequences. Because, of course, there are these other...

PETER: Well, for instance, that nobody ever did anything wrong or morally objectionable. There was nothing wrong with the Holocaust or the Atlantic slave trade. Or I’ve seen, for example, an FBI picture of a couple of guys planning a snuff film with an eleven-year-old boy. Nothing wrong, nothing wrong with that. That’s weird, right?

I mean, look, if somebody reliable — God, say — were to tell you that there was nothing wrong with that, you might say… Maybe your initial reaction would be one of horror, but you would also, I think, have a purely intellectual reaction. Which is, “I don’t see how that could be. I don’t see how it could be that there is nothing wrong with that.”

REBECCA: I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I know some non-moral realists, for instance. I think it’s crazy…

PETER: Yes, but you’re not one of them, right?

REBECCA: But, I understand their arguments. I also understand the views of people who say things like ,“God imposed the bad things on us so that we could…”, or something. I mean, you know, there are intellectually defensible — I agree, more weird — positions to be held.

But I think what I’m saying is something like, this type of reasoning… I would also think that when you come to this indeterminism problem, and you get these three options. One of them is free will is compatible with determinism. One of them is free will is compatible with indeterminism. And the other is that free will is not true. We know that you think that ‘free will is not true’ is weirder than ‘free will is compatible with determinism’, or ‘determinism is true’. I don’t know why...

PETER: That’s not quite right, no...

REBECCA: Okay sorry, so you should clarify it better…

PETER: What’s weird is that there’s no free will.

REBECCA: Yes, all right, sorry. Yes, of course. Right, good. So if it’s weird… if it’s more weird that there’s no free will than there is free will, you’re taking the weirdness approach seriously.

PETER: So, Noam Chomsky said, look, free will is obviously compatible with determinism, but we just don’t see how that could be. It’s a mystery. [laughter] And it’s probably because the human mind isn’t capable of everything. And you know what? I feel a lot of sympathy with that — I just feel the other way around. I don’t see how free will can be compatible with indeterminism. I just think, well, it must be! [laughter] That’s why I get called a ‘mysterian’. For that reason.

REBECCA: Yes, I know that. I’m just not sure why you don’t place more weight on the agent causation thing, as being a solution. And I know you’ve argued that even if it’s true, even if it’s possible, it still doesn’t solve the problem. I think that’s where I don’t get it. Because my guess, my assumption would have been, before I started thinking about these things, that you would have gone down that kind of route, because I assume that that’s why you think…

PETER: Nah, nah!

REBECCA: …that it’s not weird to think that we have free will.

PETER: Because… Well, about agent causation, at any rate. Well, I mean, suppose, say that you agent-caused some action of yours. Let’s replay that. If determinism is not true, then sometimes you’re gonna agent-cause one thing, and sometime you’re gonna agent-cause the other. Seventy percent of the time, you’ll agent-cause the lie, the other thirty percent of the time, you’ll agent-cause the truth.

REBECCA: But again, why is it that 70 per cent I do A, and 30 per cent I do B? Why? Why is there more likelihood that I do A than B?

PETER: Well, there are cases….

REBECCA: It seems to be about me!

PETER: Well, look, if you want to say every time something’s undetermined, it would have to be fifty-fifty…

REBECCA: Mmm! That seems to be much more problematic.

PETER: That’s not gonna make any difference to my argument.

REBECCA: I think it might, because I think I’d be more likely…

PETER: All right, well, let’s grant that, then. So, every time you agent-cause, you’re trying to decide whether to lie or tell the truth. So, you agent-cause telling the truth. The next time, you agent-cause lying. Then, you agent-cause telling truth.

REBECCA: I think we’ve then written free will out of the problem, though! If it is truly the case that I do 50-50, then I’m…

PETER: Well, if you agent-cause the same thing every time, that’s determinism.

REBECCA: Right. But I’m…

PETER: The past determines what you’re gonna agent-cause.

REBECCA: I totally get that. All I’m saying is, if it’s truly the case that I can pick between A and B, but 50 per cent of the time I always pick A, and 50 percent of the time I always pick B, it’s either the case that I’m not really having any impact on it, because it’s the case just probabilistically, and this, in some sense, controls me in what I do. Or, it’s the case we come back to this set of problems, which are ‘Rebecca’s reasoning is acting on Rebecca’, and I don’t have that problem.

PETER: Let’s try going through the argument carefully. So, you have determinism and agent causation. Then, you’re gonna agent-cause the same thing every time, right?

REBECCA: Sorry, explain what you mean by that. If determinism is true…

PETER: Yes, determinism and agent causation implies that…

REBECCA: How do I have agent causation, if there is determinism? I mean…

PETER: I don’t know. I just said if you had both those things, then you would...

REBECCA: Yeah, I think…

PETER: All right, but look… We’re just looking at the logically possible alternatives. Maybe the formally possible alternatives. [laughter] All right, so you say it’s not possible to have agent causation and determinism. Fine. Then we’ll have agent causation and indeterminism. That means you’re not going to agent-cause the same thing every time.

REBECCA: But I don’t think I have a… I mean, aside from the fact that I don’t think it… I understand the value of doing thought experiments, but I worry that having the idea that I could go back and do it again seems to me to bake in some stuff which might, kind of, bias our conclusions. But even if I...

PETER: How can we tell… How can we say what determinism means? How can we say what determinism means, if we can’t go back? Determinism means if you went back to exactly the same state, it would go forward the same way.

REBECCA: So, I think this is why I have a problem with… when you ask somebody in simple terms to say what 'free will’ is, sometimes they say something like ‘having had another chance’, or something. This seems to me like a weird way to describe something that I see as being an active power in the present moment! So, the question to me is: do I have both of the options? Can I reason and pick which of the options, and then act on it? So this is an account of agency. It’s quite a Lockean account of agency…

PETER: Well, see, I don’t know what a lot of those words mean. [laughter] What I do understand is ‘able’. So, that’s why I say, yep, what I meant by ‘free will’ when I wrote the book An Essay on Free Will, is that when you try and decide what to do, you’re able to do both those things. That’s all put together from words I understand.

REBECCA: I understand. So, I want to say, there are some senses in which people are not able to do things. In terms of this, I would probably divide them into, like, do I actually have the capacity to do it? And can I exercise the capacity? It might be the case that I have the capacity for free will, but the evil demon is preventing me from exercising it. Or, I have the capacity for free will, but you’re manipulating me to do all of the things.

PETER: But you already… When you go to capacity, you’ve already introduced a problematical term. We would have to stop and say what we mean by that, if we can, which…

REBECCA: Yeah. I think the conversation we had, though, in which we said something like, we talked about free will as some kind of power, presupposes… We can use the word ‘power’, instead. Being able to do something…

PETER: Yeah, power just means ability, right?

REBECCA: Yeah, or ability. Fine. We can just say ‘ability’. I have the ability. Like, there’s something within me that is able to do the thing. Yes, there could be some external constraints on me, whether those are, like, physical constraints or…

PETER: It’s not something within you that’s able to do things. It’s you.

REBECCA: It’s me, it’s me. Exactly. No, that’s right. But there are other kinds of things that can’t do those things. So, the bicycle can’t. We come back to the active-passive distinction. If the rock wrecks your car, right? The rock has moved because something has caused the rock to move. You might still want to call a rock an ‘agent’ — I know some people do that. I actually find that quite confusing.

But you want to say something like, for the rock to wreck your car, Rebecca had to, like, push the rock. For Rebecca to wreck your car, at least on the agent causation story, the agent here… This is not reducible to event causation, or however you want to put it. There’s something different about these agents….

PETER: That’s a possible point of view. But now, agent causation, as I understand it, is defined in opposition to event causation. And it is that a substance or continuant can be the cause of an event. It doesn’t… the cause of an event does not have to be an earlier event.

REBECCA: Yeah.

PETER: First of all, I don’t believe in events. [laughter] So, I don’t think there are any such things. So, that’s a little difficult for me. And secondly, I think causation is a relation between substances or continuants, such as the earth attracts the moon. That’s my paradigm. Now, we have stories about causal processes. About, you know, what happens when the key goes into the lock, and you turn the key, and the teeth mesh, and so on. None of those really requires events. Just talking about how things push on things. Maybe… I mean, is there something to us besides things pushing on things?

REBECCA: Yeah! I mean, I think, like my…

PETER: How do you know ‘you’ isn’t a very, very, very complicated system of things pushing on things?

REBECCA: Well, I mean, I think, for instance, it depends on what you count as ‘things’. I believe in mental substances of some kind. I do think that my beliefs play some role in the causal story, for instance.

PETER: But beliefs are propositions, aren’t they? Abstract objects?

REBECCA: I mean, I’d say something like, when I want to talk about some story of causation… some story about ‘why it is that Rebecca?’ Like, ‘why’ is important, here, as just ‘how’. Why it is that Rebecca picks the Chinese restaurant over the Indian restaurant, is a very different story from why it is that the earth attracts the moon. And that story there, the explanatory story in terms of ‘why’ — let’s put ‘how’ out the side, for one second — is the kind of story that we’re interested in thinking about when we think about the free will problem.

PETER: Why a bear breaks into a country store at night and gets into the fruit jars is a very different kind of ‘why question’ from, say, why water has surface tension.

REBECCA: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. I agree. It seems some kind of categorisation of these different kinds of ‘whys’… So, we’ve got why Rebecca picks the Chinese restaurant over the Indian restaurant. We’ve got why the earth attracts the moon. We’ve got why the bear breaks into the restaurant. And why… the question about the water and the surface tension. These are different. They’re trying to, seeking to explain quite different kinds of things.

And the one that we’re interested in here, in this conversation, is the ‘why Rebecca picks the Indian restaurant over the Chinese restaurant’. Now, I can’t necessarily give you the perfect answer to that, or explain ‘how’ it is. But one thing I can say: I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a different kind of story than the stories explaining the ‘whys’ in those other instances. The closest one is going to be the bear breaking into the convenience store.

On my understanding, very limited understanding, of animal psychology, which — and I work on the assumption we don’t know very much about the interior worlds of animals, if animals have interior worlds — I’m pretty happy to say things like, bears are not blameworthy, on my understanding of how it is. And if bears are not blameworthy, bears don’t have the kind of responsibility that I do.

Now, if I pick the Chinese restaurant by reasoning on it, as opposed to being pushed in through the door, or even as opposed to being, you know, having a gun pointed to my head… These are just not questions that are ever going to arise when we talk about why is the earth attracting the moon!

PETER: Well, there’s the question: how much did God have to do to create the world? And now, let’s just leave aside the fact that according to quantum field theory, there aren’t even any particles. [laughter] Let’s just say there are electrons and quarks and things like that.

REBECCA: Sure, sure.

PETER: Did God have to do anything except create all the electrons and quarks and the forces that… I think not. Everything supervenes on those things. That is, I think I’m a physical thing, a living animal, just like a bear. Only, maybe more, much more, complicated in some respects.

REBECCA: You think you’re physical all the way down? You think you’re just a physical thing?

PETER: I think I’m physical all the way down.

REBECCA: So, then, I’m kind of bemused why you’re so committed to thinking that free will is less weird than non-free will.

PETER: Sorry, why…

REBECCA: So why free will, believing in free will, is less weird than not believing in free will?

PETER: Well, because if we didn’t have free will, then all this weird stuff would be true. Like, there’s nothing wrong with the Holocaust. Nobody is to blame for the Holocaust. It’s nobody’s fault. Those things are horrible, but they’re also intellectually frightening.

REBECCA: Yeah. So, it’s your moral realism in part that makes you believe in free will.

PETER: By moral realism, you believe that there’s…

REBECCA: You think there are truths to the matter about... You know, there are moral facts.

PETER: That if some… That those things happened are somebody’s fault, or somebody’s to blame for them, yeah.

REBECCA: Yeah. Which is dependent on the idea about there being moral facts.

PETER: Is it? Well, maybe. But I’m convinced that it’s real, whatever it may be dependent on.

REBECCA: So, this is what it really… Because I was intrigued by this. You’ve written various times, for instance, things like you say — you had this nice passage — I forget, it’s maybe in the thing where you talk about Chisholm. You say something like, “Look, there are decisions I’ve made, which I’m just so certain that I was responsible. Or actions I’ve taken. I’m just so certain I was responsible for those things. I’m more certain about that than I am about the conclusions of any philosophical argument.”

PETER: Yeah, I think that’s true.

REBECCA: You’ve said something like that. Why?

PETER: Aren’t you more convinced… Aren’t you more convinced that your mother exists than of any theory of personal identity?

REBECCA: Umm… I’m not sure, no. I think we may just have a different conception of ‘convinced’. For me to be convinced, I think I have to… As opposed to me, just, to sense something, or for me to depend upon hearsay, or something like this. I don’t know. Although, that said, I also don’t believe in this kind of instinctive perception thing. I think if I see the tree, that’s not enough to think there’s the tree, there. I have to know what tree-ness is. I have the weird Aristotelian stuff about that.

But, no. I think, when I think of the word ‘convinced’, it comes back to me about this stuff about deliberation. To be convinced, I think I have to have considered the alternatives. And for a start, I haven’t ever considered the alternative of my mother not existing!

PETER: Well, you can!

REBECCA: I can. And I’m not fully… I might be wrong. Maybe she doesn’t exist!

PETER: Suppose somebody says to you, “Susan Lowe does not exist”. You know, you’re under an illusion to think there is such a person as that…

REBECCA: Yeah, yeah.

PETER: You know that’s wrong, right? You know that isn’t true.

REBECCA: Actually I have, I think, an insanely high bar on claiming I know anything. I know that I’m conscious in this particular moment. I’m not sure it’s necessary that… I don’t know it was me who was conscious in the previous moment. I’m not really sure there’s anything else I would actually say ‘know’, and mean ‘know’, in the hardcore sense.

So, I don’t think I do know that my mum exists, actually. I mean, the world is — I mean, goodness me, that’s gonna have a lot of… But I’m also not the kind of person who wants to believe something because of the impetus of not believing the thing.

PETER: But it’s not so much whether you assign a probability of one to that. [laughter] As whether you assign a higher probability to that than you do to any philosophical thesis.

REBECCA: But it’s still the ‘convincedness’, to me, speaks of deliberation. Speaks of reasoning, these kinds of things. And that brings me back to the point about the philosophical argument. So, what is it you think makes you have this instinct? Maybe this is just a category-error question. Why is it that you feel such an instinctive draw? Because of the conclusions. I think that’s what we’re getting to. You think the implications would be so catastrophic to everything else that we think we know, and the ways we behave, and all of this stuff. That, therefore, free will.

PETER: Well, it would be. But that’s not the point I was making.

REBECCA: No.

PETER: It’s just we start out with certain prior probabilities, right? I assign a higher prior probability to the Holocaust was somebody’s fault, than I do to any philosophical theory about blame and fault.

REBECCA: But why is it… What would you say if I asked you to go through why it is that you assign a particular probability to that?

PETER: But you don’t defend your priors like that. They’re what you start with. You’ve got nothing to defend them with. That’s what you… They’re the things that you use to construct your defences of other things.

REBECCA: But can’t I question… It depends on what you’re counting as a prior, here, but I think there are plenty of things that people count as priors, which they can change their mind on. In other words, you can have different priors from me…

PETER: Yeah, they certainly can. But not on the basis of some argument.

REBECCA: Really?

PETER: Not if they’re really independent. I mean, what would the argument use as premises?

REBECCA: Well, I mean, you give me an example of one of these priors that you think I can’t change through deliberating on it, and realising I was incorrect. In the context that you can have different priors from me. So, you can be like, these are Rebecca’s priors, and these are Peter’s priors. You give me an example of one of those things where you can’t be like, “maybe I should have one of Rebecca’s priors!”

PETER: “I Rebecca, am able to speak English.” What kind of argument would convince you?

REBECCA: I mean, that’s going to come back to what ‘able’ is for a start, right?

PETER: Well, I mean, you asked for an example. Well, tell me what kind of argument would convince you…

REBECCA: I want an example of something which is a Rebecca prior and something which is a Peter prior, which are different, whereby you can’t bring yourself to be convinced….

PETER: Well, you assign essentially a probability of one. Look, I mean, let me talk about essential probabilities. You can admit theoretically, on the basis of quantum mechanics, say that if you were to toss a pencil on to your desk it might pass through the desk. But you assign a practical probability of one to saying the pencil would not pass through the desk.

REBECCA: Based on my limited understanding of how the world is — I’m not a scientist, but if I read a science paper tomorrow which tells me that, look, in some instances, owing to the particular angle of the pencil...

PETER: Don’t you think that you are not likely to read such an article? I assign a probability of one to ‘I’m not going to read such an article’.

REBECCA: Quantum physics, like, blows my mind!

PETER: Yes, but the probabilities are, like, you have to go sixty decimal places to get to a non-zero in there. Yeah, that’s what I precisely meant by practical probability. Yes, there is a certain probability, it’s just so remote, that we are…

REBECCA: I think all I’m saying is that the person who knows more about these things, or has different knowledge about, or has different beliefs about this thing, has learned different things about it, can well assign different probabilities from someone else.

PETER: Well, I mean, perhaps you’re right about that. A person might know little enough about science to be convinced of something. But certainly you assign a probability of one to the proposition that you speak English.

REBECCA: Yeah, I mean, except I think it could be the case, though, for instance, that speaking English has to meet a certain bar, right? So I myself think I meet the bar for speaking English. But if I have a catastrophic accident tomorrow, which causes me to lose my…

PETER: Yes, but you haven’t yet. The question wasn’t, well, I shall speak English…be able to speak English tomorrow. Yes, that that might well be less than one.

REBECCA: What I’m trying to get at is why I assigned the probability. And I assigned the probability in the awareness that there are instances in which that wouldn’t be true about me.

PETER: Well, I think you would have to… Now here I’m going back to, I’m afraid, to Wittgenstein.

REBECCA: Oh no!

PETER: Despite your poster. [Note from Rebecca: there is a Wittgenstein poster in my office where I was recording this episode.]

REBECCA: Yeah, you know that poster’s a joke, because, I mean, I just don’t get anywhere with Wittgenstein.

PETER: I have to tell you that once… Who was the guy that wrote the biography of Wittgenstein?

REBECCA: Oh, Monk. Ray Monk.

PETER: Yes, right.

REBECCA: That’s a great book.

PETER: I was discussing that book with Hilary Putnam, back in the nineties, and he said, “That Monk just does not understand Wittgenstein!” [laughter] And I said, “But Hilary, everybody who writes on Wittgenstein says everybody else who writes on Wittgenstein doesn’t understand!” [laughter] And he said, “Yes, but he really doesn’t understand Wittgenstein! Not just the way other philosophers don’t understand Wittgenstein. He really doesn’t understand Wittgenstein!”

REBECCA: That’s very funny! We’re gonna have to finish in a minute. You tell me the relevance of Wittgenstein here, because then you’ll give me something to think about.

PETER: That is, you would not be able… If you don’t believe that you speak English, you wouldn’t be able to formulate any questions about anything.

REBECCA: I speak French. I can formulate questions in French.

PETER: [laughter] If you don’t speak English, you don’t speak French either….

REBECCA: Yeah, I mean this comes back to Quine and all these things. Yeah, this stuff is very interesting. I also think, I mean, you said earlier on, which I think has bearing in it, I think that probably pre-language children can deliberate.

PETER: There’s an interesting passage in Wittgenstein about that. Somebody quoted William James… who quoted a person who had been non-linguistic until adolescence, that he had formed the idea of creator god before he was able to speak, just by looking at design in the world. And Wittgenstein said, why should we believe that?

REBECCA: [laughter] I try to… I mean, the only time I’ve ever gotten anything out of... I get that Wittgenstein is very clever and very important. I understand that. But one time when I was in Vienna, I went to see the amazing house that he designed for his sister. And I was so taken by this house, I went straight to read some of On Certainty, and all of a sudden, it seemed wonderful to me. And I was like, oh my goodness, I’ve been missing all this, all this time! And then, when I got back to the UK, I tried again, and I just went back to this... [laughter] I think it’s like, you know, wine tastes better in the place, or something.

PETER: Yeah.

REBECCA: Peter, this has been wonderful. I’m going to finish by asking you the question I always ask people on this podcast, and you can completely divorce this from the fantastic conversation I really enjoyed. If a little kid comes up to you and says, “Hey, Peter, I hear that you write about free will. What is free will?”

I could imagine, even with all of these caveats, you saying something like, “when it’s up to you”, or something. Is there some starting point, for the little kid, in getting into this, that you’re happy to offer?

PETER: Well, yeah, I would ask him to think about the last case when he was trying to decide what to do. And then I would ask him what he did do. I mean, let’s hope that he actually comes up with a plausible system of alternatives [laughter] and can clearly decide that he decided. Then, I’d ask him whether he thought he was able to do the other thing. That would be the starting point for me.

REBECCA: So, ‘being able to do the other thing’.

PETER: Mmm-hmm.

REBECCA: That’s nice. This has been wonderful. Peter, I’m very grateful to you. This has been very fun, as indeed all our conversations are. I feel like we’ve covered a lot of stuff. So, thanks very much for joining me.

PETER: I’m very grateful to you for asking me.

I enjoyed reading my friend ’s review of Daron Acemoglu’s new book on liberalism. John is a good philosopher — easily one of the best I know — and his review is unsurprisingly full of important, interesting philosophical ideas. My view, however, from having read just a few short extracts of the Acemoglu book, is that there’s not much point in philosophers engaging with its philosophy qua philosophy.

It is simply not worth one’s time. And Acemoglu should have been much better advised and supported, to this end, by any philosopher friends he has, while writing the book. You can see this, in particular, in his engagement with the social contract tradition. You can see it in the extract that John quotes and discusses in his review, but even more so in Acemoglu’s recent interview about the book with my friend .1 Acemoglu seems to me deeply confused and off-target on the topic of social contract theory, to a really quite embarrassing extent.

Now, of course, if I were to read the whole book, perhaps I would come away thinking entirely differently about Acemoglu’s philosophical talent! And none of this is to deny his skill as an economist, or to hide the fact that I’ve enjoyed and valued reading economics papers by him over the years.

John’s review gives me the chance, however, to state a very simple boring view that I hold quite strongly, but which I don’t think I’ve written down before. John says:

“But why foreswear the idea that Acemoglu’s three goals are justified by considerations of individual rights (e.g. a right to an adequate standard of living or to individual participation) and human flourishing (e.g. the ability to live a life that instantiates values such as achievement, knowledge, autonomy, friendship, etc.)? I suspect that Acemoglu resits this further step because the discipline of economics, like many other domains of our culture dominated by those with a university education, is allergic to the very notion of objective ethical values, to the idea that we can reason about the ultimate ends of individual and collective life. Indeed, this sort of subjectivism about value may play a non-trivial role in the new forms of elite thought- and speech-policing that Acemoglu justly decries, since they often rely upon curbing speech that is found merely subjectively offensive, without concern for whether the taking of offense is rationally warranted.”

My simple boring view is the following. Economists often make a misstep that goes something like this: “We economists have worked out, over the centuries, that accounting for subjective preferences plays an important part in good descriptive analysis of value assignment, qua pricing and understanding demand, etc. We’ve moved away from the labour theory of value, don’t you know!? Therefore we are subjectivists.”

In other words, it seems to me that a conflation-type misstep is taking place: that two different kinds of ‘subjectivist about value/valuing’ are being confused or jammed together. There’s the first ‘descriptive’ sense, and there’s the second ‘non-moral-realist’ sense. (Of course, subjectivism, per se, is just one kind of non-moral-realist position, but no need to go into that here.)

This interpretation is supported by the fact that, as implied, the final bit — the “therefore we are subjectivists” — often comes in the form of a jump, rather than any kind of argument. And also by the fact that, when you question one of these economists about what’s going on, they sometimes either say, “Oh I hadn’t thought of it like that!” or, “I don’t know what you mean by subjectivism about value in that other sense.”

In other words, for some of them, it simply ends in a confusing use of language. But for others, it leads to an almost blind — or at least non-fully-thought-through — denial of moral facts. In some cases, this is accidental and surface-level, and shouldn’t be taken seriously. But sometimes, the person in question tries hard to double down on the mistaken conclusion, and ends up going round in circles.

I won’t go into further downstream analysis here. And, of course, I’m not suggesting that all economists fall into these kinds of traps! But if my simple ‘conflation-type misstep’ analysis is correct at any general level, then this could strengthen my position that we philosophers have let the side down, over the past decades, by failing to play our part in the division of intellectual labour.

We’ve failed at this in public, and we’ve failed at it in the academy. We’ve become insular and exclusionary. And this, to return to the topic of Acemoglu’s book, has had particular costs to the defence of liberalism. We philosophers who believe in the value of liberalism have allowed overly thin economistic arguments to take hold — arguments that urgently need the bolstering of good philosophy.2

Perhaps, therefore, I should end by accepting that engaging with the bad philosophy of good economists might be worth our time, after all…

A few months ago, I mentioned here that I’d given up eating chicken and pork. I’m glad to report that I’ve been keeping this up, though I now prefer to say “the chickens and the pigs”. When someone asks if I have any dietary restrictions, that is, I tell them, “I don’t eat the chickens and the pigs”.

I’m aware this locution makes me sound weird! But weirdness can make people stop and think. And I’m a big believer in taking the useful hit on little things like this. What I mean, of course, is that I use this locution to remind myself and other people of the obvious fact that chicken meat and pork meat comes from animals. It comes from particular animals. It comes from ‘the animals’. As in the ones who are currently still alive or died recently. The chickens and the pigs. I’m going to keep saying it!

I’ll admit now that, in terms of philosophy, the thing I want you to take away from this piece is the argument I’m going to make towards the end, about the idea of ‘morally better’. This will be my first full response to a problem I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. Nonetheless, if instead you go away thinking there’s some small value in referring to meat-eating in my weird way, then I’m convinced I’ll have done something good.

But what about all the other animals, you ask! Why haven’t I given up eating the ducks and the sheep and the deer and the fish?1 Particularly when I claim to care about doing good.

The obvious starting point is to emphasise that, on my admittedly limited awareness, it seems pretty clear that when you’re ordinarily picking between the animals to eat, the chickens and the pigs are the most likely to have been particularly violently factory farmed. It seems difficult, for instance, to buy a chicken salad sandwich — one of my favourite things to eat — that hasn’t been produced on the back of some particularly extreme animal cruelty.

This goes some way to explaining my approach. But the full answer to why I haven’t given up eating all the animals hinges on something else that seems pretty clear to me: I’m morally weak.

The moral weakness problem

I’ve written before about how hard I find it to stop eating the animals. The animals are my favourite thing to eat, by far, and also to cook. I love cooking. But I’ve also written about how convinced I am that it’s bad and wrong to eat the animals. Indeed, my belief is that it would be bad and wrong to eat the animals even in a world with no factory farming. Even in a world with fantastic standards of animal welfare. This is because I think it’s a failure of basic moral respect to eat the dead body of a once living thing. Particularly when you don’t need to. Particularly when there are other delicious and affordable options easily to hand.

Now, I should probably clarify that I don’t believe that dead things can be the objects of disrespect. Rather, I think the disrespect in question is directed towards the living instances of the dead animal’s species.2 This probably sounds like a strange view! And you might find even stranger my further view that this problem doesn’t disappear in the case of lab-grown meat — something I wrote about for Aeon a few years ago. But you can probably get somewhere towards the disrespect in question by thinking about how you’d react to someone playing with the bones of a human skeleton. And the main point I want to make here is just that my moral concerns about eating meat go beyond my view that factory farming is horrific.

Like most people, however, I sometimes struggle to do the right thing when it collides with my strong desires. And one of my strongest and most easily fulfillable desires, now that I live in America, is to eat great cheeseburgers. This is in addition to my long-time strong desire to eat great steaks. And I’ve found, so far, that I can very easily prevent myself from eating the chickens and the pigs, as long as I permit myself to continue eating the cows. Indeed, as I write this, I realise that as long as I can continue to eat the cows, I could probably quit eating all the other animals much more easily than I’d previously thought! Except for the seafood.

The number of animals argument

This brings me to one of the few Peter Singer arguments that I quite like. It’s an argument focused on counting the number of meals you can get from different types of animal. The simplified version tells us that if Rebecca eats the cows instead of eating the chickens and the pigs, then even if Rebecca eats the same number of meaty meals, she will surely eat a far smaller number of animals, over all. A quick glance online suggests you can get something like 160 meals from a cow, but only four from a chicken.

Now, you don’t have to be some kind of moral aggregationist, like Peter Singer, for this argument to hit hard. Someone that is, for instance, who might go about picking between ‘eating the cows’ and ‘eating the chickens and the pigs’ based on the outcomes of complex calculations aimed at working out the overall amount of suffering that would be produced in both cases. If instead, like me, you think such approaches don’t take seriously enough some Nozickian-type notion of the ‘separateness of animals’, then surely you should still care about the number of animals you wrong!

Nonetheless, it might seem as if I’m smuggling in a bit of consequentialist reasoning here. That perhaps I’m trying to justify doing wrong by doing ‘less wrong’. Or perhaps I’m mentally trading away the life of the cow to save the lives of the chickens and the pigs. I’ll return to all that in a moment.

First, a far simpler personal problem arises if I want in any sense to depend on this ‘number of animals’ idea: I’m going to really struggle to quit the seafood. The only thing I enjoy eating as much as steaks and cheeseburgers is seafood pasta, and each portion of seafood pasta contains a large number of animals. I ate some fantastic seafood dishes in Scandinavia the past couple of weeks, and each time I did, I ate more animals than most only-cow-eaters would eat in a lifetime. Okay, there was also a meal during which I ate duck hearts on toast — maybe twenty of these delicious juicy pink little things, followed by a wonderful monkfish in a (yes) seafood bisque. But I don’t often have the option to eat duck hearts, and I could easily give them up.

More pressing is the following. Even though I would surely have prioritised eating the seafood in the naval nations of Scandinavia even if I’d still been eating the chickens and the pigs, there were definitely some meals during which I’m sure I would’ve chosen the chickens or the pigs, instead. There was a schnitzel I really wanted, for instance. Therefore, it seems as if giving up the chickens and the pigs likely meant that I ended up eating an increased number of animals during my fortnight in Scandinavia.

I don’t think this was a one-off. When I gave up eating the mammals for a few months a couple of years ago, the realisation that I was eating the seafood at almost every meal played a large part in my decision to start eating the mammals again. This is mainly because the standard moral argument in favour of eating the seafood over the mammals doesn’t really work for me.

The animal capacities argument

This standard argument is the argument on which you conclude that the animals that are less sentient, or less conscious, or less intelligent, count for less, morally. Now, I wrote here recently about my unease at the idea of depending on notions like consciousness and sentience and intelligence to differentiate the moral value or moral status of types of living thing. Indeed, I’m happy to put intelligence aside at this point, mainly because I think there can be no good arguments for judging such things on intelligence, alone.

But a general meta problem, for me, about these ‘animal capacity arguments’ is that I’m unconvinced that any human could ever know enough about non-human animals to make these kinds of distinctions sufficiently reliably — particularly in terms of ruling out the possibility of a particular animal having such capacities. I mean, “Hey, don’t worry, Rebecca, that particular animal hasn’t told us that it’s conscious or sentient, so you can definitely conclude that it isn’t!” (I’ve even argued this kind of thing about electrons.) Moreover, while I do know what people are trying to get at when they say things like ‘less sentient’ or ‘less conscious’, nonetheless the ontologically and morally crucial thing, for me, is whether an animal is sentient or conscious at all.

In other words, if I could be certain that some particular animal was the kind of thing could never be conscious nor sentient, then perhaps that information could play a decisive role in my decision-making about eating meat. But for now, I’ll accept that I can’t use this kind of reasoning to justify eating the seafood over the mammals. And that I’d be on shaky ground even trying to use it to conclude that it would be ‘morally better’, if I did.

The ‘morally better’ problem

I’m now going to turn full-on towards this notion of ‘morally better’, because it really isn’t a straight-forward matter for a non-consequentialist like me. This will help me to address my earlier concern that depending on ‘the number of animals’ idea could be smuggling in consequentialist reasoning. It’ll also give me the chance to share the outcomes of some thinking I’ve been doing about rights and liberalism and moral theory.

I’ll begin by emphasising that a strong view I hold is that consequentialists often make incorrect conflations between concepts like ‘right’ and ‘more good’. As Rawls tells us, one useful way of comparing moral theories is to consider their relations to the right and the good. In simplified Rawlsian terms, consequentialists prioritise the good over the right. In the more complex terms I prefer, consequentialists don’t really value anything, qua consequentialists. Rather, they instrumentalise the things that they claim or imply to have value — typically some conception of the good, but sometimes other things like rights — in order to evaluate rightness and wrongness. Utilitarians, for instance, tell us that the rightness and wrongness of things like actions, or states of affairs, or principles, or rules, depend on the extent to which these things track a hedonistic conception of the good. This, in simplified Rawlsian terms, counts as prioritising the good over the right.

I’m now going to try to persuade you that such approaches are at risk of introducing weird further relations between the two.3 In particular, that followers of such approaches often make over-conflations between: 1) ‘right’ and ‘more good’ or ‘less bad’; and between 2) ‘wrong’ and ‘more bad’ or ‘less good’.

Take the following example. Imagine that some kind of consequentialist tells you that the right thing to do when faced with a choice between killing one person and killing one hundred people is to kill the one person, because killing the one hundred people would bring about ‘more bad’. You can fill in the further reasoning for yourself. Okay, perhaps you want to respond at this point that surely I recognise that killing can sometimes be morally permissible! Surely, for instance, I accept the permissibility of killing in at least some instances of self-defence? Well, to deal with that, let’s switch to an example that involves making a choice between torturing one person for fun or torturing one hundred people for fun. My guess is that you’ll find it much harder to accept that torturing someone for fun can be morally permissible. But the bigger point, here, is that I don’t need to make this about moral permissibility! All I need to argue is that neither option would ever be ‘the right thing to do’, in the sense, for instance, of being the option you must take to avoid doing wrong.

What’s more, even if I can’t get you to accept this — if for instance, you think that in some complex situation torturing someone for fun could indeed be the right thing to do — my hope is that the example might have helped you to accept that there could sometimes be a difference between ‘less bad’ and ‘right’. Just think of the situations, for instance, in which you think that torturing someone for fun wouldn’t be the right thing to do, but would nonetheless be ‘less bad’ than doing something else.

I do accept, however, that persuading you that sometimes you should acknowledge a difference between these two things isn’t going to be enough here! So let me now try to explain — via two separate ways — why I’m so anxious about the over-conflation of these kinds of things.

1) Rights need bite!

First, I picked the example of ‘torturing the one or torturing the hundred’ because, on my view, both options involve rights violations, and on my view, violating a right is always wrong. This doesn’t mean that I think all wrongs include rights violations. And it also doesn’t mean that I think all rights are held unconditionally. Rather, it means I think that when a right holds, it’s wrong to violate it. Nonetheless, I chose the torture example because I do happen to think that the right not to be tortured is a right that’s held both unconditionally and generally. In other words, that all of us are always perfectly obligated never to torture anyone, whether it’s for fun or any other reason. That torturing, in all instances, is always wrong.

And what I mean by ‘wrong’ here is clearly different from ‘less bad’. This is because both acts — torturing the one and torturing the one hundred — are wrong, on my view, regardless of whatever real or hypothetical comparison we place them into. The single rights violation remains wrong, qua rights violation, even if the alternative is infinite rights violations!

What’s more, one of the reasons it’s so important to me that there’s a notion of ‘wrong’ that we can depend upon outside of ‘totting up relative badness’ is that otherwise rights lose their moral bite. Otherwise, that is, the possibility sneaks in that we should not only permit, but also require — on the grounds of it being ‘the right thing’ — someone to commit the single rights violation, in order to avoid committing the multiple rights violations. Then, as I argued recently on , what can we depend upon to protect ourselves in the face of the totalitarians?

2) Sometimes there is no right choice!

I now want to turn briefly to a further concern I have about this kind of over-conflation. This is a concern that could be shared by someone who doesn’t hold my unusually hardcore view about rights. It runs something like this. If we conflate ‘more good’ with ‘right’, then aren’t we at risk of concluding that there is a ‘right option’ in situations in which there simply isn’t such an option? Indeed, at maximum, in all situations in which there is a ‘more good’ one!

What I’m getting at is the following. When you are faced with many ordinary ‘choosing’ situations, surely it often doesn’t come down to one option being ‘the right one’, or there being a ‘right thing to do’. This seems most easy to conclude about boring situations such as choosing between picking up a cake with your right hand or with your left hand. But isn’t it also the case in many much more morally-loaded situations, such as choosing between which one of two really great guys to date? I’ll write more about this topic another time, but I’ll note here that I’m pretty committed to the idea that in most situations there are almost infinite justifiable things that a person could decide to do: this idea is becoming more and more central to my thoughts on the conjunction of liberalism and moral theory.

All I need to conclude for now, however, is that acting on the assumption that all — or simply too many — option sets have a ‘right answer’ put us at risk of the totalitarians again. Aside from being conceptually messy, that is, this over-conflation could risk some pretty concerning downstream consequences. It could leave you open, for instance, of being judged to have acted wrongly, when all you did was to pick an option that was, at best, in some objective sense ‘less good’, and at worst, failed to track the preferences of some powerful person.

The place for ‘less and more bad’

I’m now going to argue that even for someone like me — someone who has such a hardcore view about the demandingness of rights, and such a pluralistic view about ordinary option sets — that there is nonetheless an important place that notions like ‘less bad’ and ‘more bad’ can play in arguments about right and wrong actions.

I’ll begin by accepting that violating the right not to torture is ‘more bad’ than teasing a friend — even though clearly, for me, it isn’t something like the ‘relative amount of badness’ that makes the act of torture wrong. Again, the act of torture is wrong, on my view, regardless of any real or hypothetical comparison we enter it into. Regardless, that is, of whatever bit of ‘totting up’ you might want to do. Okay, you probably want to respond, “Ah but of course you think that violating the right not to torture is more bad than teasing your friend, because only one of these things includes a rights violation!”. Sure. But I can go a stage further here, and conclude that some ‘extra badness’ occurs when you torture two people as opposed to torturing one. And what’s more, I don’t have to accept that doing the latter would therefore be ‘the right thing’ in order to conclude this. Rather, I can simply acknowledge that, in the two-person instance, you are causing great badness for each person. If you’re really into counting, you could sloganise this as: ‘two bad more than one bad’!

Now, I should note at this point that my view is that doing wrong always includes doing bad, but that doing bad does not always includes doing wrong. For example, I do bad to you when I accidentally and totally unavoidably run over your foot, even though I don’t wrong you — I don’t count as blameworthy, for instance. Whereas, I’m happy to accept that there’s no example in which I wrong you without doing bad to you. Moreover, ‘doing bad’, on my view, isn’t a matter of adding to some ‘aggregated amount of badness’ in the world. That is, I don’t need to depend here on some notion of ‘a worse world’ or a ‘more bad state of affairs’. Indeed, I’m pretty glad about this, because I don’t think that things like worlds and states of affairs can experience badness! I don’t even know what such a thing would mean. So, in simple terms, you can conclude from this that my view is that ‘doing bad’ means causing something bad to happen to the kind of thing that can experience bad things.

It seems clear, on this view, that I can go further than concluding that in the case of torturing the two people I have twice violated the right not to torture. Yes, I have committed two such specific wrongs. But I can also conclude that I have brought about ‘more badness’, and I can do it without buying into the aggregative notion of ‘adding to the badness in the world’. Indeed, if I don’t conclude that ‘more badness’ occurred when I tortured Person Two on top of the badness that occurred when I tortured Person One, then surely I wouldn’t be taking the interests of Person Two sufficiently seriously!

What’s more, I can conclude this kind of thing in instances involving any number of people, and I can conclude it regardless of how much each of the people suffered, or any complications along those kinds of lines. I mean, to return to slogan form, if the comparison is between ten people and nine people, then ‘ten bad more than nine bad’! Unlike the consequentialists, that is, I don’t have to enter into complex calculations here based on weird notions of commensurability.

Again, none of this commits me to concluding that it is ‘right’ for me to torture the one person instead of torturing the one hundred. Indeed, my view, as you might have guessed, is that I should never torture anyone. That it’s always wrong to do so. And that I should choose to die, rather than choosing to torture either of the people. Of course, I often worry that I wouldn’t take that choice. But all I need to conclude here is that by torturing the two instead of the one, I would be ‘doing more bad’ as well as ‘doing wrong’. This, on my terms, gets me to something pretty similar to the notions of ‘morally worse’ and ‘morally better’.

The ‘only cows’ solution

It seems, therefore, that I can indeed argue that I ‘do less bad’ by eating the cows than by eating the chickens and the pigs, as long as by eating the cows I eat fewer animals. Okay, the seafood poses a problem here, so I guess I’ll have to quit eating the seafood if I start using them as some kind of coping mechanism.

One last objection you might throw at me, however, is that the ‘less bad’ argument I need to make here must relate to the particular badness that I believe is occurring each time I eat an animal. And perhaps you think that moral disrespect is not so easy work out in terms of ‘extra amounts of badness’ as instances of torture — even though my position depends on the countable idea of disrespecting all the living instances of the dead animal’s species.

Well, sadly, the only world in which my ‘cows instead of chickens and pigs’ approach would depend on the disrespect concern — as opposed to the disrespect concern in combination with the factory farming concern — is the world with fantastic animal welfare. And that world seems a long way away. Indeed, it seems there’s no urgent need, at all, for me extend my ‘less bad’ argument much beyond the specific torture example I gave above. This is because it seems clear that the vast majority of factory farmed animals do indeed suffer torture.

I commit here, therefore, to eating only the cows — with my seafood caveat — on the view that this will involve me ‘doing less bad’ than the nearby alternatives. But I know, full well, that I’ll still be doing wrong.

Today, I went with some friends to the real Elsinore Castle! You know, the place where Hamlet lived and loved and killed and died. We also saw his grave! Both the castle and the grave are in the seaside town of Helsingør, an hour’s train ride from Copenhagen.

Visiting these things reminded me of a fun argument, which I recently got into with an audience member at a panel event, about what it means to predict the behaviour of fictional characters. The other panellists and I had been discussing whether AI has things like desires and goals, and can do things like choose and know. Regular readers will be aware that I strongly believe that AI does not have these things and cannot do these things!

As it happens, I’m writing a paper at the moment arguing that groups can’t bear knowledge, in which I also argue that it’s much more costly to liberalism than many liberals acknowledge to over-expand the set of the things that can bear knowledge. On my view, this over-expansion applies to AI and fictional characters as well as to groups.

On topic, you may remember that I’ve made an analogy here before between the idea of AI being able to do such things and fictional characters being able to do such things. I like this analogy for many reasons, and think it’s underused. And being at the real Elsinor Castle (!) today gave me the chance to think about these matters some more.

I should probably clarify at this point that one of the many reasons I’m enjoying calling it ‘the real Elsinore Castle’ is because the real name (!) of this castle is Kronborg Castle. But if anywhere real is the real Elsinore Castle, then surely that’s it!? Good old conditionals. (All this reminds me of the fantastic chapter in J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia on ‘real’, which I wrote about recently.)

Thinking about Hamlet’s real grave (!) also got me on to thinking about when it was that Hamlet died.1 Did Hamlet die when Shakespeare first conceived of the narrative of the play? Or when he wrote it? Or each time the play is performed? Or when? On some level, this overlaps with the great aesthetics question ‘where is Beethoven 7?’. On another, it overlaps with ‘what does Hamlet know?’.

Now I could, of course, conclude that Hamlet is not the kind of thing that could bear knowledge,2 but that Hamlet is (! or was… after all, I just saw his grave!) nonetheless the kind of thing that exists (or existed! or will exist!). Although I don’t conclude that. You can probably guess what, instead, I actually (!) conclude.

Anyway, visiting the real Elsinore Castle — rebuilt some time after Hamlet died, if Hamlet died either when Shakespeare conceived of the narrative, or when he wrote it down, or during many of the earliest performances — with its disorientating underground tunnels, arras-lined bedroom, and views over the plain rough sea towards the Swedish Helsingborg (!), helped me to understand better why Hamlet felt (feels? will feel?) quite anxious.

Poor chap. If he hasn’t yet died, then maybe one of us can do something to help him.

I grew up going to church, and continued to think of myself as a Christian until about fifteen years ago. But this piece isn’t going to be about why I stopped being a Christian. It’s going to be about why I don’t go to church anymore.

Perhaps this seems like a strange thing to write about. Perhaps you think, “Of course Rebecca doesn’t go to church anymore, now she’s no longer a Christian!” But the truth is that sometimes I have a strong desire to go to church. And when I mention this to my Christian friends, they tend to say, “Then go!”.

So I’ll start by explaining why I sometimes still have the desire to go to church, and then I’ll get on to why I don't act on these desires. This will give me the chance, along the way, to sketch out some thoughts on desire, belief, and their interrelation.

I miss the aesthetic experiences

First, and most pressingly, I sometimes have the desire to go to church because I miss its aesthetic dimension. Particularly, I miss the music and the language of the services I used to attend. I miss this music and this language not for the theological messages they convey or represent, but for what I think of as their overwhelming and particular beauty. (I’m pretty sure I can separate out these things!)

I’ll save my niche philosophical views on beauty for another time. But one of the aesthetic experiences I’ve valued the most — something I’ve experienced maybe 40 or 50 times — is singing or listening to the text of compline, a late-night Christian service, in a dark quire. Consider the phrase “Keep me as the apple of an eye”, its final word all stretched out, the vocal line building and building up and down in both pitch and volume. Then, place this phrase among many other such phrases, sung in related patterns of elongation and contour. It’s just so beautiful to me, in many ways.

I have a similar reaction to certain hymns. Take the carefully prepared and resolved suspension between the soprano and alto lines in the third section of each verse of the Vaughan Williams harmonisation of Deck thyself my soul with gladness — all sinuous and satisfying after the opening heavy block-chordal texture. I’ve even felt similarly about the imagery offered in a sermon. When someone once spoke about how hot the Calvary sand must’ve been to touch, for instance — hot under one’s feet, hot against one’s face.

On the rare occasions that I do go to church these days — in the sense of attending a service, that is, as opposed to ‘visiting a church’ in order to spend time exploring its architecture or contents or history — it hits me hard how much I miss this aesthetic dimension. I feel it when I go the midnight service in my hometown with my mother on Christmas Eve, and I feel it at weddings and funerals. I felt it last week, when I went to a service with some friends during a conference in a hotel with a chapel.

This brings me to the second thing I miss about going to church. This thing is harder to clarify, and harder to separate out from the more nebulous idea of ‘wishing I were still a Christian’, which is something I don’t wish for some reasons I’ll give below.

I still feel intellectual interest and moral admiration

This second thing pertains to the intellectual interest I generally derive from going to church, and the moral admiration I often feel while doing so, even though I’m no longer a Christian.

In the case of the intellectual interest, the best example I can give is the fantastic metaphysical challenge posed at the beginning of the sermon during the service at the conference hotel: “Imagine yourself Solomon, alone in the darkness, asleep.” This sentence continues to make me shake my head in wonder! First, there’s the idea of imagining yourself as somebody else. Then, you’ve got to try to discard yourself from the mix. And then, wait for it… the kicker comes that you also have to imagine yourself (no, sorry, himself!) asleep. Have you ever tried to imagine being asleep? How would you go about it? That’s my favourite part. But the whole thing made me think so hard that I missed the rest of the sermon.

Okay, perhaps you want to say that this isn’t an example of me being intellectually interested by a Christian idea, per se. That I could’ve found this example at a philosophy conference. But my point is that going to church makes me think about all kinds of intellectually interesting things. That it’s not just that I remain intellectually interested in Christian theology, but that I also find church services — and particularly, the philosophical seriousness of their texts and liturgy — a valuable and particular source of non-theological intellectual stimulation.

Then, we come to the moral admiration I sometimes feel during church services — admiration, that is, for the Christian values and principles expressed. I’m happy to admit that Christian morality coincides with much of what I think is good and right. Not all of it, for sure. Both ways! And okay, quite a lot of what I think is good and right within Christianity can also be found in some other religions, albeit typically not so much in the same place at the same time.

But Christianity seems broadly on track to me, morally. Indeed, I think this to the extent that I believe the world would be a much better place if more people were Christian, even though I think this outcome would be less good for the individuals in question, because I think it’s bad to believe untrue things. This brings me to why I’m no longer a Christian.

I stopped being a Christian because I came to accept that being a Christian entails believing, or trying to believe, things that have been reliably concluded as the kind of thing that cannot be true. Okay, not everyone agrees with me that you need to believe in the virgin birth and the resurrection to count as a Christian. And technically, my view is specifically that these are two of the things that I, myself, would need to believe to count as a Christian.

In other words, I’m open to the idea that not every Christian believes those things. That someone who’s been taught a confused version of one or both of these central events could possibly count as a Christian, for instance. But, for me — with the experiences and evidence I have had access to — I cannot be a Christian as long as I believe that virgins cannot give birth and men cannot come back from the dead.

Beyond all that, I’m aware that not everyone shares my conception of what it is to believe something — regarding the particular relation that I think holds between belief and truth, for instance. As it happens, I’m currently trying to refine my views about this kind of thing. But again, I don’t see myself moving much away from the formulation that I’m not a Christian because I can’t help but conclude, on the extremely reliable-seeming information available to me, that the virgin birth and the resurrection never took place.

Nonetheless, it isn’t only that I continue to find church services aesthetically pleasing — I also often derive valuable intellectual interest and an encouraging sense of shared morality from attending them. So doesn’t this give me a range of reasons to continue going to church?

I don’t need to go

Well, for a start, I can get much of that elsewhere. My best friend is a priest. Two of my three oldest friends — friends I think of as sisters to me — are Christians. As are various of my other friends, including many of the closest friends I’ve made in America these past two years. And I talk with these people about theological and theologically-inspired philosophical questions a lot!

I’m also pretty keen on natural law theory, which isn’t Christian, per se, but has been dominated by great Christian philosophers from John Locke to John Finnis, who often reason in multiply interesting ways on Christian ideas. So, I’m happy to conclude that I don’t have to go to church to gain access to the intellectual interest that I often derive from doing so.

Then, there’s the moral admiration. Well, again, I can feel this admiration when I speak with my Christian friends, or read or think about Christian ideas. It also seems relevant that I feel this admiration because Christianity broadly tracks what I believe, morally, as a non-Christian. This is relevant because the value of admiration is contingent on the value of the thing being admired. But also, relatedly, because isn’t going to church in order to be satisfyingly reminded of some of my non-Christian beliefs a little like eating a strawberry-flavoured non-strawberry when I want to eat a strawberry!?

I should also probably note here my concern with the central Christian idea that the Christian god is the source of morality. Aside from anything else, I worry that this provides a flimsy grounding for moral truth. I sometimes ask my Christian friends, “If you suddenly learned that God didn’t exist, wouldn’t you still think there was a correct answer to whether you should ever torture a baby for fun?”. There are, of course, good responses to this implied criticism, and I'll save a fuller discussion of moral realism for another time, but you get the idea…

It seems, therefore, that I don’t need to go to church for the intellectual interest, and that there are some problems with the idea of me needing to go to church for the moral admiration.

The ‘aesthetic experiences’ idea seems much more compelling, however. After all, it seems likely that some of these experiences can only be accessed while attending a church service; the place and the practice seem central to these experiences. The musicians are to be found there doing these things, for instance. And listening to the Magnificat from Howells’ Coll Reg in a concert setting (good luck with that, even in England!), or on a recording, seems qualitatively different from waiting for the organ to edge in after the first lesson while anticipating the contrast with the quasi-shouted doxology you’ll soon hear bouncing off the wood and the stone.

And as for the suspensions in Deck thyself my soul, what am I going to do about them? Sneak into a church with a gang of friends in the middle of the night to sing hymns, unreligiously? Join a church choir, insisting I’m doing so solely to provide support for the soprano line, and ignoring the fact that I’m playing a part in a religious experience? After all, it wouldn’t be a religious experience for me, but it would be for the other people.

I don’t want to be a free rider

This brings me to the overriding reason I don’t go to church, now that I’m no longer a Christian: I don’t want to be a free rider.

Church services are aimed at certain Christian goals. Goals such as glorifying God, building belief in the glory of God, and sharing the experience of being a believer. And church services have certain constitutive Christian elements that attendees play a role in: certain practices, manifestations of shared belief, often some kind of sacrament. And the internal significance of these kinds of things means that if everyone attending the ‘service’ were like me — there only for the beauty of the music and the language — then it would no longer count as a service.

Why would I want to play a part in that? Why would I want to invade this community, as a member of a potential set of casual destroyers, simply to satisfy my aesthetic greed? It’s not even as if I’d be doing it because I wanted to be part of the community, beyond what was necessary for my instrumental gain! I don’t like organised group activities; the ‘we believe these things’ part of Christianity always bothered me.

It seems clear to me, therefore, that it would be bad to continue going to church. Wrong, even. Wanting to do something isn’t reason enough to do it. Wanting to do something is different from deciding to do it. Sometimes, you should choose not to act on your desires.

My Christian friends often push back against this position of mine. They claim to think it’s okay — or even a good thing — for me to go to church. But my guess is that either I haven’t stated my position strongly enough, or they’re straining their generosity, or they hope that going to church under these conditions will have the effect of getting me to believe again.

And when I think hard about the third of these ideas — the idea that I should go to church when I don’t believe, because maybe it will help me to believe again — I realise this gives me a further reason not to go.

I want to believe as the result of good reasoning

I’ve said to a few of my Christian friends that I’d be grateful if they could persuade me to believe again, and I meant it — on at least some level. After all, I badly miss the aesthetic dimension of going to church, and I think that Christianity represents a net good for the world. I also know it can be a source of solace and strength in hard times.

But more than I care about those things, I care about why I believe what I believe. I don’t think I can easily force myself to change my beliefs, in the sense of “hey, I’ll give you $100 if you believe there’s a yellow elephant sitting next to you!” And I’m happy to accept there are multiple routes to holding a belief. But I do think that at least some of my beliefs are the result of my good reasoning. And I want as many as possible of my beliefs to have been acquired that way, and as few as possible to have been acquired as a result of loose reasoning. I don’t want solace or strength, or anything else, at that kind of cost.

There’s little I value more than being persuaded away from being wrong. But it seems to me highly unlikely that the persuasion I will experience during church services will be the persuasion that I need in order to come to better conclusions about whether virgins can give birth and whether men can come back from the dead. And the truth about those events, for me, is crucial here. Sure, Christianity amounts to so much more than the truth about those events. But I cannot have any of the other things of Christianity, if I do not believe that those events took place.

I want to hear the music. But even more, I want to know the truth.

This is the sixth in my series of short, quickly written, weekly philosophy essays.

There’s much talk of a reading crisis. The standard version of the central claim here is that ‘the people are giving up on reading’. There’s a stronger version, which you’ll also recognise, according to which the ‘death of reading’ has already occurred. And there are various weaker versions, too, which I’ll discuss below.

But I’ll begin by focusing on this idea that ‘the people are giving up on reading’, because it’s the standard claim and it seems crazy to me.

It seems crazy to me because I find it obvious that reading is extremely central — likely more central than ever before — to the modern world. I find this so obvious that I never thought I’d write about it, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it probably needs to be said. Moreover, saying it will give me the chance to make a bigger point towards the end of this piece.

I want to begin by asking how, exactly, you became aware of these claims that the people are giving up on reading? Presumably via the internet, where you — and most other people — spend a great deal of time reading! I mean, even the sites and apps that are typically blamed for the ‘giving up on reading thing’ are extremely reading-intensive.

For a start, Twitter is almost entirely about reading! Okay, it features increasing amounts of short-form videos — a trend that typically takes a large part of the ‘giving up on reading’ blame — but those little videos almost always seem to include text! So my guess is that we can count Facebook and YouTube, and even Instagram and TikTok which I know little about, as quite reading-intensive, too.

The next point I want to make is that most people spend a great deal of their time, nowadays, sending text messages. Whether at work or at leisure, they spend many hours messaging with other people via email, or WhatsApp, or various other sites and apps. Increasingly, they are even assessing and selecting their potential partners via reading about, and messaging them, online, rather than through in-person social interactions!

Now, I haven’t said anything too controversial so far. But I’ll be upfront at this point and admit that I’m not very interested in doing or reading empirical work on any of this.

Isn’t it almost undeniable that people in the past spent more time on oral conversation, though? Or, at least, that if we didn’t have all these options for sending each other messages in text form, that we would spend more time on oral conversation, ourselves? That said, of course, my overall argument doesn’t depend on me being right about this kind of counterfactual! All I need to do is persuade you that reading is alive and well — that the people are not, in fact, ‘giving up on it’.

Okay, okay, the young people love sending those silly little voice notes. But I bet they’re often scrolling the wordy videos while they listen to them! And I haven’t even mentioned the LLMs yet. Whether you’re constantly messaging with GPT, or just engaging with AI via Google search, what are you doing? Reading words, words, words!

I could carry on, but you’ll have understood by now that my basic argument is that a great deal of the time that people are spending looking at their screens, they are reading words.

Sure, these people are sometimes — maybe even often — also looking at moving or static pictures. But it seems undeniable that most of the time there are, nonetheless, words on the screens, and that the people are reading them. There’s been a well-documented rise in switching on the subtitles, for instance. And even when you’re watching a sports game broadcast — whether it’s in a bar, or on your phone — there are words to be read, on many parts of the screen!

Now, some people like to claim that there’s been a gradual decrease in reading across the past century or so, which has correlated with the gradual introduction of new forms of entertainment tech. First it was the radio, they say, then it was the TV, and now it’s the internet with its memes.

But these people should remember that listening to the radio did not involve reading any words! Sure, perhaps you might have read the brand name on the device, but that’s hardly the same as all those words zooming past, zoomily being read, on all those little videos on the social media apps! It also seems important to note that watching TV was far less reading-intensive when the subtitle function was reserved for foreign-language programming or people with hearing problems. Whereas, surely, the Internet memes pretty much always include words!

I’ll stop at this point because you’re probably dying to fire some objections at me.

First of all, I should respond to the idea that ‘reading is more than just reading words’, or something like that. Ha! Good luck with that one! And beyond that kind of hilarity, my assumption is that most of the objections you’ll want to fire at me will represent a weakening of the original strong standard claim. The claim, that is, that ‘the people are giving up on reading’. In which case, go for it! I’ll take that as a win for the first part of my piece.

Sure, some of you might want, instead, to point me towards data suggesting that the picture I’m painting is inaccurate. Fine! I’m always keen to be persuaded toward the truth. But do be aware that I won’t be easily convinced by polling that depends on nebulous questioning. Or by the idea that people are just watching the videos and ignoring the words. Yeah, right! Just give that a try! Overall, my general response to many of these kinds of objections is likely going to be: “Just look around you. Aren’t the people busy reading?”

That said, one standard weakening of the original claim, which I should definitely address, would shift the focus entirely towards children. “It’s not that the people are giving up on reading in general, Rebecca! It’s that the kids aren’t reading any more.”

Well, I’ll admit that I don’t know much about what the kids are doing. But I do know that most of the people who will make this reduced claim will combine it with the claim that the kids are spending more and more time looking at screens. In which case, I’d refer these people to my point above that looking at the screens typically involves reading a lot of words!

Okay, perhaps the kids are looking at very different things on their screens from the adults. But my bet is that most — or at least, much — of the time that the kids are looking at their screens, they are reading words, too. I mean, don’t even video games include lots of words? And isn’t there a whole thing about the kids messaging their friends while playing video games?

I’ll conclude by assuming that when most concerned parties are pressed further on these kinds of matters, they will reduce the opening strong claim that ‘the people are giving up on reading’ (whether this claim is being made in reference to adults, or kids, or adults and kids in certain parts of the world, or whatever) to a focus on either, or both, of the following two things:

1. the nature of the things that are being read

2. the form of the things that are being read

They might say, “The reading that the people are doing is not edifying!”, for instance. Or, “The people should be reading more books!”.

Well, these are hardly new claims. You’d have heard the same objections to the rise of the penny dreadfuls and the comic books, and all the other popular reading crazes. Yet the claims made today typically suggest that reading is declining ‘more’, or in some special sense! Beyond pushing on the relative nature of these contemporary claims, however, one response I have to the “they should be reading more edifying things!” people is to ask whether they are opposed to the idea of reading for enjoyment. This should make them pause.

And one response I have to the “they should be reading more books!” people is to ask exactly why they think this. I mean, one standard response I often hear is that reading books is essential, or at least particularly valuable, to the development of analytical and comprehension skills. Indeed, that the opportunity to develop these skills is the key instrumental value of reading books — rather than, say, some value deriving from the way in which books have the capacity to express a lot of facts, by virtue of their length.

But if the development of analytical and comprehension skills is what you want people to gain from reading, then I’m not sure why books would be your hero. I’ll set novels to one side, for now, and take time to emphasise that most non-fiction books are very flabby and repetitive. I’m happy, here, to assert that this has pretty much always been the case regarding the majority of non-fiction books, but that this is particularly easy to conclude about contemporary non-fiction books.

Now, I assume this is largely a function of their length (the central feature that differentiates the book!). But I find it rare these days, for instance — outside of the world of highly technical academic books, which have many of their own correlative and special problems — to find non-fiction books whose authors aren’t simply offering you three ‘key’ points in the introduction, and then the opportunity to have these three key points lobbed at you, again and again, over the course of the rest of the book.

Sure, some books’ authors go notably against this trend, and manage to combine tight argumentation with ‘through composition’, in such a way that ‘having relatively great length’ becomes a good thing.

But if what you want reading to induce is the capacity for analysis and comprehension, then my bet is that reading well-argued short tight articles would serve most people much better, most of the time. Particularly those people who are early on in developing these skills! And I’d have a similar response to anyone who would, at this point, turn to the supposed particular value in reading books for ‘developing focus’. Why books? Why simply reduce time spent to length of text, for instance, if it is focus you want?

Now, of course, perhaps in mourning the supposed decline in reading you are not, in fact, signalling your support for the idea that books help people to develop skills around analysis and comprehension and focus. Perhaps you are not focusing on that kind of instrumental value, at all. Perhaps, instead, you are worried about the death of a much-loved industry, or the sterile appearance of non-book-readers’ houses. Okay, fine! But then you should be clear about that.

Or perhaps you didn’t mean non-fiction at all, and it is novels that you want people to be reading. In which case, I refer you to my question above about where you stand on the value of gaining enjoyment from reading. And I’d also ask why you are preferencing the novel. If, of course, your answers come back to points about developing focus, and comprehension, and so forth… well, there we are again!

And if you want, instead, to say something grand about novels helping us to understand what it is to be human, well, can’t you do that by reading what the people are saying on social media? “Oh, but that is less focused! It won’t help us to analyse or comprehend…” Sorry, I love reading fiction books more than doing most things, but I don’t think this route is going to help you win the argument.

I’ll end by saying that I love reading books, more generally, and that I hope very much they survive, as a form. My bet is that they will, mostly for the relatively boring reason that they look nice. But the underlying aim of this piece has been to signal the value of working out the underlying point of the big claim. What is the point or points that other people are really making? What is the point or points that you want to make?

What is it you think is really going on? What is it that’s worrying you?

I promised I’d give a short talk this week about the fifth chapter of John Locke’s Second Treatise, so I’ve been thinking about him today. I used to think about him a lot.

I say that. But I’m a very ahistorical analytic philosopher, so when I say such a thing, I don’t really mean I’ve spent much time thinking about the man called John Locke who was born in seventeenth-century Somerset and wrote the Second Treatise.

Okay, I have read some of his letters. I enjoyed in particular the following line he wrote to Isaac Newton: “I have been, ever since I first knew you, so entirely and sincerely your friend”. It’s one of the most beautiful lines I know.

I’ve also read some biographies of Locke, or at least some parts of a few. After all, he lived in an amazing time. I remember enjoying the chapter in the Cranston biography where you learn that Locke was writing to a whole load of women, claiming to all of them, “It’s only since I met you that my work has become so great!”. He was a bit of a dick, I guess.

But truly, when I say I used to think about John Locke a lot, I mean I used to think about his arguments. And even then, what I was really thinking about were the most charitable, idealised, versions of these arguments. Because what I was interested in was working out the answer to a problem, which I thought these arguments could help me with.

In general, Locke, qua his idealised arguments, is pretty great for this. He’s great for this because he spends his time addressing important questions, in important ways, and often, he comes to important conclusions.

Okay, he often goes around the houses in getting there. Sometimes, he’s like the kid who gives seventeen answers to the maths problem, in the hope of getting credit as long as one of them is right. Surely, for Locke, this is partly to make sure he persuades you in the right direction, even if you have different ‘priors’ from him, as the kids say. But mainly, I assume, it’s because he really wants to work out the truth!

Psychologising aside, however — and as I said, I’m not much interested in the man himself — there are many Lockean arguments that you should spend some time with. I wrote here recently, for instance, about the influence his social contract arguments had on the American founders. But today, I want to focus briefly on a smaller set of Lockean arguments I used to think about a lot.

These are the Lockean arguments about property, and they are most clearly set out in Chapter Five of the Second Treatise. I spent a lot of time thinking about these arguments back while I was writing my PhD, a while ago now. My overriding aim, back then, was to reconcile my natural hardcore commitment to capitalism with my philosophical uncertainty about the moral grounding of individual property rights.

I mean, why is it that you should be able to exclude everyone else in the world — including the sick, the starving, and the seemingly well-deserving — from eating the delicious apples on your tree? What is it that grounds these exclusive and exclusionary individual claims you have over external things? What is it that generates these very serious and very costly moral obligations in everyone else? Locke asks these questions, pretty much straight up.

What answers to these questions could satisfy my deep liberal commitments to basic equal freedom and basic equal moral standing? Commitments I shared with John Locke!

After all, I don’t just mean ‘able to exclude’ in the sense of having the physical capacity to push other people away. Or the backing of the mob down the street. I mean, morally! Morally, on a world-view that’s committed to a liberal understanding of justice! So, what grounds moral property rights? What gives moral backing to legal property rights?

These were the questions I was obsessed with, back then. The permissibility of capitalism, which I really loved, depended on it!

One particular problem I faced was that many of the standard answers were either explicitly consequentialist, or, on examination, dissolved into consequentialist reasoning. You know the kinds of answers I mean. Things like, “But without property rights, we have no peace and prosperity!” Now, believe me, I’m into peace and prosperity. Yet regular readers will know my feelings about consequentialist reasoning.

One funny but useful thing about Locke’s approach is, of course, that he himself sometimes appeals to consequentialist reasoning! Even though, correctly, we generally remember him as someone who offered a different route. Thinking about this incoherence helped me to see the value, more generally, in dividing up arguments that can’t go together. It helped me to work out why you can’t be a little bit consequentialist. But I’ll return to that another time.

Back then, I divided up Locke’s relevant arguments something like the following way:

1. that the truths about the grounding of moral property rights can be found in natural rights;

2. that the truths about the grounding of moral property rights can be found in self-ownership;

3. that the truths about the grounding of moral property rights can be found in consequentialist reasoning;

4. that the truths about the grounding of moral property rights can be found in the common good.

And the conclusions I reached about these arguments were, broadly, the following.

First, that a Lockean natural right involving property only extends, at most, to the equally-held general potential right to acquire (some basic-needs-meeting kinds of) private property. And that this is most convincingly grounded, on a Lockean-liberal account, on a natural-law account focused on human reason and the human good.

Second, that while it makes sense, on a Lockean-liberal account, to conceive of people owning their selves and their bodies, it shouldn’t be assumed, as per standard interpretations of Locke, that this can be easily ‘extended’ to (help to) generate or ground the individual ownership of external things. Rather, that there is a convincing argument for this in only a very small set of cases. (Basically, umm, some separated body parts.)

Third, that while consequentialist reasoning is inimical to Lockean liberalism on various grounds, this doesn’t mean that the consideration of good consequences, such as those relating to societal prosperity, must be ignored in the Lockean-liberal case for private property. Rather, good consequences should be taken into account, but cannot suffice for justificatory purposes.

Finally, that while certain natural rights and obligations, grounded ultimately in urgent human need, do important work regarding a limited range of private-property relations in any societal situation, the power to justify an extensive system of private property, within political society, can depend on the moral obligations that correlate with legal rights instituted through legitimate positive law.

In other words, by recognition of a Lockean notion of the common good, cashed out through legitimate democratic processes, it is possible to justify a much more extensive property-rights system. A system that caters not only to concerns of urgent need, but also enables the Lockean dream of societal prosperity involving the meeting of an incredibly wide range of preferences.

Having come to these conclusions, I mostly stopped thinking about property rights. And I mostly stopped thinking about Locke. Okay, I’ve used some of this stuff in my writing about space. I’ve written various times, for instance, about the value of using insights from Lockean property theory to help to design an effective and morally justified property rights regime on the moon.

But the deeper problem I was struggling with entirely went away, and it no longer bothered me. I solved it, at least to my own satisfaction, with quite a lot of thanks to John Locke.

REBECCA: Hi, I’m Rebecca Lowe, and welcome to Working Definition, the new philosophy podcast, in which I talk with different philosophical guests about different philosophical concepts, with the aim of reaching a rough, accessible, but rigorous working definition.

Today, I’m joined by JP Andrew. JP is a philosopher at Austin College, which is actually in Sherman, in Texas. One of the greatest states. He writes about ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, and more. Often writing about things like free will and animal ethics. He has one of the best and funniest Twitter accounts, and he has an excellent philosophy Substack, too, called Reflections on What Matters. He’s even on YouTube, so he’s a modern philosopher working on classic topics!

I’m delighted that he’s here with me today, and that we’re going to be talking about animals. Thanks so much for joining me, JP.

JP: Thanks. Thanks so much for having me on.

REBECCA: All right, so we’re going to talk about animals. What animals are, why they matter, what kinds of things they can do. But I thought we’d start with the hardest question of all… What’s your favourite animal?

JP: My favourite animal? Well, if we’re talking about a particular animal, it would be my border collie, Millie, who might make an appearance, actually. We’ll see about that. [laughter] But if you’re looking for a species, then I guess I’d have to generalise it out to dogs. Love dogs.

REBECCA: Okay, that’s very cool. And how meta would that be? A dog actually appearing on a podcast about what animals are! [laughter]

JP: It could happen. I wore her down before this conversation, so she might be napping the whole time. Which is no small feat, to wear a border collie down, I will say.

REBECCA: No small feet.. I think there’s a joke there. [laughter] Actually, in one of my previous episodes, with Michael Ignatieff, his cat appeared. But we were talking about liberalism, so maybe that was less apt.

I think my favourite animals are tigers. I like all of the big cats. My surname even, if you’re transliterating into German, means lion. But the tigers are the best, because they swim — they’re very good swimmers — and they’re individualistic, and I think they’re very elegant. But dogs are great, too.

JP: Very impressive creatures, yes.

REBECCA: They’re very cool, aren’t they!

Are philosophers well-placed to try to define animals?

REBECCA: Okay, so, we’ve dealt with the difficult stuff. I think we should get on to the easy stuff now. So, one question I have. You get that the idea of this podcast is we talk about these contested philosophical concepts.

JP: Right.

REBECCA: We’ve done things like equality, democracy, liberalism, freedom, rights. It does strike me that somebody listening to this might think, well, okay guys, you know, you’re two philosophers talking about those kinds of things — trying to define those kinds of things is what you guys should be doing. But here you are trying to tell us what animals are. Don’t you think you should have got a biologist, a zoologist, someone like this to join you?

Are we going outside of our remit here? What are we doing? Are we cheating? What’s going on?

JP: Well, I don’t — one of the nice things about doing philosophy is that it’s not totally clear where the boundaries of inquiry actually lie. It’s the ultimate dilettante’s field, right? So where does philosophy end? Who knows?

But yeah, I think when we’re trying to define concepts, we are ultimately doing philosophical work. It’s not an empirical question what a particular term refers to, or picks out in the world. It’s something we have to think about. And when your task is just to think more clearly about something, I think that’s a paradigmatically philosophical task.

REBECCA: That sounds like a good justification to me. I think there’s some kind of division of labour here, isn’t there?

JP: Some sort, yeah.

REBECCA: I like the Bertrand Russell thing, where he suggests that the scientists sometimes get into these kind of edge matters, which are very philosophical, and they sort of shift them over to the philosophers. The philosophers solve them and throw them back to the scientists. I find this particularly funny because the idea of philosophers actually solving the things and giving them back to the scientists seems to me a little hopeful, but…

JP: Yeah, I think it’s one of these things, you know, like from a thirty-thousand-foot view, we can delineate pretty well between philosophy and science. The scientists are tackling the questions that can be answered empirically, and the philosophers are dealing with the more conceptual questions. But then, like you say, at the boundaries, the two meet. And so I think there’s not a clear delineation, really. We’re all trying to figure out what’s true.

REBECCA: That’s right. That said, you have done the classic philosopher thing, which is exactly what I would have done too, of starting to compare, right? So, to try to work out what the philosopher does, we compare with what the scientist does. And it strikes me that when I start to try to think what animals are, the first thing I do is think: why are plants not animals?

JP: Ah right, yeah.

Is there a simple answer?

REBECCA: So, should we start there? I mean — let’s just roll back a sec. Do you have a simple answer to this? I like to ask people at the beginning of these episodes, just on the hope that maybe they’re just going to solve it, and then we can just do philosophy banter for the next 45 minutes. What is an animal, JP Andrew?

I’ve read your stuff. You write very beautifully about animals and morality in particular, but also animals more generally. What is an animal?

JP: Yeah… well, this one may be slightly above my pay grade. So, I can give a — you know, what we do in philosophy is give a provisional answer, and then we could probably refine it together. So, an animal is a living organism, for one thing. We don’t yet have a distinction between plants and animals, though, because plants are also living organisms, right?

So, an animal is going to be a living organism, plus some capacities or features that the things that we usually identify as plants don’t have, right? I guess there are two places that it seems natural to go first.

So, animals we tend to think have perceptual capacities, and plants don’t. That would be one potential avenue. Also, animals have the ability to engage in self-directed behavior, in a way that plants don’t. They can move around sort of their own volition. Plants can move around, but not on the basis of some kind of decision or choice.

So yeah, something like being a living organism plus having some perceptual abilities plus engaging in self-directed action. Something like that gets us in the territory, I think, even if that’s not totally satisfactory. What do you think of that, Rebecca, as a starting point?

REBECCA: I really like that. When I was thinking last night about how I’d answer this question, I came up with something a little more minimal, but very similar, I think. Something like ‘individuated living things that move of their own volition’.

I agree that there are these other things. I think we should get on to the question of whether all animals do have perception, whether we could know that. That does seem to me, however, another clear way of going down the line.

I think we might break into four kinds of things — doing the classic ‘philosopher does the taxonomy’ — when we try to think about the difference between plants and animals. This is what I came up with, anyway. So, there’s one simple answer which is something like ‘who studies them?’. [laughter]

JP: Yeah, right.

REBECCA: We know that that’s going to get kind of circular, but it might be useful for some people. Then, there seem to be these answers about their lineage. So, they have different descendants. Also, things like how they’re born, and how they develop. So maybe things to do with development. Or even evolution, a step back.

And then the third thing is, I think, the kinds of things you were getting on to, which is their capacities. So, we have these living organisms, the plants and the animals, and they have different capacities. That seems to me like a really good way of distinguishing. Particularly if we want to do this in quite an ordinary way, and just use our senses.

JP: Yep.

REBECCA: And then, there’s probably something about their makeup, where we might need the scientists to help us a bit more. So, I did a little bit of reading, and there are these things about cell structure — how they store energy in their cells. Whether they have neurons for coordination. Their systems. That seems like that’s in the scientists’ territory. But it might be useful for a more fine-grained distinction. Although then these fine-grained distinctions can get too complicated.

JP: Yeah, we could also go Aristotelian, I suppose, and say that they have different kinds of souls. Although that kind of talk makes people very nervous and queasy these days. But if we went back to the ancient world, there would be more talk in those terms, I suppose.

What about animalism?

REBECCA: I like that. I was going to ask you — so, one thing I think we have in common, is that we are both kinds of dualists, which is quite unusual in contemporary philosophy. And getting on to this talk of souls does make me think of the animalists. Where do you stand on animalism? I mean, you’re a dualist like me, so you probably aren’t an animalist. Although, that said, for a supposedly relatively simple type of theory, it does seem like the animalists have a lot of debate about what animalism actually is.

JP: Yeah, goodness. Well, I mean, first I should say that, yeah, if forced to choose a view in philosophy of mind, I would say that I’m a dualist. Although I think that’s held as a somewhat loose commitment. But yeah, I think it is all things considered the best position.

So, animalism is the view, for anybody that doesn’t know, that what we are fundamentally is an animal organism, right? So you, Rebecca, on this view, are not a mind, you’re not a soul. You are this whole organism. That’s like a mind-body composite. Now, there’s a kind of dualism associated with Aristotle that also, I guess, counts as a form of animalism, called hylomorphism or hylomorphic dualism.

And if there were a kind of animalism that I might endorse, it would be that variety, I suppose. And something that is attractive about it, I suppose, is that it does allow us to clearly distinguish both humans from other kinds of animals, and animals generally from plants. Because we’ll say, well, there’s a strict metaphysical boundary, here. We’ve got these creatures that have souls, which give them perceptual and other kind of higher-order mental capacities. And plants are the entities that don’t have those, right?

But I don’t really — I’ve never been able to make a whole lot of sense of hylomorphism. And if we’re not talking about hylomorphism, then I can’t really make much sense of animalism. So, that’s a long-winded answer to say that I don’t really know. [laughter]

REBECCA: Yeah, I get a little allergic to hylomorphism. Partly because, a long long time ago, I used to sometimes do some editing for a very nice Italian philosophy professor who loved hylomorphism. And I have to say I never fully got what the contemporary hylomorphists are writing.

JP: It’s a very hard view to understand.

REBECCA: It is very hard. And I think — I mean, I love Aristotle — I would say also, to me, the clearest contemporary animalist positions are those kinds of identity-type claims where they are explicitly pushing against the Lockean distinction between the animal and the person, or something like that. So, it’s literally the identity thing — the Eric Olson identity thing of…

JP: So yeah, it commits you to thinking that mental states are just identical to brain states…

REBECCA: Yeah, a particular kind of physicalism, on which a human person is identical with an individual animal. So, it’s a numerical identity thing. I do get that they then go beyond that, and there are these other interesting positions to be taken from it.

Okay. I would push back on one thing, though. I’m not sure I really believe in souls, but I do believe in some kind of immaterial substance that’s part of us, as someone like Descartes would say. But I’m not fully sure why I would assume that plants don’t have those things, if I assume that all animals have those things. I’m also not sure why I’d think that all animals have those things.

That said, I do think this brings us on to these very complicated questions about how could we ever know these things about animals. It seems to me like the simplest ways of going down, distinguishing between the animals and the plants, would just be these things like: the animal moves around. It’s not sort of tied to the floor by its roots!

Like, I think, if you ask a child, they’re going to pick up on this ‘moving around thing’. This seems very important. And I liked your point about ‘of its own volition’. This also seems very important. A robot is clearly not an animal. And the clearest distinction between the robot dog and the dog is that the dog has some kind of power over its own movement.

JP: Yeah, that’s right. And the dog is a biological entity, and maybe that matters, too.

REBECCA: Yes, yes, good. Exactly so. But it seems like maybe the combination of these two things. The biology — and again, maybe we can leave it slightly to the scientists about what that means. Does it mean some kind of carbon-based organic matter? You can tell I’m not a scientist by my clumsy use of words!

Plus, like you say, some further set of conditions. One of which seems to be an easy one — seems to be this thing about moving around. Although then, no doubt, the plant scientist is going to come along and say, “Don’t you know about this particular kind of plant that seems to move?”

JP: Yeah, right. Exactly. So there are going to be these edge cases. I think there’s just — this is a manifestation of a general phenomenon in philosophy that you will be very familiar with, as somebody who’s done a lot of this stuff. But I don’t know that there’s really a special problem, here.

There are all kinds of distinctions that we can commonsensically make. But then, when we’re trying to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for identifying the two different kinds of things, we have a very difficult time. And sometimes, we just sort of throw up our hands and decide we can’t really do it. But nevertheless, in an ordinary context, we can still make the distinction. Which, you know, to your point, I think the ordinary person feels very confident about being able, most of the time, to distinguish plants from animals.

But then there are going to be cases like, I don’t know, a jellyfish, or something where maybe intuitions sort of cut in both directions. And it doesn’t mean there’s not a distinction there. But it’s really hard to do this stuff. Socrates taught us that, if nothing else, right? It’s that giving a totally satisfactory definition of almost any interesting concept is extremely hard to do.

The risk of over-delegating

REBECCA: Yeah, I totally agree. I’m a big fan of the ordinary approach, though. I think ‘picking stuff out’ like we do in everyday life shouldn’t be undervalued. The other thing I’ve come to think, and this is a little bit of philosopher’s arrogance, is sometimes there’s a risk that we over-delegate to the scientists.

So, I read recently — I got annoyed about this on my Substack — it was, to be fair, rather than reading the scientific article, which I just got too frustrated by the press release to do — there was some press release from some scientific study, which claimed that plants can hear things.

JP: Oh yes, yes.

REBECCA: And what it actually was, was that the plant seed gets slightly jostled by the wind, and then grows more! And they throw, all over these articles, these terms like ‘perceive’ and ‘hear’. And you don’t have to be a philosopher to see this is a massive jump.

JP: Yeah, yeah. Well, this brings to mind a couple of points. So, one — as I imagine you would agree — one problem with trying to do the delineation thing between science and philosophy is that you can’t do science without at least bringing in a bunch of philosophical assumptions, right?

It’s not true in both directions. Like, it is possible to do philosophy without doing science. [laughter] But to do science, even if one is not consciously thinking about the philosophical matters at hand, one must nevertheless make a bunch of assumptions that are, themselves, philosophically contentious and subject to scrutiny.

And then secondly, I don’t blame particular scientists, but it is maybe a problem with the way that education has developed in the last century or something, that it is possible to get a PhD in a scientific field, and just never have any direct contact with philosophy. And a consequence of that is the sort of thing that you’re talking about in that article. Where there’s just a lot of philosophical sloppiness that’s not being picked up on, because the scientists, although really good at what they do, are just not thinking in philosophical terms. And I do think that that is a problem.

REBECCA: Yes, they’re not thinking in philosophical terms, yet they are kind of doing philosophy, in a…

JP: That’s right, yeah.

REBECCA: In a mediocre way.

JP: That’s right.

REBECCA: I also notice this all the time in history books. Historians sometimes even explicitly say things like, “We don’t do normative matters! I’m not going to make any normative claims.” And then, they often follow it up by something like, “Because that would be bad.” [laughter]

JP: Yeah, right, there you go!

REBECCA: I mean, good luck trying to write a paragraph of a history book without getting into that business. That said, I mean, if we look at the other side of the equation, there is a very, very basic sense, in which we do depend on what at least the scientists might want to think is their domain, when we do philosophy. All of the time.

So, this is just a very simple, kind of trivial, not very interesting sense. In which, if you’re thinking about, you know, is it the table that I see in front of me? You have some idea of what a table is, in terms of what the scientists think it is. It’s something hard. It’s something that’s a substance. It has a certain number of corners. And similarly, the political philosopher thinking about distributing corn — whether it’s done justly — thinks that corn exists, what is corn.

But yeah, I think you’re right. When philosophers make really complicated claims about, I don’t know, the relation between the brain and the mind, it can really help if they do have some good awareness of the latest neuroscience. But yes, I think broadly I definitely agree with you that it seems to me like the dependence is much less strong.

JP: Yeah. And I think there are some clear cases, like, if somebody’s just doing pure formal logic or something, or speculative metaphysics, that that is just very far removed from science.

One other point that just came to mind is that since science carries a kind of cultural significance — a sense of authority — people look up to scientists as authorities. A worry here is that when scientists make what are ultimately contestable philosophical pronouncements, it carries the authority that culture now gives to science. So, a lot of times, these things are sort of taken to be settled when they’re not.

It’s like, oh the scientist that said that plants can communicate with each other! Plants are conscious. I mean, what are you thinking, you philosopher nerds!? [laughter] Science pronounced upon this! So get with the program, right!? I think that is a problem when you pair this kind of latent scientism with scientists who encroach upon philosophical matters. It is unfortunate.

REBECCA: You definitely also see that in domains like when doctors try to talk about ethics. And sometimes they don’t even really realise that they’re doing it. They’ll say things like, you know, “But this particular condition is more painful than this one, therefore we need to treat this person first.”

I mean, that’s a very simplistic distinction, but they don’t understand that already they’re laden with all kinds of commitments in terms of, you know, what it means to be obligated to treat somebody, what it means to… And it’s just sort of skated over, and particularly in times of crisis. I mean, we can think of good examples of this, recently. I mean, in COVID times, for instance. The idea that the scientists..

JP: Just follow the science!

REBECCA: Yeah, right, ‘follow the science’ — I mean, what is that? That, in itself, of course, is a philosophical claim! [laughter] Yeah, it’s very funny.

Okay, so I think we’ve done a pretty decent job of sorting out the metaphysics.

JP: Okay! [laughter]

REBECCA: In an over-carving-up sense! I want to touch a little on the philosophy of mind stuff.

So, it seems to me, particularly if we go down this route of making distinctions between plants and animals — and again, we also, apparently, the non-scientists always forget the fungi. I don’t know very much about fungi. And then there’s the bacteria. It seems like these things are interestingly, but subtly, different from the plants and the animals.

JP: Yeah.

REBECCA: It seems like, taking our ‘living organisms but they’re in some sense distinguished by their capacities’. I like this route. This seems like quite an understandable and ordinary route. But you mentioned some capacities which it seems to me a little harder to track in an ordinary sense.

So, we might distinguish, for instance, you suggested between the animals and the plants, in terms of which has a soul. This seems to me much harder than saying which ones move of their own volition. Although we then get into ‘what is of their own volition?’ How do we know that the plant isn’t moving of its own volition? Perhaps it is.

And then, perception. Perception seems like it’s very much in the philosopher’s ballpark. Do you have a settled-on view about the kinds of animals that perceive? Do you think all animals perceive? Do you think that your dog perceives you in a similar sense in which I perceive you? Where do you start on these kinds of matters?

The relevance of perception and pain

JP: Yeah, so I think that this is the normatively significant capacity that at least many animals can possess. I mean, it’s the one that we should care about, because it potentially carries lots of moral weight, and is the baseline for moral consideration, perhaps. So I think that probably not all the organisms that we’re going to want to classify as animals are going to also be perceivers.

So, probably it’s not the case that all animals are perceivers, even though probably most are. But I take it that being a perceiver, at least in the normatively significant sense — and we could talk about whether there’s another kind of not-normatively-significant perceiver — but that kind of perceiver is going to be conscious. So, normatively important perception is conscious perception. It’s perception that it’s like something to have.

REBECCA: Yep.

JP: Certainly, I think that my dog perceives me in that way. Like, she has experiences. It’s like something to be her. And so on. And that’s true with respect to lots and lots of animals. We don’t know how far down it extends. So, you know, there are very lively debates these days about whether insects, for example, are perceivers, in the sense of being conscious. For a while, I guess, there was debate about fish, although I feel like that’s kind of settled, at this point. Yeah, like, fish are conscious!

REBECCA: Yeah, I think I pretty much agree with that. I think it’s ordinary to think that animals perceive, but that some animals don’t perceive, and that the most morally relevant thing is whether they perceive. I also think I agree with you about the consciousness.

I get that within philosophy of mind — and actually, on my most recent episode of this show, I had Tim Crane on. We were talking about consciousness, and we talked a little about the distinction between sentience and consciousness. Oftentimes, these are blurred. I think there is a not very helpful ordinary distinction that is sometimes made — and I sometimes see this when people are making big claims about animal ethics — on which there’s a kind of sense in which you can be sentient but not conscious, such that it still bestows some sense of moral status.

I really, really struggle with what this position actually is. You sometimes see people saying things — and maybe I’m just being uncharitable — on which you have, like you say, your dog, in which we assume that it perceives like we do. There’s something it’s like to be your dog. It has feelings. It experiences pain in some kind of similar sense. And therefore we shouldn’t treat the dog in certain ways. And then they want to say, but there are these other kinds of animals, which are sentient in some sense. They feel some pain, but they don’t have this internal world. And straightaway it’s like, well, what could it mean to feel the pain, if they don’t have the internal world?

If they’re just responding to stimuli in some sense, but they’re not then feeling the pain, then you can’t really hinge it on feeling the pain! I feel like there’s often this kind of sloppy thinking in ordinary discussion, and among philosophers too, where you don’t get these super fine-grained distinctions that the really smart philosophers of mind might make.

But, more broadly, it seems to me anyway that the perceptual state, or the morally relevant sense in which the animals have perception is something like: they have awareness, they feel the pain, they don’t just fall down the hill and cut themselves, they feel the pain. And those are the animals to which we should afford most of our moral consideration. Or something like that.

JP: Yeah, so that all seems right to me. Just a couple of reactions.

So, in case anybody’s wondering what I was talking about earlier, with respect to potentially non-normatively significant perception. I don’t know, like, you might think that some creature, like a jellyfish, there’s some sense in which it’s able to perceive stuff in its environment without having experience. I myself would rather not use terms in that way. But I can imagine somebody using the term ‘perception’ to refer to that. I think that, morally speaking, there would be no reason to care about that sort of perception.

The sort of perception, as you suggest, that we should care about is the sort that it is like something to have. And so, when we’re talking about the notion of pain, I really do think that is essentially bound up with the concept of consciousness. There’s no such thing as pain that it’s not like something to have.

And I also think that — I don’t know if you would agree — but I think that it’s just that pain is straightforwardly bad. And so, since it is normatively laden, there’s no such thing as morally-neutral pain. I think pain for any creature that experiences it is bad. And we should care about it.

So, that’s kind of the baseline for moral consideration. Once you’ve got a creature that can experience a state like pain, well, then it matters now morally. And then we can have a discussion about how much it matters, but it now is entered into the moral calculus.

REBECCA: Yes, I broadly agree with that. I think I’d want to say something more like ‘being in a state of pain is bad for you’. But I feel like we’re going to come out at the same place on that.

Again, it’s quite clear that we can think of instances where, I don’t know, you need the operation, you have to go through the pain to be healed. You might want to say — somebody might want to say — oh but then the pain’s bad for you. [Note from Rebecca: I meant to say ‘good’ not ‘bad’, here!]. I actually don’t think in any sense you’re committed to say that. You can say the thing that’s good for you has this particular side effect, which is feeling pain. It’s also the case that something could be necessary without being good for you, in that kind of simple sense.

JP: Yeah, I think that there are a number of ways to handle this. I mean, you suggested a couple. I would want to say that the pain in such a case still is bad. It’s bad in itself.

But the overall state of affairs of undergoing the procedure — the operation, or whatever — is good. Because it’s possible for an overall good state of affairs to also involve some stuff that’s bad, right? So it might be, like, all considered, it might be good for me to undergo the treatments. But that doesn’t mean that the pain that I’m experiencing in the process is good. It’s still bad.

REBECCA: Yeah, I think the only thing I might push back on is the idea that then it would be altogether good. But I think then we’re just splitting hairs in an unnecessary way.

Somebody might, however, give one of these other cases like eating chilies. I read a fun Substack piece about this recently. I didn’t really agree with the conclusion, but I think it’s a great question. There are clearly some people who do claim to derive some joy from the pain of eating chilies.

Now, we could just take some simple thing and say, oh then they’re not in pain, or that’s not what counts as pain. Or again, you can do a ‘pain is side effect’ and actually it’s the taste that is interesting, or it’s something like enjoying the risk, or showing off, or something like that. I feel like there are ways around this.

But it nonetheless does seem to be the case that some people at least reliably claim that they derive some pleasure from pain. Again, we can just say, well, then it’s pleasure and it’s not pain…

JP: Yeah, I don’t want to say that!

REBECCA: That seems like maybe it’s cheating…

JP: Yeah, I do have a view about this that I am in the process of rolling out on my Substack. I wrote about this in my dissertation, which no one should read, but maybe some people should read the Substack. [laughter] But I actually stated my own view less than carefully. So, what I actually want to say is intrinsically bad is pain that is not, in some way, sanctioned by the will of a being.

So, in a case of a painful treatment, I’m not sanctioning the pain that I’m experiencing. And so, I think it’s still bad for me, there. But I think that rational agents have a capacity that I think non-rational agents don’t have, which is that we are capable of sanctioning pain. Like, endorsing an action that we know is going to involve pain. And we might even think that the pain that’s involved in the action, or the plan, that we endorse is part of what makes it overall good, right?

So, I run marathons. And so when I run a marathon, I think that I’m experiencing a lot of pain, for sure. But I think that I’m not thereby suffering. This is not bad for me, because it’s an activity that I rationally endorse. And running a marathon that involves no pain would probably be a less meaningful experience.

But I also think this is a weird thing about us, because my dog can’t do this, right? My dog can’t understand, okay, yeah, like this activity is going to involve pain, but I want to do it, anyway! So, I think that when pain occurs in non-human animals, it’s always bad. It’s not necessarily always bad in us, because of the chili peppers and the marathon-type cases. But those are kind of weird cases, too.

REBECCA: Yes, I like that. I feel that the sanctioning can do a lot of work, particularly in the permissibility of other people causing us pain.

So, it seems to me, like, you go to the physio after your run — I don’t know very much about running, but I know sometimes they go to the physio, and it’s like, “Oh, the physio really hurt me, but it solved my muscle cramp!” Or, similarly, in the even easier case of the doctor doing the operation, it seems to me like the person who’s going to be hurt — going to suffer the pain — giving their consent, sanctioning it, in some sense helps to solve at least some, maybe most, of making permissible for the person to do that to them.

I’m a little worried, I think, though, about making that do so much work in terms of whether it’s good or bad. Partly because I think it’s quite clearly the case that we can, and often do, sanction things that are bad for us. So, we get slightly into the ‘can you consent to be a slave’ kind of problem.

JP: Yeah.

REBECCA: And I just wanted — I have a pretty hardline view, which is there are certain things you can’t permit people to do to you. And that there are certain things that you might act in a permitting way, and either you don’t give the authority, or the thing is bad for you. And again, we can cut this up in different ways...

JP: Yeah.

REBECCA: So, I think I’d want to make some distinction between the permission-giving and the goodness-making. But I think broadly we come down in a similar place.

JP: Yeah, I think I can agree with all of that, though.

Because I would also say that the mere fact that one has endorsed some kind of activity doesn’t mean that it’s good, right? Because we would have to do some value theory. And I think that we can — we’re capable of desiring things that we shouldn’t desire. So, somebody might sanction a state of affairs where they’re enslaved or something, but then I would agree with you that that would be wrong. They shouldn’t do that. That would be a disordered desire.

So, I’m actually very happy to — I’m happy to say all kinds of desires are bad and disordered.

What is it permissible to do to animals?

REBECCA: Okay, good. I feel like now we’ve done some philosophy of mind, we’ve done some metaphysics, we’ve got into morality. So, let’s go into the question of what we’re permitted to do to animals.

So, we thought about, a little — I like your distinction between human beings as a kind of animal having this distinct capacity to sanction painful behaviour towards them, or something like that. That seems to be a very important distinction. Particularly when we’re thinking about the ways in which we are permitted to treat animals.

So, I guess my easy starter question is: do you think it’s ever okay to eat animals?

JP: Ever okay to eat animals? Yeah, I mean we can cook up cases, no pun intended [laughter], where it’s permissible to eat an animal. Certainly if — I think roadkill, that’s okay. If an animal’s already dead, and you can eat it, that’s going to be okay.

Also, you might think that was cheating, because what you’re really talking about is: is it okay to kill an animal to eat it? And even there, I would say, yeah, right? Like, if you’re in a situation where your life depends upon killing an animal to stay alive, that’s probably permissible.

So, yes. Although I do think that in most of the conditions that we now find ourselves, we probably shouldn’t be killing animals to eat them.

REBECCA: Okay, so just to follow up on the ‘if it’s necessary to eat the animal to stay alive’, are there kinds of ways in which you can’t treat an animal, if it’s necessary for you to stay alive? So, I mean, you think of the nasty philosopher’s case in which the guy comes along and says, “I’m gonna kill you if you don’t torture the animal!”

Are there certain things that are proscribed, in this sense? Eating seems okay, killing seems okay. But are there certain things that, even if your life depends upon it, you shouldn’t do to an animal?

JP: Oh, yeah, maybe I don’t have a totally settled view about that, honestly. But I think what I do have a settled view about is that if you find yourself in a situation where, all things considered, it is permissible, maybe even obligatory, to kill an animal, you should still be trying to do that in as pain-free a way as possible.

So the fact that it’s permissible to kill an animal in a given circumstance doesn’t mean that it’s permissible to kill the animal in any way whatsoever. Like, you’re not allowed to torture the animal first, and so forth.

But, you know, maybe it’s the case that human interests are such that in these sorts of life and death situations, it’s just always permissible to do what you need, as a rational human agent, to do to stay alive. Maybe that’s the case. I’m not strongly opposed to thinking that that’s the case.

REBECCA: I think that would risk meaning that there were kinds of horrible things that, therefore, we’d be justified to do to other people in our self-interest. And I think I’m quite unusual in at least trying to hold the position that in many of those cases you should just sacrifice yourself. I mean, I don’t think this is a very sustainable position for human beings to hold. We’d probably have died out a long time ago, if we didn’t support our own self interest in these ways.

Nonetheless, yes, I think it seems like a good route to go down, when we’re trying to think about the kinds of behaviours that are permissible towards animals, if we’ve accepted that there are certain circumstances in which we can eat them.

JP: So, I think in the human being case, we’re going to be on the same page. I’m entirely prepared to think that there are some acts that you’re just not allowed to perform with respect to another human, in order to save… Like, if you’re told that you have to torture someone for days on end and then kill them, or else you’re going to be killed, you might just have to sacrifice yourself in that situation.

But what I was thinking in the animals case, which may surprise people, since I’m going to sound like the crazed animal-advocate anti-speciesist, is I’m at least open to — I don’t want to dismiss out of hand the possibility that there’s a difference in kind with respect to the moral status that human rational agents have, compared to other animals.

So, we might think that human beings are such that there are just some actions that you can’t perform with respect to them. Is that true with respect to other animals? All other animals? Less clear to me. I don’t know. I just don’t have a super settled view about that.

REBECCA: I think I’m open to this view as well. I like the kinds of view that — Shelly Kagan, I think, is a good exponent of this kind of moral-hierarchy-type view. I don’t agree with how he gets there. I don’t like his utilitarianism. But I’m not opposed to the idea that it might be the case that there are quite different kinds of moral status held by different kinds of animals, including us.

Nonetheless, I feel like I spend quite a lot of time just beating back my natural skepticism about everything.

JP: You and me both!

REBECCA: And I do struggle with the idea that… [laughter] Yeah, I feel like this is, in some sense, my most fundamental quality is I’m just ultimately skeptical about everything. I do get that you have to just push past that, and try to make distinctions beyond it.

But one thing that I find myself quite interested in is: if we suddenly learned, or it became more likely to us, that the animals that we thought weren’t conscious, in this deep sense that we talked about — didn’t have this kind of perception — if we suddenly learned that it was very likely that they were, and more interestingly, I think, that the plants were, a couple of questions arise.

One of them is about how we should change our behaviours. Another, I think, is also probably about how we carve it up, in terms of our ontology. I think I’d be quite open to the idea, which might sound a bit crazy, of including some plants in the category of animal, if, for instance, it turned out that the plants were conscious.

It seems to me I might want to go as far as to say ‘being conscious is a sufficient condition of being an animal’. I know that there are going to be all kinds of problems that that’s going to cause….

JP: There are, yeah!

REBECCA: Not least for those animals that, as we said, don’t seem to be conscious. But I wonder whether I might actually just fall down that line. I’m open to the idea, I think, of doing some reclassification, as well as some kind of moral work, if I were to learn these new things. And I’m pretty open to the idea that plants might well be conscious.

JP: Okay, okay, I have a couple of reactions to that. So, first, I do want to reject the idea that consciousness is sufficient for counting as an animal, because panpsychism might be true. My dissertation supervisor was Galen Strawson, so he’s convinced me at least of that. Like, it’s epistemically possible that panpsychism is true, in which case… [laughter]

REBECCA: I knew it would only be a little bit of time until we got on to panpsychism, because I knew you were a Galen Strawson student!

What is it permissible to do to electrons?

JP: So, if panpsychism is true, then electrons are conscious, but I think electrons are not animals. And so, since it’s at least epistemically possible that an electron is conscious, I think that being conscious is not enough to count as an animal. That would be my attempted reductio on that view.

REBECCA: There are standard objections I could just make, in terms of, you know, we’re talking about organisms though, and you get the combination problem. But I don’t think we should go down there. I’m happy to accept something like some conditional ‘if panpsychism is not true, then’, or something like that.

JP: Yeah, so if the proposal is that an animal is an organism that is conscious, then that seems plausible to me. But just like, you know, that something is conscious is not enough, I think, because of the panpsychism possibility.

REBECCA: Yes, good.

So, at least in this simple sense of enabling us to do quite a lot of the work, in the same way that I’m happy to say the living organism — the individuated living organism — that moves around of its own volition. I feel like I’d probably also broadly be happy to get on with life, and believe that the individuated living organism that is conscious…

That both of these can be. Something like that. It feels like one, or both, in terms of getting on with my life, and thinking about things like animal ethics. I broadly think that that’s not very controversial, and that it seems relatively reasonable to go down either of those routes.

JP: Yeah, fair enough. I agree.

Though, with respect to the plants being conscious thing… So, I don’t think that plants are conscious. And I think that there are good reasons to not think that plants are conscious. I mean, they don’t have a nervous system. They don’t really seem to have anything that’s structurally analogous to a nervous system, despite what some not-super-well-thought-out pop-science pieces say. I don’t think there’s anything like that that’s present in plants.

So, I am a skeptic of plant consciousness. But I would say, even if plants are conscious, it would be a further question whether they can occupy normatively-significant conscious states. So, I don’t necessarily think that, in fact — I shouldn’t do the philosopher’s hedging thing — I don’t think that consciousness is, by itself, morally significant.

I think it’s got to be paired with the capacity to experience, at minimum, pleasure and pain. Because if I’m thinking, again, about the panpsychist possibilities, like, if an electron is conscious, it has just this unimaginably simple kind of consciousness. I don’t think it thereby takes on moral significance. Because it’s not really going to have like a welfare associated with it, right?

It’s not going to be better or worse off, if it’s not at least able to feel pleasure and pain. And, so, if plants merely have some ‘what it’s likeness’, that doesn’t yet mean that they, like, compete with conscious animals for moral significance, or something. Which is often — rhetorically, this is how this move is often invoked, right?

Because it’s usually deployed by people who are very annoyed by ethical vegetarianism, or something. And they want to say, well, but what if plants are conscious? And so I want to say, well, what if they are conscious? Do you think that they matter in the way that a pig matters, when the pig is in intense pain? I think very, very clearly there are good reasons for thinking not.

REBECCA: Yes, I do like this distinction between consciousness in the sense of the thing that obtains when the capacity is exercised, or something like that, and then the conscious mental state. So, you get JP is conscious, and you also get JP has conscious mental states. Or, mental states or events that have the property of consciousness, as I discussed in my last episode with Tim Crane.

That said, I still think I’m going to come down on the side which is something like ‘those mental states have to be experienced by a thing’. I don’t think it makes sense for them to, you know, float around. And I know you’re not saying that. But I would want to say if the electron is conscious in the sense that there is ‘what its likeness’, even if it’s only in a very thin sense, I’m still going then to want to afford it a load of moral concern. I think this is going to be very problematic for me in terms of how I go about my life!

I feel like, then, I’m going to be dependent on some kind of naturalistic justification for not just locking myself in a box, and still worrying about the germs and the little tiny particles. You know, the bits of bacteria, or whatever the scientists want to say. I can get past some of it by making a ‘it’s only if I intend to disrupt the thing, or harm the thing’.

But it seems to me like the possibility of consciousness obtaining at such a level, or all of these different kinds of other things being conscious, is very, very morally problematic. So I’m not sure I…

JP: I guess I don’t see that with respect to the electron. Because if you don’t think that the electron has a state of welfare, then it’s not clear what would harm or benefit the electron, right? Like is it..

REBECCA: I’m not sure why I wouldn’t think it had a state of welfare, if it was conscious. In the sense of there was a ‘what it’s like to be’ the thing.

JP: Yeah, I suppose the thought would be that if the electron were conscious, then the consciousness would take just this brute simple form, because there doesn’t seem to be reason to think that the electron is capable of experiencing interesting mental states, right? So, it’s just like this unimaginably simple form of awareness, is how panpsychists usually talk about.

Now, of course, we don’t have epistemic access to what it’s like to be an electron. So I guess we, you know, maybe the electron is thinking deep metaphysical thoughts, or something! But then this is just kind of the problem of other minds. So this is true with respect to all entities that we encounter. We ordinarily just have to make judgments on the basis of the behaviour that we perceive. And we just see no signs of interesting mental activity in the case of an electron.

We do see signs of interesting mental activity in the case of a dog, right? So, it’s just like very clear what it means to harm or benefit a dog. Whereas, I’m just kind of in the dark about what it means to harm... So, I think even if I were open to the possibility that an electron could be morally significant, I just — it’s a total mystery to me.

So it’s not really clear how this should change my behaviour in any way. Like, maybe the electron likes being blown up, or something. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a blast! [laughter]

REBECCA: It feels to me like that whole mystery thing, though, wants to leave me more open to the idea that it just could be something just entirely different for something to be interesting to an electron. It makes me think actually a little — and maybe this is a not very subtle way of shoehorning in a good philosophical thought experiment — but you remember the Thomas Nagel story about the spider that he finds.

JP: Yeah, yeah.

REBECCA: Yeah, he finds this spider in the, you know, how do Americans say it? Urinal? Urinal? I don’t know. I’m not a man, and I’m not an American…

JP: The former. Yeah, we don’t police this term! [laughter]

REBECCA: So, you know, he goes into the restrooms every day — the men’s room — and he sees the little spider, and the spider can’t get out of the ceramic bowl. And he worries about the spider. He thinks probably the spider’s surviving on the teeny little bugs. But he thinks it must be, in some sense, frustrating for the spider. Or the spider isn’t achieving its best life, or something. So, he sees this over several days, and then finally he takes the spider out, and places the spider beside the aforesaid object. And he comes back, and the spider has died.

Now, there are all kinds of things we can take from this story, and Nagel wants us to take from this story. But, to me, the relevant thing, in terms of our conversation, is maybe it’s just almost category-error-type stuff to think that we could even get into understanding the interests of something aside from us. So, I’d want to say that times a billion with the electron.

If the electron has any awareness, I mean that’s such a… It just seems to me, in itself, a kind of morally-laden matter. But the idea that I could know what, or — I mean, this just seems catastrophic to me. I certainly don’t want to rule out the idea that the awareness is important to the electron. That the awareness does indeed mean something like ‘being blown up feels good’.

As soon as I’ve started to accept that kind of thing, it seems to me like I should be trying really hard to work out the kinds of behaviours I should be displaying towards the electron. And maybe they are entirely different from the behaviours… But nonetheless there are still some behaviours.

JP: Yeah, okay. So, maybe I do feel less drawn to skepticism here than you. So, I think there’s a kind of proviso that I understand to be built into most knowledge claims that I make, which is that I could be wrong. But I think, in principle, I could be wrong about just about anything other than the fact that I have conscious experience in the first place, right?

Descartes was right about that. I can’t be wrong about that. I have no time at all for eliminativism or illusionism. But with respect to anything else, like I could be wrong. Like, maybe you’re not conscious right now. But I see lots and lots of evidence that you are, right? And so, just like I think that I have positive reasons for thinking that plants don’t feel pain, I think I have even better reason to think that electrons don’t feel pain, right?

Like, they have nothing remotely resembling a nervous system. Could I be wrong about that? Yeah, but I guess like in something like the way that I think that I could be wrong that I’m not living in the matrix or something. Like, I can’t totally decisively prove that I’m not living in the matrix, but also I definitely think that I’m not. And so yeah, I think that anytime we’re making claims about other minds, there’s the proviso built in that we could be wrong.

Maybe Descartes was right, and other animals are not conscious. But I think that’s also a really crazy thing to think. And so, in the same way that I think I’m on firm ground thinking that if electrons have conscious experience, it’s not interesting or morally significant. But maybe I’m wrong. I just assign a very, very low probability to the possibility that I’m wrong about that.

REBECCA: So I wonder if maybe the difference between us, then — or maybe just that we haven’t got on to this — is I think that there are ways that you can behave badly towards someone that don’t cause pain, in the sense of physical pain.

JP: I agree with that. Yeah.

REBECCA: So, yeah, if the electron has some kind of awareness, it seems to me like — I mean, I don’t want to start trying to psychologise the electron — but awareness seems to me the kind of building block for, for instance, doing some psychological damage to the electron, or treating it with disrespect.

These kinds of things which paradigmatically aren’t instances of physical pain, but that we — at least, I — want to leave some space for those things within my account of behaving wrongly towards something. Causing something bad for something. And I think I’m just going to want to afford more significance to the awareness, in terms of at least the set of possibilities of ways in which I could behave badly, or even wrongly, towards something.

JP: So, I’m with you for half of that. I’m with you in thinking that there are ways of wronging someone that don’t involve causing the person pain, or the entity pain. But I think that those forms of wrongness require mental capacities that I have positive reasons for thinking the electron doesn’t possess.

So, I think most of the non-pain-involving forms of harm are forms of harm that can only be inflicted on, basically, like, a fellow rational creature, right? So, I think I have duties to you as a fellow rational creature to respect you in ways that don’t necessarily involve just not causing you pain.

But I also think that the electron is not going to possess any of those capacities. In fact, I think most other animals aren’t going to possess those capacities, either.

REBECCA: Yes, I was coming to the conclusion that you were going to say that about other kinds of animals. So I think maybe, then, we do have a difference of opinion, because I think quite strongly that you can morally disrespect non-rational animals — if indeed the animals are not rational. I also think I probably just place less weight on the moral relevance of rationality, here. That’s two ways of saying the same thing.

JP: Yeah. And I don’t want to seem to make a stronger claim than I’m wanting to make, because, yeah, I’m not thinking about the way that we should relate to other animals in purely utilitarian terms. I’m not a utilitarian, actually. But I think that most kinds of non-pain-involving harm are going to be harms that we associate with other rational creatures.

But yeah, I think that there are ways of wronging non-human animals apart from causing them pain. So, we would be on the same page about that.

The relevance of disrespect

REBECCA: Yeah, I think so. So, I do think this idea of moral disrespect is something that plays quite a big role in my view of morality, and my view of the kinds of obligations we might hold to other living things.

I even think — I have some of these crazy views — I even think that if animals, for instance, non-human animals, had the best possible lives and deaths, I still think we’d be showing importantly-bad moral disrespect by eating their dead bodies. This causes me some problems even for lab-grown meat. I’ve written about this before.

I think I have quite an unusual position on this, which is, my problem is something like, in that we’re trying to simulate the dead body of the animal — we want the steak that looks like a bit of beef. We want the prawn that looks like a prawn. Sorry, the shrimp, as the Americans say, that looks like a shrimp. We want them to taste like those things. We want them to smell like those things. And if my ‘moral disrespect view’ is an important part of why I think I shouldn’t eat the actual dead bodies of animals, I think that carries over — maybe not to such a strong degree — into the simulated bodies of animals.

I may, of course, just be affording far too much respect to dead bodies, here. I don’t think I am affording respect to the dead body, per se, though! Or indeed to the dead animal. I don’t think it makes any sense to say you owe respect to something when it doesn’t exist anymore. But I’m willing to say something like ‘I’m disrespecting that kind of animal’. I’m disrespecting beef-kind, when I eat a steak.

I should clarify, by the way, I do eat beef. I’ve given up pork and chicken recently, kind of on pragmatic grounds and also factory-farming grounds. But I do think, for me — and this is partly why I find it so hard to give up all the animals — I worry that my position just leads me into this very desolate situation, in which I can hardly do anything in my life.

JP: Yeah, yeah. We would part ways there. So, I think with the lab-grown meat case, it’s not clear to me who I would be disrespecting by eating lab-grown meat. And I don’t think that it’s possible to disrespect a kind of animal, or a species. Now, with respect to the dead bodies, like eating roadkill or something, I think that’s fine too, honestly.

But I could imagine that maybe there’s a kind of respect, or something, that that sort of action sits uncomfortably with. I don’t know. I mean, I’m a proponent of lab-grown meat. I think my view would be that even if I conceded that there was some kind of morally problematic disrespect here, I think the benefits would overwhelm whatever badness obtains there, because the worst thing we do to animals is factory farming. And I think that the only way factory farming ends is if we have a sufficiently desirable replacement, which probably is going to mean lab-grown meat.

So, if there’s still some residual badness that’s involved in lab-grown meat, I think that my view would be that we should just swallow whatever that is. Because there’s no worse way of disrespecting animals really than torturing them en masse, which is what we currently do in factory farms.

REBECCA: I agree with most of that. I mean, for instance, I agree that a particular thing has to be disrespected for disrespect to obtain. But I just think it’s the particular instances of that kind of animal that exist.

So, in the same way that if you had a video game in which, I don’t know, it involved someone going around torturing women, or, you know, being sexist towards women — however you want to put it, or think of some other category — then I think you could say it’s disrespectful to womankind. I don’t mean that womankind as some kind of ‘lumped whole’ is the object of disrespect. I mean that the particular instances of women who exist are the objects of disrespect. Therefore, you’re in some sense disrespecting all the existing cows by eating the dead body of a cow. I get that that’s quite an extreme view.

Beyond that, I do agree, though. I mean, I would word it slightly differently because I’m so anxious about not falling into any kind of consequentialist reasoning — although I do think you can talk about costs and benefits without being a consequentialist.

JP: Yes.

REBECCA: I agree, for sure, it’s a morally better world, or something like that, in which we eat lab-grown meat than we factory farm. That just seems to me very clear.

A point you made — I read your reducetarian piece last night. It’s a very, very nice piece. I think it’s a great example of doing public philosophy. It’s so clear and well argued. You made many excellent points in it. But one I think which is under-discussed, yet seems to me very important — and I feel like might tie our positions together here — you made this point around ‘we should just accept that as the kind of creatures we are, meat tastes good to us’. Or, you know, our brains are wired to want to take in the high-protein food.

I think this may take us down some kind of naturalistic route. Although I don’t think we have to fall foul of the naturalistic fallacy, and think because something’s natural for us therefore it’s good for us.

JP: Yeah.

REBECCA: But it might just be this important psychological notion that we have to take in. That doesn’t mean that we might not want to push against it. So, for instance, if it’s the case that humans are disposed to doing some other thing which is horrible, we might spend our time trying to condition ourselves away from it.

But nonetheless, I feel like accepting this — which it seems like a lot of people in the, kind of, vegetarian movements don’t accept — which is that it is normal and natural for human beings to enjoy the taste of dead non-human animals. This just seems to me pretty true.

JP: Yeah. So I definitely don’t think that because it’s natural, it’s good. But this was just a pragmatic point that I think the animal protection movement has to be realistic about. Because, since the beginning of the animal protection movement — in the early 1970s, basically, is when it really got going in earnest — the share of global vegetarians and vegans just hasn’t increased that much, at all.

And this is I think because, at least in part, people like the taste of meat, and other animal products, a lot. And that’s what pushes me towards the lab-grown meat thing, because I think there’s got to be an alternative, basically. People are unlikely — could happen, right? — but people are unlikely to decide to take significant hits to their taste enjoyment simply out of moral conviction. I think that’s not really how human beings are.

I did want to circle back, just to register agreement with one thing that you said a couple of minutes ago. So, with respect to the respect point. I do think that I agree — in fact, I think you’re totally right, in the case of humans. So I think, yes, you’re correct that it is possible to disrespect humankind, or womankind, or something like that. Or, I can translate that into terms that I agree with.

And I think that’s going to be cashed out, though, in terms of the relevant cognitive capacities that humans have that animals don’t have. So, I think that it’s possible to disrespect women, as such, in a way that it’s not possible to disrespect cows. But I think that’s because women are rational agents, and cows aren’t. So, they’re susceptible to different kinds of harms.

REBECCA: It seems to me that our difference may be the capacity of the thing to be aware that disrespect is being paid. Not necessarily in the particular instance, but more generally. I mean, I’m going to just come up with a classic example about, you know, the person in the coma. And then maybe you just say, well, look, generally the person in the coma, when they are fully operating normally, they can understand disrespect, or something like that.

I think I worry, though, about hinging whether something can be an object of disrespect on the capacity — and maybe you’re not saying this, maybe I’m going too far — on the capacity, for instance, to then understand, not necessarily disrespect, but some of the consequences. So, maybe, feeling shamed. Or, maybe, feeling lowered in status, or something like that.

Am I getting somewhere towards your position?

JP: Yeah, I think the person in the coma is still a human rational agent, right? They’re a member of a particular kind of species, and we have certain, plausibly, certain duties of respect to that general kind. That natural kind. But I think that cows, as such, don’t have an interest in not having any cow meat consumed, however that cow meat is produced. That’s the way that I would want to go.

But it may be that I have views here about natural kinds that are just more metaphysically loaded, or something, than you might want to endorse. That might be the difference.

REBECCA: I feel like there may be some difference, there.

Are we obligated to bring back extinct species?

REBECCA: I have all of these other questions about animal ethics to ask you. Things about companion animals, I know you’ve written about. Things about domestication. But, I think, because we’re running out of time, I’m going to finish with my favourite one — I started writing something about this a while back, maybe I will use this as inspiration to pick it up — about whether we might be obligated to bring back extinct animals.

It seems like it’s a pretty standard view to think that we have obligations to prevent animals from going extinct. At least, if you’re the kind of person, like me, who has these weird kinds of ideas about the obligations we have to the ‘creature-kind’. Although, I did say that that was still predicated on there being some existing instances of the creature-kind.

Where do you get off the ground on thinking about extinct animals? Do we have any kind of obligation to bring them back? If so, what would you ground that in? Is it just something fun for the movies, or interesting for the scientists? Is there any kind of moral domain, here?

JP: Yeah, I haven’t thought a ton about this. But my reaction is that we probably do have some reasons to bring back extinct animals. Obligation sounds too strong, at least under present conditions. So, under present conditions — again, where we have tens of billions of animals that are suffering horrifically on factory farms — I think most of our reasons in relation to how we ought to be relating to other animals are reasons to try to end that state of affairs.

So, since we’re so bad at relating respectfully to other animals right now, I would think that bringing back extinct animals seems like a very bad idea under present conditions. Under future conditions that maybe are better, where we’ve gotten our act together a bit, then yeah, bringing back extinct animals might be a good thing. I don’t know, like, variety is good! [laughter] So, having more kinds of animals around is better than not.

But yeah, it doesn’t strike me that there are super strong reasons, here. But that there are reasons to do this, that seems plausible.

REBECCA: Yeah, I think if the argument about the current animals being more important is based in this sense of obligation to existing things, or if it’s something about feasibility and resource constraint, then I’m definitely with you.

If it’s more like ‘this is the most important thing, therefore we have to only attend to that’ — and I know you’re not saying that — but then you get the whole, you know, ‘you’ve broken your leg but I can’t feel sorry for you, because I should be paying all of my attention to the person who’s being tortured’.

JP: Yeah, I mean the broader point is that we’re just really bad at attending to the interests and welfare of animals, right now. And so bringing more animals into the fold just doesn’t seem like it should be a priority, at the moment. But yeah, if we got better at behaving respectfully towards animals, then I would be more interested in bringing back extinct ones.

But right now, I think that we would just be disposed to probably do all kinds of horrific things to the extinct ones that we brought back.

The phenomenology of moral disgust

REBECCA: Can I end by asking: do you eat any meat?

JP: So, I’ve been vegetarian at least since 2009. And it was actually a philosophy article that caused the change. I was reading the widely-anthologized piece by Alastair Norcross, Puppies, Pigs, and People. And I got about halfway through that, and decided that was it: I’m not ever eating meat again.

And there had been some kind of process before that, where I’d been kind of uncomfortable with eating animals, going back to the time I was probably twelve years old. So, that was 2009. And since then, I’ve increasingly approximated veganism. And the degree to which I’ve been fully vegan — like super, super strictly vegan — has varied.

But I do take something like — with some caveats that we could talk about some other time — I take veganism to be something like the ideal, and one should approximate it as closely as possible. And that’s basically what I do. So vegetarian, almost totally vegan, but not like the strictest vegan in the world, I guess, is the way to describe myself. I do the best I can, you know.

REBECCA: So, I go through periods of not eating meat. I’m currently not eating the chicken and the pork.

JP: I endorse that. Good job.

REBECCA: But when I did give up — I gave up meat, apart from fish and seafood, about a year ago, for maybe three or four months. And the thing which I found really interesting about this — aside from the fact that I came to the conclusion I was just cheating by eating seafood every meal, partly because I do have these concerns about all of the animals.

But one thing I found very interesting is that I assumed, previously, if I managed to give up meat, I would have just sort of strengthened my will, in every instance. So, you know, I go to the restaurant, and I see the cheeseburger on the menu, and I reason it through, and I have more strength of will, or the reasons are stronger, and the argument works. And then I have the little battle with myself, every time. And I assumed that the situation in which Rebecca is the vegetarian is a situation in which Rebecca just wins those arguments against herself. But that wasn’t the case at all, actually. I just — I lost the desire.

So I, similarly, had read something, a philosophy paper, which included some stuff about pigs. It’s this piece by my friend Sahar Akhtar. And she had this example — it’s actually about abattoir workers, and how bad it is to be an abattoir worker, or something like that — but she had this one example of this little pig, who had never known any affection, never really hung out with other pigs, came and nuzzled up against the abattoir guy who was just about to kill the little pig. And I just thought, oh my god, I can’t eat animals anymore.

And then it wasn’t, though, that I constantly thought about the arguments. I just no longer had the desire to eat the meat. I found this very psychologically interesting, because I had always been assuming that all of the vegetarians were just making the stronger arguments, being more convinced.

Do you recognise this? Or are you somebody who makes the argument every time and still has the desire?

JP: I see. It does seem like there’s a good bit of individual variation, here. So, I have no desire to eat meat. In fact, it disgusts me. And that is a way that some people end up going. I honestly have a hard time eating an enjoyable meal with somebody else who’s eating meat, because it just really does disgust me, at this point. And it’s interesting — it’s like a kind of moral revulsion, right? It’s just like morally yucky.

REBECCA: Yes, I was going to ask: is it that it’s disgusting in this simple sense that it tastes disgusting or smells disgusting? Can you separate that out from the moral revulsion? Because I think I have the moral revulsion, but I still have the desire to eat it. I’m fully convinced that it’s bad and wrong, and I particularly feel this when I see the full animal. The pig on the spit, or the little shrimp in the pan. But, nonetheless, I still do have the desire to taste it, to smell it, to subsume it. This seems confusing to me.

JP: Yeah, it’s something I should think about a little bit more, because I think it’s been under-theorised — the phenomenology of moral disgust, or something. Because it is a different kind of reaction than I would have to mouldy bread, or something.

Mouldy bread is gross, but there’s no kind of moral laden-ness there. But I do experience some sort of moral revulsion at the sight of meat. Now, it’s not totally rational, because I’m not disgusted by eggs and dairy. You know, I think they’re — really, I will say this — one should definitely avoid factory-farmed eggs. That’s one of the worst things that one can consume, really, in terms of animal suffering.

REBECCA: Yeah, I do.

JP: But when I look at a fried egg, I’m not disgusted, right? And I still kind of desire cheese, even though I think I have strong moral reasons to avoid it. So yeah, my affective states have not tracked my moral reasons in a totally rational way.

But yes, to answer the question, it is definitely different in kind from merely what we might call ‘aesthetic disgust’. But I can also say, just from talking to other people — I mean, there are people who’ve been vegan for 30 years who still desire to eat steak. And there are others who are just revolted by any kind of animal product at all. I think it does seem to be not terribly common for this, kind of, disgust reaction to develop, which I think is partially why the recidivism rate is so, so high, right?

Like, people will encounter an argument in a philosophy class, and become very convinced vegetarians, vegans. And then, a year later, after they’re no longer being reminded, they’re just right back to their old habits. It’s something that should probably be — it would be good to study it more, honestly. It would be valuable to study.

REBECCA: It also does make me think, in the same way that another nice point you made in that reducetarian piece was that we should just increase people’s knowledge about the badness of factory farming. If we could also find some way to increase people’s revulsion… Like, I would be interested in becoming more revolted. I clearly am, on some level at least, morally revolted.

Maybe I just need to put mouldy meat out in my house, every day. Maybe I need to, I don’t know, paint the shrimp a different colour, or something. It seems to me like perhaps I could condition myself down that line, such that my higher-order desire to be a good person might match my much more instinctive animal-type response to ‘ooh it smells nice, it looks nice’.

JP: Yeah, there’s an interesting philosophy paper that I don’t think yet exists — but that there could be a moral obligation to induce disgust or revulsion in ourselves. I would co-author that one with you, if you want to get on that someday. [laughter]

REBECCA: Let’s do it! All right, let’s do it.

But what is an animal?

REBECCA: So why don’t we finish — now we’ve committed to writing this paper — why don’t we finish coming back to this opening question about what an animal is.

I feel like early on — and this has allowed us to have such a wide-ranging and fun conversation — I feel early on we agreed broadly on this idea of ‘the individual living organism that moves around of its own accord’, something like that.

If the little kid comes up to you in the street, and says, “Hey, JP, I hear you write about animals! I need to go into my class today, and say what an animal is.” Are you going to go something down that line? Do you have something simpler? What is your simple off-the-cuff answer to what the animal is?

JP: If a kid just asked me that off the street, I would say, “You know, the kind of being that dogs and cats and pigs and cows are. That’s what I mean. Those are animals.” And that might be as good as we can do at the end of the day, actually. So, oftentimes, the answer that we would give to a random little kid on the street ends up being the best philosophical answer that we can get. [laughter]

REBECCA: I like that. If your definition of animals does not capture those paradigmatic animals, you fail.

Okay, this has been great. Thank you. This has been a lot of fun. And you may even have helped me go further down the vegetarianism route. So I’m eternally grateful to you for that.

JP: Well, you know, that was my hidden purpose in the whole conversation, Rebecca. It was just to make you a vegetarian by the end of it. [laughter]

REBECCA: That’s right — we’re back to Aristotelian teleology — good times! [laughter]

I’ve written here before about the idea of living forever. Back then, I asked you to consider the possibility of your mind persisting endlessly after your bodily death. Today, I want to discuss the possibility of avoiding bodily death, in the first place.

I’ll begin by assuming that the avoidance of bodily death is, indeed, a possible thing. By this, I don’t mean I think there’s a possible route to ‘bringing you back from the dead’ after you’ve fallen off a cliff, or had your head chopped off. Rather, I mean I think we could become invincible against disease and ageing.

And as such, absent things like falling off cliffs and having your head chopped off, I think it’s possible we could live healthily, forever. I’ll even admit to thinking this is ‘nearby possible’. (Hey there, AI-driven medical advances!)

Okay, maybe I should accept that these two notions of ‘avoiding bodily death’ are closer in possibility than I assume. I mean, perhaps once the problems of disease and ageing have been solved, we’ll consequently find ourselves newly able to solve problems like falling off cliffs. I’m happy to accept that for current purposes, even though my metaphysical convictions set me strongly against it.

Mostly, however, I want to focus on what it’d mean for humankind to gain this newfound invincibility against ageing and disease. It seems to me likely, for instance, that it would radically change how we go about planning for the future. For a start, I assume most of us would think very differently about investing. Not only in the sense of where you put your money, but also about how you commit to your long-term development.

Think about it. If there were no certain end in sight, then how would you choose which skills to build, which career to pursue, who to marry, and so on? More generally, how would you undertake the activity that Nozick refers to as “formulating long-term plans for [your] life”? This is something he tells us — and surely you’d agree — is a particularly distinctive and valuable part of being human. These seem like important questions to me!

Now, perhaps you’re tempted to think that notions such as careers and marriages would fade away, outside the shadow of death — that our new ‘timelessness’ would destroy any urge or reason to make long-term commitments. Or perhaps you think that our longest-term commitments would simply shift from being ‘for life’ to being the stretchiest links in a never-ending chain. “Ah yes, my fifty-year relationship with so-and-so!”, you might fondly reflect, a thousand years down the line.

Or perhaps you assume we’d all be hiding away, locked in our houses, wrapped in cotton wool, terrified at the thought of the accident or assault that could end our otherwise endless lives — thus squandering our supposedly endless opportunities.

I have many thoughts on these matters, some of which you can probably guess if you’ve read my previous piece. But what I want to emphasise today is that such a life would not truly be a life of ‘endless opportunities’. In particular, it would not be a life of ‘endless opportunities’ either in the sense that: a) every possible opportunity would arise for every person at some point; or b) every possible opportunity would last for everyone endlessly.

For a start, it’s easy to see that these two conceptions are in tension! What I want to draw your attention to, however, is how neither of these conceptions is alive to the fact that particular opportunities depend on particular sets of conditions.

It might be tempting, that is, to think that an endless life would be a life in which you’d be able to do every single possible thing in every single possible combination. That such a life would be a life correlative to the idea that, at some point during ‘infinite time’, the monkeys would write the works of Shakespeare. Okay, I’ve never bought the Shakespearean monkey claim, but again, I’m happy to accept it for current purposes.

One key difference between the Shakespearean monkey claim and the ‘every possible opportunity’ conception of the infinitely-long human life is that many of the opportunities we value in our lives involve other people. Take the paradigmatic example of having the opportunity to enter into a romantic relationship with someone you really like. Well, surely, imagining that living forever would always entail having the opportunity to be in a romantic relationship with whoever you really liked is crazy down many lines!

I mean, just because the girl you currently like is going to live forever doesn’t mean she’s going to like you back at some point. And just because you and the guy you currently like both have the possibility of living forever doesn’t mean that the two of you can risklessly delay getting together, even though you both currently feel the same way about each other!

It’s not only, therefore, that the risk remains that you might fall off a cliff or have your head chopped off. Even if we could survive those kinds of events, the girl might never like you back, and the guy might change his mind!

This kind of logic applies to most other valuable opportunities you would face in a possibly endless life. And that’s because other people — indirectly, as well as directly — would play a part in those opportunities, too! And those other people would be people, just like you, with changing goals and preferences, as well as locations and resources, and so on, and so forth.

Of course, as you might have guessed, all this is really just an attempt to reconcile my excitement at the idea of getting to live forever with my instinct that it’s valuable to live with some sense of urgency.

That is, as things stand, I believe it’s generally useful to think ‘life is short!’ when valuable opportunities arise. Doing so forces you to weigh up your options, and helps you to be productively innovative in the ways you live your life. Without such a heuristic, it can be hard to value what you have, as well as what it’s possible for you to gain.

In that context, my argument says that while the life in which you could live forever would be a life with infinitely more opportunities than the life you currently lead, it would not be a life in which anything you ever wanted was always yours for the taking.

I’ll end by emphasising that I assume many people would be scared by the possibility of ‘endless life’. They would be scared, not least, about what it would imply for their chance to find meaning. I attempted to address this anxiety in my previous piece, by arguing that some insulation against the downsides of ‘being alone in the dark forever’ can be found in trying to make yourself as interesting as possible. And moreover, that the inherent value of such an approach might even tell us something about the ‘meaning of life’.

Well, I think a similar kind of ‘getting on with it enthusiastically and evaluatively’ approach can be taken to addressing the potentially stultifying news — the news that I believe could arrive any day now! — that bodily death has become avoidable.

Think about it like this. The life in which you lie in bed all day, hiding away, wrapped in cotton wool, because taking an opportunity could mean ending the opportunity to take any opportunity is a life in which you don’t really value opportunity. And the life in which you assume that ‘endless time’ means that every possible opportunity will arise at some point and will also always exist is a life based on bad math.

Rather, the value of the ‘life is short!’ heuristic would persist even when ‘shortness’ had less application to our ‘whole lives’, in general. Thinking in this way would still help us to make good plans. But whether or not you agree with me, you’d better start thinking about these things. The new constraints of endless time may be upon us sooner than you think!

Thanks to GPT for the picture.

If you know me in person, you’ll know that I love space. I wrote here recently about my interest in the philosophy of space. I’ve published elsewhere on topics ranging from lunar property rights to the value of space exploration. I’ve even spent time as Consulting Space Philosopher at a space research firm. I’m biased, therefore, to seeing the relevance of space everywhere I look.

Indeed, I often find myself saying things like “It’s all about space!”, even though I get frustrated when other people conflate ‘most’ with ‘only’, and even worse, when they conflate ‘under-acknowledged’ with ‘only’. The aim of this short piece, therefore, is only to persuade you that most people are under-acknowledging the relevance of space. And that smart liberal policy-thinkers, in particular, should be paying more attention to it.

At this point, you might want to remind me that I committed to writing a short weekly philosophy essay, yet it seems as if this might be an essay about space policy. Well, aside from my belief that space policy is an area particularly well-suited to the philosophically-minded, I believe that philosophers have obligations to get involved in the real world.

In particular, I think that professional philosophers who depend in any sense — direct or not — on taxpayer money in order to spend their lives doing philosophy have special obligations to this end. And I think that professional philosophers who spend their lives reaching conclusions about pressing moral and politico-philosophical questions have extra special obligations.

So if you don’t think this essay is philosophical enough, per se, then feel free to see it in that light.

I’ll begin by stating that I’m pretty sure that if you asked most policy people in Westminster and DC to list the twenty most important policy concerns of the moment, space would not be mentioned. And if you asked them to expand their lists, then where would space appear? Number 45? Ever?

Sure, you could argue that some of the more general matters these policy people included in their lists had space-based implications. You might say, “Oh but they were including space in their reference to emerging tech!” Or, “They were including space in their reference to the impact of regulation on small companies!” But correlative to an argument I made in my recent ‘philosophy of space’ piece, it seems clear there are enough space policy questions, per se, to justify a domain-specific approach. And an implicit aim of this piece is to persuade you of that!

1) Defence, militarism, and peace

One exception I’d make to my claim about policy people overlooking the importance of space would, of course, be the defence dudes. In particular, there’s a small set of space-focused defence dudes, who for years have been trying to tell everyone else about the increasing relevance of space affairs. Check out, for instance, the work of my old friend Gabriel Elefteriu.

More recently, the non-space-focused defence dudes have caught up. This is hardly surprising when, as I wrote elsewhere, “the Space Foundation […] calculated that, in 2023, global military space budgets grew 18 per cent on the previous year, totalling $57 billion, and comprising almost half of total government space expenditure”. Note also, for example, growing American financial commitment to the Space Force. Yes, there is a Space Force!

Then, at the level of everyday awareness, few would deny the role satellite technology has come to play in military operations. Surely you’ve read about Starlink’s relevance to the Russia-Ukraine war. And it’s increasingly easy to conclude that future conflict won’t simply be monitored and guided from space, but that militaristic activity will likely take place up there. After all, we’re currently seeing the ground being set for space weapons firing at targets on Earth.

My first simple conclusion, therefore, is that there’s increasing need for smart liberal policy-thinkers to pay more attention to space, because these are people who, by definition, should believe in protecting and promoting the value of peace.

2) Innovation, regulation, and property rights

The space economy is also increasing in relevance. I recently wrote a journal article about how difficult it is to quantify the current and potential space economy. This is partly, again, because of the pervasive relevance of satellite technology. (As I’ve asked here before, does every sat nav count as part of the space economy?). But the most expansive and extreme predictions tell us that the space economy could be worth $2.3 trillion by 2035!

Setting calculation (and incentives for exaggeration) problems aside, if you look at each segment of the space economy, you can see astonishing economic opportunities. Take, for instance, recent improvements and cost reductions in rocket technology — crucially, payload costs have been decreasing fast — which mean that for many firms of many kinds the sky is no longer the limit.

Sure, we haven’t yet reached the age of mining on asteroids or hotels on the moon. But those are simply cartoon totems. What’s happening now ranges from the valuable development of products enabling advances in space medical testing, to the valuable development of modular space tech. (There are so many examples of these things I feel no need to provide hyperlinks!)

My second simple conclusion, therefore, is that there’s increasing need for smart liberal policy-thinkers with expertise in economic and legal analysis to pay attention to space. These people are needed, not least, to hold policy-makers to account for the overly burdensome, and often outdatedly irrelevant, regulation that currently holds back space entrepreneurs. (And if you think space entrepreneurs should be focusing on Earthly goods instead, then here’s my piece to persuade you otherwise.)

Upstream of all this is the urgent need for humankind to set in place an effective and morally justified property rights regime in space. I’ve written about this many times before, so I won’t go on about it here. But the lack of good writing on this topic represents a pretty unparalleled intellectual and practical opportunity for smart liberal policy-thinkers with expertise in political philosophy and law.

3) Life and exploration

Finally, because I promised you a short piece, let’s think about the aliens. You might have noticed increasing amounts of evidence being released to show that government actors have long held back information about unexplained activity in our skies. Now, I’ll be up front about the fact that I don’t believe that these releases, or any to come, will prove the existence of little green men at Roswell!

But, beyond the importance of knowing about the unjustifiably non-transparent norms of state actors, I do think it’s rational to be open to the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. Indeed, pretty much regardless of the pure likelihood of this — not least because I believe calculating this likelihood borders on the impossible — I believe this is something we should all take seriously, as responsible and inquisitive creatures.

More people should be aware, therefore, that we’re on the verge of gaining new information about nearby places in the solar system that could potentially harbour life. Numerous current space missions, which are either underway or soon to launch, are targeted at gaining knowledge about the nearby places that seem most conducive to life, particularly owing to the current or past presence of water.

My third simple conclusion, therefore, is that paying attention to this information as it arises offers smart liberal policy-thinkers with expertise in moral philosophy an astonishing opportunity. This is the opportunity to help to ensure that humankind behaves well towards the new kinds of living things we might encounter in space.

4) A caveat and a commitment

I now want to add a caveat to my call for smart liberal policy-thinkers to think more about space. I’ve pre-empted this caveat, to some extent, by emphasising the need for various kinds of expertise.

As I wrote here recently about AI, there’s an unfortunate tendency for new fields of inquiry to attract new fields of experts. You know what I mean: the AI policy person, or the medical ethics policy person. These policy people often lack the methodological rigour and subject experience that comes with discipline expertise. Or they come from disciplines that are ill suited to the policy questions at hand. For example, computer scientists are not, per se, well placed to answer questions about AI consciousness. And doctors and nurses are not, per se, well placed to answer questions about medical ethics.

My general strong advice for policy-thinkers, therefore, is to develop a disciplinary expertise and apply it to new fields, where best suited. This brings advantages at the personal level as well as at the aggregate. It can lead, for instance, to a beautifully deep kind of interdisciplinary work, where each person is not aimed at becoming an expert in each field, but people from different disciplines help each other to strengthen their arguments and conclusions in new ways.

My fourth simple conclusion, therefore, is that humankind urgently needs good economists and good philosophers and good lawyers, and so on, to turn their attention to space policy. And that those of us who are committed to liberal ideals should want these people to focus on values including peace, innovation, and the welfare of all living things.

Finally, and I won’t say much about this now, I’m excited to be spending some of my time at Mercatus building our space policy capacity. I’m convinced that this work is timely and important, and that we’re unusually well placed to do it well. Moreover, like I said above, if you’re lucky enough to be a professional philosopher, and particularly one who works on important moral and politico-philosophical questions, then you have certain obligations to get involved in real-world stuff.

So, if you’re interested in knowing more, or maybe even getting involved, then drop me a line..

Thanks to GPT for the picture.

I want to share with you a quick argument I made during a recent episode of Working Definition. This argument takes the form of an objection to a classic bit of Nozick evasion. Or rather, an objection to the implications standardly drawn from a classic bit of Nozick evasion.

I think quite a lot about the problem at hand, which broadly is whether and when moral rights can be ‘overridden’, and you can read or hear my further thoughts by checking out the episode.

But the objection I discuss below is probably the one that interests me the most. This is partly because I think it’s under-appreciated (has anyone else made this particular objection, aside from me?). And partly because it helps to emphasise the value to the individual (all individuals, any individual, this is the point!) in maintaining the notion of moral rights as non-overridable, by suggesting that even Nozick is at risk of forgetting the significance of the individual and maybe even the individual’s ‘separateness’.

As I discuss in the episode (which is one of my favourite episodes so far), committing to the idea that moral rights can’t be overridden definitely doesn’t mean committing to the idea that all moral rights are unconditionally-held. Indeed, I think the distinction between conditionality and overridableness is extremely important here. I also think that conditionality can do a lot of the work that other people want overridableness to do!

But if moral rights can be overridden, then what does the individual really have as protection? What protection do we have if even Nozick is susceptible to unthinkingly prioritising the many over the one?

REBECCA: Nozick has this famous footnote about catastrophic moral horror, in which […] he says, “The question of whether these side constraints are absolute” — he basically means perfect moral obligations by this — “or whether they may be violated in order to avoid catastrophic moral horror, and if the latter, what the resulting structure might look like, is one I hope largely to avoid.” [laughter]

JOHN: I think we can see why! [laughter]

REBECCA: This is classic Nozick — I’m not gonna tell you the really important stuff!

JOHN: Yeah.

REBECCA: But I have various problems with this ‘catastrophic moral horror’ thing. One niche problem I have with it is, isn’t Nozick supposed to think that all instances of rights violation are catastrophic moral horror? Yet I think we’re supposed to imagine it’s some great big, the world is gonna explode. So, is this like Nozick the aggregationist, here? It only can count as catastrophic moral horror if the whole world explodes, or Manhattan explodes? Don’t we want to say that torturing a baby is catastrophic moral horror?

One final thing. If you’re kinda into Nozick, then you might have paused at my clarification about side constraints, because you probably know the phrase ‘rights as side constraints’. But if you’re really into Nozick, then you would’ve been glad to see my clarification! As I discuss in the episode:

REBECCA: I sometimes hear people wanting to conflate rights and perfect obligations, though. And I have a problem with this for various reasons. One, I’m quite interested in the idea of being a rights-holder. If I hold the right not to be tortured, that clearly isn’t the same as holding the perfect obligation not to torture.

Thanks to GPT for the picture.

One of the most annoying popular ideas of the moment is the idea that AI is going to take all the jobs. There are many reasons this idea annoys me. But today I’m going to focus on making one simple argument about why ‘AI taking all the jobs’ is a silly thing to worry about. This argument hinges on the value of — and the ease of doing — good conceptual analysis.

I want to begin, however, by emphasising that there are good reasons that philosophers typically don’t get into the prediction game. And that those philosophers who do are not philosophers like me. For a start, I oppose many of the philosophical theories that might (reasonably or not!) predispose philosophers to trying to foresee the future: consequentialism, longtermism, determinism, and so on.

Beyond that, I strongly believe in the value of an intellectual division of labour. I mean, there are people who are clearly much better placed than philosophers to make predictions, when making predictions is useful! To that end, this is not a piece about labour market trends or the relevance of historic parallels — though I do think there are good arguments that can be made against the idea that ‘AI is going to take all the jobs’ that depend on those kinds of approach.

Rather, all I’m going to do today is make a simple argument drawing on some non-controversial claims about some ordinary concepts. Then, I’ll end by briefly discussing what I see as a more general flaw in much current writing and discussion about AI.

I’ll begin by admitting that my strong assumption is that most people who push or buy the idea that ‘AI is going to take all the jobs’ haven’t thought much about what ‘jobs’ are, in a fundamental sense. Or, indeed, about the more fundamental concept of ‘work’. I’ll talk below about the relation between jobs and work. But one very simple thing that the ‘AI is going to take all the jobs’ people seem at risk of forgetting is that work isn’t just something human beings do to earn money. Though, of course, that is a key reason most of us do indeed work.

Work — or the kinds of work that most of us want to do, anyway — also offers a sense of purpose. Working brings fulfilment and achievement. Again, this doesn’t mean that all work always brings these things, or that everyone manages to find work that does this for them. Indeed, it seems right to feel sad when someone fails to find such work. We feel that they are missing out. That, regardless of their particular skills and interests, there probably is such work out there for them.

We feel sad about such people, I think, mainly because fulfilment and achievement are basic fundamental goods. What I mean by this is that fulfilment and achievement are things that are objectively and irreducibly good for us, as humans. Of course, there are many other ways to find fulfilment and achievement beyond working! But work is perhaps the standard route to these things, for most people. It’s certainly an ordinary and easy route, for many of us.

Moreover, it seems clear that working resonates with something in our nature. It resonates, that is, with being the kind of thing that we are, as human beings. And this resonance suggests that the value of work may go beyond the ways in which working is instrumentally valuable for us.

We humans have the distinctive capacities to reason, to act of our own volition, to create, to innovate, and to acknowledge and take pleasure and pride in these things. And work, of so many kinds, enables so many people to do these things, at a complex level, on a daily basis. And to get better at them. This helps to explain why some philosophers list work, itself, as one of those basic fundamental goods.

None of what I’ve said so far is controversial. And, for current purposes, it offers us a strong story about why people in all cultures and times have worked. An example of this, which I often think about, is how even in prisons people find ways to trade with each other: they exchange skills and goods, swapping jokes for cigarettes, and giving social advice in return for help filling in forms. I bet this happens in the most brutal labour camps, too, when it is possible. This simple example helps me to conclude that it’s almost incoherent to think that humankind could ever be totally jobless.

All that said, we can and should debate what counts as ‘work’, and relatedly what counts as a ‘job’. People often disagree, for instance, about whether taking care of your kids or your aging parents counts as either of these things. And there are overlapping debates about whether the moral status and relevance of certain kinds of activities affects the extent to which they count as ‘work’ or ‘jobs’. You can see some of this play out when people use the term ‘sex worker’, for instance. That said, broadly, my take is that the use of this term is generally motivated more by a kind of relativistic virtue-signalling, than a desire to comment on what counts as ‘work’.

For now, however, let’s agree on a very simple and overly reductive descriptive distinction, on which ‘work’ includes all of those types of activity above, but the term ‘job’ is reserved for types of 'work’ which are recompensed.

It’s worth noting that even on this reductive distinction, the prison examples do count as ‘job-type work’ — whereas the family caregiving examples generally do not — because it’s not only money per se that counts as recompense. And, of course, recompense is valuable to us in multiple ways, too. I mean, sure, being rewarded for our work enables us to support ourselves and our families, and to access the goods and services we prefer. But being paid also represents respect shown for skills used and commitment given, and relatedly helps to confer status.

When you think about these standard concepts in this deeper (but very ordinary!) sense, then the idea that AI will ‘take all of the jobs’ only really makes sense in some sci-fi world in which all the humans have been locked in pods or uploaded to the cloud. And at least in the latter situation — if we halt reality and take such a crazy notion as possible! — then jokes and social advice could, of course, still be exchanged.

Okay, by this point, the ‘AI is going to take all the jobs’ people are no doubt dying to tell me that they don’t really mean ‘all the jobs’! That instead, they mean ‘the current jobs’ (at which point I refer them to my friends the economic historians). Or they mean ‘the good jobs’ (at which point I do the same, while also telling them to be more pluralistic). But regardless, at least I’d have got them to stop talking about ‘all the jobs’. This is a crucial first step towards sanity!

The bigger point I want to end by making, however, pertains to the deficiency of good conceptual thinking that I see, more generally, in writing about AI. I see this particularly in writing about AI that hits the headlines by making these over-the-top claims about what the future holds. My favourite example of this is not ‘work’ but ‘scarcity’.

I’ve argued here previously that an end to scarcity — and again, I’ll halt reality and accept that such a thing is possible, even though actually thinking it through will make you laugh — would not rid us of our need for property systems that are productive and allocative. In other words, ‘abundance’ wouldn’t undermine the core comparative strengths of private-property systems. No matter how many trees there are, I want that one! No matter how many cakes there are, I want that one! And no matter how many cakes there are, we’re going to need to keep producing them for us all to get cake!

Now, you can read my previous piece to find the clever complex arguments that back up these shouty claims, if you want. But you really don’t need to! This is because it’s all incredibly obvious, if you just stop and think about it. Same with the jobs thing. And, of course, the two interrelate.

So why do people fall for this stuff? I mean, I see smart people falling for it, day after day, at the moment. Well, again, I’d rather leave such matters to the psychologists, and get back to doing my philosophy. But the best analysis I can offer is the following, which I said in a recent podcast episode:

“I think a large part of this is you don’t really get experts in their particular domains writing about AI. Instead, you get ‘the AI expert’, and they want to reinvent the wheel. You see this when they write about economics, or when they write about philosophy. You talk to an AI person and suddenly they’re like, “I’ve just discovered this thing!” And it turns out they’re talking about, like, supply and demand. And you’re like, oh my God.”

Start with the ordinary concepts! Don’t reinvent the wheel! Whether the rest falls into place is a matter for the clairvoyants..

Thanks to GPT for the picture.

I want to share with you a quick argument I made during a recent episode of The Street Porter and The Philosopher. It’s a classic argument about the tension between liberalism and pacifism, though I think it’s under-represented outside of Philosophy World. It’s also an argument that bothers me a lot. I am a liberal! I want to be a pacifist, too! But can I?

“There is this classic objection to pacifism if you’re a liberal — or at least there is this pretty strong argument that suggests that pacifism and liberalism are deeply in conflict. That it might even be incoherent to be a pacifist if you’re a liberal.

[…] there are various arguments [to this end]. There are some weak points around things like free-riding objections, not holding your part in the bargain.

I think the strongest argument, though, that being a liberal pacifist is incoherent, says something like, look, if you’re a liberal, then you buy at least into some kind of justification for the limited state. You think that it’s not just that, within the state, you have the right to defend yourself, but also that you have some rights and obligations around collective protection. To the extent that if somebody comes and attacks you in the street, you can expect that other people should come and help you. You’ve got some kind of right to push back against that person. You might even expect that they’d be punished. There are laws about this stuff, and these laws are enforced.

But then, all of a sudden, as soon as a whole load of people from some other nation come and attack you, well, you’re not allowed to respond, and you’re not allowed to preemptively push them away. This seems like, in terms of the liberal’s commitment to these collective rights and obligations around protection, that pacifism — if pacifism, in its absolute form at least, is that no wars are justified, that even we have problems with enforcement, we have problems with any kind of aggression — this just seems like, well, if you’re an anarchist, fine.

But for the liberal? Can a liberal be a pacifist?”

Here it is in video form..

Thanks to GPT for the picture.

In the summer, the people of DC and VA delight in squashing spotted lanternflies. A typical example of this phenomenon involves an adult human expressing disgust towards one of these little bugs, before jumping on it, often while laughing and feeling some degree of pride.

A recent local news article begins “It's time to kill spotted lanternflies nymphs again.” The DC Urban Forestry Division website advises “using a portable vacuum cleaner to suck them off the plant” because the lanternflies “typically jump at any disturbance of the plant, which makes them difficult to smash by hand”.

Of the perhaps 30 people around here whom I’ve asked about this matter, only one has fully agreed with me that the practice of stamping on lanternflies is morally horrible. That said, several did express their concern at the ‘taking delight’ element.

Now, at this point, if you know about the lanternflies, you’re probably getting annoyed by the fact that I haven’t explained that they’re an ‘invasive species’. And yes, I could go into details about how, apparently, the lanternflies have very few local non-human predators, and how, apparently, they have the potential to cause great damage to local crops and other plants.

That said, it’s notable that the Urban Forestry Division page I referred to above attempts to promote calm by stating that:

“Spotted lanternflies do not bite or sting, and they cannot damage your house or other structures. They have not been found to cause significant damage to healthy landscape plants. Their sheer numbers may become a nuisance and their honeydew excretions may lead to the growth of sooty mold on plants and horizontal surfaces underneath the trees that the nymphs and adults are feeding on.”

I’m sure you can point me to much stronger claims about the risks the lanternflies pose! But I’m not particularly interested in those claims, for now.

I’m also not particularly interested, for now, in trying to persuade you that it’s morally horrible when people take delight in killing living things. I’ll just leave my sadness at that, hanging here — my sadness at this serious gap between the ways some of us conceive the world — in the hope it makes you reconsider, if you are one of those people. I have spoken before about how I believe and hope that the way we humans currently treat insects is something that our descendants will look back on in horror. But I’ll set all that to one side, for now.

Rather, I’m going to offer you one simple argument in favour of pausing before you stamp on a lanternfly, this summer.

This argument hinges on the idea that every single living thing has some moral value. The idea that, just by being alive, a thing gains some kind of moral specialness: that it becomes, in some sense, a matter for our concern; something towards which there are ways in which we should and shouldn’t behave. Indeed, that being alive is essential to what such a thing is. And that this is of extreme relevance to us humans, as the kinds of things that are not only alive, but are able to deliberate on — and understand something of — the significance of being alive.

Of course, if being alive is essential to some things in the world, and not to others, then this means that when I said that these ‘living’ things “become a matter for our concern” and “gain some kind of moral specialness”, I was speaking loosely. If being alive is essential to these things, then when ‘they’ are not alive, ‘they’ are not such things!

Okay, if it were possible for something that was un-alive to be alive, then that could make it the kind of thing that did ‘gain’ and ‘become’ in these ways. And some people spend a lot of time thinking about the relevance of such ideas to foetuses, and even AI. But lanternflies, at least in their ‘nymph’ and fully-grown stages, are unequivocally alive, to the extent that I don’t need to persuade you of this. I’ve written here before about how hard it is to define ‘being alive’. But if the lanternflies that you will squash this summer are not alive, then we must seriously reconsider the ways in which we ordinarily use the term!

Now, I’ve no idea what it is like to be alive, as a lanternfly. I don’t know whether being a lanternfly involves having an internal world, feeling pain, feeling sadness. I bet there are entomologists who have strong views about these matters. But whatever these entomologists told me about this, it would not weaken my belief that it is wrong to stamp on the lanternflies.

This is partly because I don’t think that being an expert in insects makes you an expert in what it is like to be an insect. And it’s partly because I don’t think that any human could ever get anywhere close to being an expert in what it is like to be an insect — never mind what it is like to be a particular insect! Again, however, all I want to do today is make you pause before you unthinkingly kill a particular instance of the particular insect that is the spotted lanternfly.

Think, first, of the difference between the lanternfly and a tiny pebble of the same size. Okay, perhaps the pebble you are thinking of is more beautiful than the lanternfly. Perhaps you think it damages my case that the lanternflies are generally considered ugly! As it happens, I think that the lanternflies in their nymph stage are very cool-looking. But I don’t care about beauty, here! I mean, good luck trying to persuade me that how good you look gives you more moral status than me. At best, you will be making a category error. And arguing that people with physical disabilities look ‘less good’ in some important way than people without such disabilities, will not, and should not, get you far.

Think, instead, about the fact that this little thing moves. But don’t tell me why it does! I don’t care, for now, about whether the lanternfly moves because God imbued it with powers, or because the laws of nature are acting on it in such ways as to deny it, and any of us, the capacity for free agency. Instead, simply think about the fact that it moves.

In the nymph stage, the lanternfly hops around awkwardly. Pushing back on those teeny spindly legs, like a little robot. Except, also, that it eats! Unlike a robot, the lanternfly eats and rests, and it needs to do these things. It also mates. Now, who knows if the lanternfly finds pleasure in mating, but again I don’t care about that for now. (Sorry, lanternflies! And sorry, entomologists, you’re not needed here.)

Think also about how each lanternfly is a particular example of this kind of thing. That each lanternfly is a particular example of the kind of thing that lives, and moves, and eats, and mates. It’s that one! It’s the one you saw earlier, across the table, by the window! Hopping along, in its funny little way, on that particular set of spotted spindly legs.

Now, sometimes people want to persuade you that living things gain moral value when they are in their multitudes. That you shouldn’t torture the trillion shrimp, or however the EA argument goes, because of all the moral value that these shrimp accrue together. But if it is wrong to torture the trillion, then it is wrong to torture the one, or your maths depends on taking the valuable property (whether it is being sentient, or conscious, or intelligent, or alive, or whatever) away from the creature, and putting it (this non-extractable property) into some kind of ‘aggregation pot’. But I’ll save expanding on this anti-consequentialist argument for another day.

For now, the sole point I want to make is that you don’t need to know about the intelligence, or consciousness, or sentience, of a particular living thing to afford it some small amount of moral consideration. To determine such a thing worthy of the kind of consideration that you would never afford to a pebble or a bicycle. To pause when you see the spotted lanternfly this summer, and ask, should I? Must I?

Of course, perhaps you will come to the conclusion that the ‘invasive species argument’ overrides your concern for the particular lanternfly under consideration. And I will disagree with you about that, then. But at least you will have considered the particular lanternfly, as a living thing. Different from you, but worthy nonetheless of some of your time and concern.

Thanks to GPT for the picture.

This is the seventieth in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end. That said, this feels like a good time to shake things up. So, from now on, you can expect a ‘5 top things’ piece only once a month. The other weeks, I’ll publish a short philosophy essay — typically between 500-1000 words — addressing some question I’ve been thinking hard about.

One reason for this change is that I think there’s clear space in the world for more short-form philosophy. Another is that, for me, the opportunity cost of writing non-philosophy is writing philosophy, and I take this seriously.

1) I spent last week in Austria, most of it at an excellent conference on fin de siècle Vienna. In preparation, among other things, I read some of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. I started with a short section near the beginning entitled Ethical Feelings in Dreams. The title of this section concerned me from the off, but I’ll skip that for now, and get on to the rest of it.

In this section, Freud takes out his frustration on two groups of people. First, a group of influential thinkers who, broadly, hold positions that cohere around the idea that we are ‘ethically indifferent’ in our dreams. And second, a group of influential thinkers who, broadly, hold positions that cohere around the idea that we each remain bound in our dreams by our real-world ‘ethical character’.

Freud wants us to believe that the positions held by these two groups of thinkers are diametrically opposed. This is even though he points out ways in which these two sets of positions overlap — and even though it’s easy to think of other positions that would oppose members of these two sets of positions in a much closer to ‘opposite’ sense! That said, I should admit at this point that I do get overly frustrated when people talk loosely about words or concepts or positions as being ‘opposite’! This happens a lot, for instance, when I read literary criticism.

Anyway, Freud’s frustration at these two groups lies partly in relation to their approaches to assigning responsibility for immoral behaviour within dream-world, and partly — relatedly — to their approaches to addressing the source of this immorality. He finds most of these people’s takes on these matters inconsistent down various lines, regardless of their group memberships. Nonetheless, he proceeds towards some conclusions of his own largely by synthesising his favourite bits of these people’s views!

One of the conclusions that Freud reaches is that the “involuntary” immoral ideas that arise in our dreams “are the opposite [my emphasis] of our normal feelings”. Argh. Okay, in context, Freud seems really to be signalling here the quite simple view that, in dream-world, we do things that we wouldn’t do in the real world. But as soon as you start trying to think about this in terms of opposites, then it becomes extremely confusing!

I mean, say you begin with the seemingly straightforward example of having the real-world principle that you should only ever intentionally kill a cat in self-defence. Now, this clearly means that in dream-world you would find yourself doing…. what!? This challenge becomes even harder if you don’t depend on the notion of principles…

Okay, okay, maybe you want to remind me that this book is often treated as a great work of literature, and that demanding greater precision — particularly of the kind we analytic philosophers aim for and admire — is inappropriate. Well, I’ll add that Freud is trying pretty hard in this section to persuade us of some general truths about humankind! As implied above, I struggle with his general ‘picking out the bits of the consensuses and synthesising’ approach to this. But I also struggle with the idea that there are general truths of such kinds about this sort of thing.

All that said, one of the claims that Freud chronicles in this section is Hildebrandt’s claim that while a great deal of odd stuff doesn’t shock us in our dreams, nonetheless “we never lose our ethical sense”. In other words, you don’t bat an eyelid at the flying giraffe, do you? And you don’t even notice the weirdness of time! Whereas bad things still feel bad, and good things feel good. I enjoyed thinking about this claim.

2) Another thing I enjoyed thinking about this week is how Freud’s conception of the unconscious relates to the mind-body problem. This was neat timing, because I released the latest episode of my philosophy podcast, Working Definition, while I was in Vienna — and it’s an episode on consciousness! It features my old friend Tim Crane, who is easily one of the best philosophers I know. Here’s an extract:

TIM: […] But I think the temporal way of which things exist in consciousness is very important. That will be my starting point.

REBECCA: So, could we conclude from this, then, that if you’re not the kind of thing that persists across time, you can’t be conscious?

TIM: Yeah, I think not just persisting across time, I think it’s the way you occupy time. So, I mean, I persist across time. But there’s a difference between me and my life, I think. Whereas, I think I exist for each moment of my existence. I’m wholly — as Hugh Mellor said — I’m wholly present. I’m totally there for each moment of my existence. It’s not a part of me that’s here, and part of me that’s somewhere else. I know some philosophers are going to disagree with that. But this is my starting point.

REBECCA: You’re wholly there in a bodily sense, but —

TIM: I’m wholly there. This is the whole.

REBECCA: But I mean you’ve just told us that you’re not always aware in the internal sense of awareness across time.

TIM: That’s true. That’s true. Sometimes, I’m completely out of it. [laughter] But I exist in my entirety at each moment of my existence. Whereas an event, my life, does not exist in its entirety at each moment of its existence. It’s rather spread across time, which has temporal parts. So, I like that distinction. And I think that consciousness is primarily predicated of events and processes. Primarily.

So that’s where I would start with the category of event and process. But then the question you asked is, well, what kind of property is it? I want to say it’s a property rather than a capacity. When we talk about capacities here, we’re talking about things like the capacity for vision, or the capacity to feel sensation, or the capacity to reason, or something like this. Whereas, there isn’t a capacity to be conscious. That’s the wrong classification.

REBECCA: I think if you’re thinking about capacities, it seems a little more, to me, like it’s the thing that obtains, when the capacity is in operation. Or something like that.

TIM: That’s right. Yeah, exactly. Good. That’s a good way to put it. Yeah, I’d say like the exercise of the capacity. So, your capacity, for example, to feel bodily sensation, to feel pain, or pressure, or warmth, and things in your body. You exercise that capacity, and the exercises of that capacity are conscious events. That’s my ontology, so to speak.

While we’re on podcasts, here’s a link to the latest episode of The Street Porter and the Philosopher. This is the podcast that and I run through our joint substack, . This latest episode features my friend Tyler Cowen and me debating liberal attitudes to war and peace, through a focus on Benjamin Britten. Here’s an extract:

LOWE: […] I think the strongest argument, though, that being a liberal pacifist is incoherent, says something like, look, if you’re a liberal, then you buy at least into some kind of justification for the limited state. You think that it’s not just that, within the state, you have the right to defend yourself, but also that you have some rights and obligations around collective protection. To the extent that if somebody comes and attacks you in the street, you can expect that other people should come and help you. You’ve got some kind of right to push back against that person. You might even expect that they’d be punished. There are laws about this stuff, and these laws are enforced.

But then, all of a sudden, as soon as a whole load of people from some other nation come and attack you, well, you’re not allowed to respond, and you’re not allowed to preemptively push them away. This seems like, in terms of the liberals’ commitment to these collective rights and obligations around protection, that pacifism—if pacifism, in its absolute form at least, is that no wars are justified, that even we have problems with enforcement, we have problems with any kind of aggression—this just seems like, well, if you’re an anarchist, fine. But for the liberal? Can a liberal be a pacifist?

COWEN: I often make an argument like that to Bryan Caplan. I don’t think he ever has a very good response, but I think the problems run even deeper than that. So someone can say World War II, that’s a single, quite extreme example. There was, of course, self-defense. The war itself maximized liberty in the longer run. Those are all relevant and, I think, correct points.

But the longer-term historical fact that my polity, United States, and your polity, Great Britain or the United Kingdom, they were built by force. And to get these nation states large enough to create free-trade areas for prosperity to flourish took a lot of initiated violence to begin with. And it’s not clear there was any other path besides that initiated violence.

3) Regular readers might remember my obsession with Solvej Balle’s ongoing On the Calculation of Volume series of novels. I’ve written about these novels often here, including a recent long piece about Balle’s interaction, throughout the series, with philosophical theories about time.

I just finished reading the fourth of these novels. Unlike the previous three, each of which I read the day I got hold of it, I read this fourth book over a period of some weeks. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean I liked it less; often, I force myself to slow down while reading the books I like the most. But, in many ways, I did like it the least of the set, so far.

One small thing that annoyed me about this book was its occasional grammatical mistakes. I don’t remember this as a feature of the previous three. A bigger thing, however, is that I am increasingly convinced that Balle does not have a coherent grasp on the way in which time works in the world she has created — or the most important implications of Balle Time for the inhabitants of Balle World.

I’m afraid I can’t back up this big claim without risking wrecking the books for those who haven’t read them yet. (Though you can probably work out what I’m getting at here if you’ve read the first four books and my recent long piece!) And I hope very much that reading the next three instalments will help me to change my mind.

Nonetheless, this fourth book is a beautiful creation. And just like the previous three, it is easily one of the best novels I’ve read in recent years.

4) This fantastic recent WSJ piece about a prepper community “clustered on a former munitions depot” in South Dakota made me think of J.G. Ballard. I’m all for finding ways to live forever. And wherever I am in the world, I make sure to work out what I’d try to do to survive if a nuclear war began. But it doesn’t really surprise me that people whose shared plans include hoarding all the machine guns sometimes end up beating each other up in advance of what they’ve been preparing for!

5) I saw many great paintings in Vienna, and heard some wonderful music. But the art object that surprised me the most was the Otto Wagner Kirche, up a hill in the grounds of a psychiatric hospital. Of course, this church is not only an art object; it’s a working place of worship. But I found it, in so many ways, aesthetically unexpected.

Its extreme brightness, clarity, and cleanness. Its golden dome, geometric animals, and swimming-pool-tile ceiling. Of course, all churches are different from each other, and all churches have certain features in common. Yet I’ve seen so many of them — including others in modernist styles — and this one felt unusually new.

REBECCA: Hi, I’m Rebecca Lowe and welcome to Working Definition, the new philosophy podcast in which I talk with different philosophical guests about different philosophical concepts with the aim of reaching a rough, accessible, but rigorous working definition.

Today I’m joined by Tim Crane. Tim is Professor of Philosophy at the Central European University in Vienna, where he’s also Pro-Rector for Foresight and Analysis — a philosophical title if you’ve ever heard one. He was previously at Cambridge and UCL. He’s written lots of good books, including The Mechanical Mind, Objects of Thought, The Meaning of Belief.

He’s also weighed in philosophically on even more important matters, like what Jaffa Cakes are and the aesthetic value of wine. But today we’re going to be talking about consciousness. Thanks so much for joining me, Tim.

TIM: Thanks Rebecca. Thanks for the invitation.

REBECCA: You’re very welcome. Okay, so an obvious place to start would be with Thomas Nagel. So, Thomas Nagel tells us, or people think that Thomas Nagel tells us, that consciousness is having a what-it’s-like-to-be-ness.

But at the beginning of that famous bat paper, he explicitly says things that are a bit more like — I wrote a couple of these down — he says, “that an organism has conscious experience at all, means basically that there is something it is like to be that organism”. So, that’s something about conscious experience, rather than consciousness.

He also says, “fundamentally, an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it’s like to be that organism, something it’s like for the organism.” So, there we have conscious mental states.

So, my opening question to you is do you think that consciousness is a type of experience? Is it a mental state? Is it a property of a mental state? Is it one of these things? All of these things? None of these things?

TIM: You’ve given me the answer already. [laughter] Consciousness is a property of certain mental states or mental events or mental processes. We can go into the distinction between those things if you want. But consciousness isn’t a type of experience itself. It’s rather, it’s a characteristic of certain kinds of mental phenomena. I would say ‘conscious experience’, that phrase is somewhat pleonastic, because I don’t think there are unconscious experiences. There are unconscious effects on experiences, but not unconscious experiences themselves.

REBECCA: I’m very glad to hear you say that because I was thinking about this this week, and I could not think of a non-conscious experience. I mean, people talk about having unconscious experiences. I think that’s parasitic on being conscious. It seems to me like a kind of temporary state of something that’s conscious. I’m not even sure really if you can have an unconscious experience, to be honest. But the idea of a non-conscious experience just seems to me to be absurd.

TIM: Yeah, I think I agree with that. I think there are what psychologists like to talk about “things below the level of consciousness”, by which they mean things that actually impact on your consciousness, but you don’t register. So, subliminal influences, effects of what they call ‘priming’ in psychological experiments. These are sometimes called ‘subconscious effects on experience’, but I still regard this as part of the total experience.

REBECCA: Also, that seems like that would be the effect on the thing, rather than the thing itself, perhaps.

TIM: Yeah, or there could be aspects of experience which are conscious, but you don’t notice them. I think we need to have that distinction. It can’t be that everything that’s in consciousness is something that you’re currently aware of or noticing.

REBECCA: Okay, that sounds right. What about mental states then? So what is an example of a non-conscious mental state?

TIM: Well, my paradigm example is perhaps one of the paradigm examples of a mental state, which is belief. Believing something, in the sense of holding something to be true. So, believing that the world is round, or believing that you are now currently wearing glasses or something like this. Sometimes people distinguish between conscious belief and unconscious belief. I don’t think this is a useful way to talk. I know what they mean.

But I think the characteristic feature of belief is that it persists beyond changes in your consciousness. You don’t stop believing that the earth is round when you fall asleep. You carry on. It’s a persisting state of yours, which you then can bring that state to consciousness. You could become aware of what it is that you believe. But that’s not itself the believing. So I think belief is a paradigm of an unconscious state. But there are also other drives like unconscious desires and motivations, which are needs, which I think are part of our unconscious as well.

REBECCA: So, on the idea of then these beliefs persisting, even when you’re not consciously aware of them, or you’re not thinking on them, I guess one thing you could say then is something like, is that contingent on having been conscious of that thing in the first place? But then I remember, I’m pretty sure I read you — or maybe it was someone else, but I think it’s you — talking about the kinds of things we believe that we haven’t ever deliberated on or thought about.

I think maybe it was even you who gave this example of the president wearing socks. Is that one of your examples, or is that some other philosopher of mind? I forget now.

TIM: I might have picked up this brilliant insightful example from someone else. [laughter]

REBECCA: I think — I read this a long time ago, and I can’t remember. But this is this idea that most people believe that the president wears socks. But they quite clearly haven’t gone around thinking — it wasn’t one day when they were seven years old, and they thought that the president had socks, and then it’s contingent on that.

TIM: Exactly. Yeah, so I think our concept of belief allows there to be beliefs which you are born with, for example — that isn’t one of them — or beliefs which are consequences of other things that you believe, or things that you will draw out as a consequence. This is more about belief than about consciousness, but I think we need to have all those distinctions in mind.

But we don’t need to think that for every case where you think that it’s true that you believe something, that that thing has already always been in your mind, or there from birth, or something like this.

REBECCA: Yeah, that sounds right. So, I think we’re getting some kind of picture of consciousness then as not just being to do with awareness. It seems like it’s something bigger than that. Is that right?

TIM: Well, awareness means different things to us. [laughter] I think this is where it’s hard to pin down. So, I think because — I think everyone’s familiar with the phenomenon that — so, take your visual experience now.

There are parts of your visual experience, things in your visual experience, things that you are experiencing, which you’re not paying attention to. And in that sense, you’re not aware of them. So at the moment, I’m aware of the screen, I’m aware of you. And I’m not aware of the window next to me, but I can turn my attention to it if I can. But it’s certainly in some sense in my consciousness.

So, I think we need a distinction between those two things: what you’re currently paying attention to, and what’s in consciousness, so to speak. That applies to the case of vision, I think. But it curiously doesn’t apply to the case of thought. I don’t think we have a distinction. In the case of thought, thinking is pure attention, so to speak.

REBECCA: So you couldn’t have non-conscious thought, or something like that.

TIM: I don’t mind people talking about non-conscious thought. But I think the paradigm where we’re talking about thinking is conscious episodes of thinking, or a process of running something through in your mind consciously. In that case, when you’re running something through in your mind consciously in that way, there’s no distinction between being conscious and attending to it. You’re simply attending. That’s all I mean.

REBECCA: That makes sense. So if we try to think about what kind of ballpark of kind of thing consciousness is, you said it’s a property of certain mental states. You also talked about, you used this phrase “in my consciousness”, which seems like it’s a particular part of you in some sense.

What kind of ballpark of a kind of thing is it? I mean, is it a state of affairs? Is it a capacity? Is it a property? It could be more than these things, and maybe conscious is different from consciousness. I’m very aware you could say, you know, “a conscious cat” or “a conscious Rebecca”. That seems like you’re talking about a property. When we talk about consciousness, that seems a little different. Then we get these distinctions between, like, ‘having consciousness’ or ‘being conscious’, ‘being a subject of experience’. Some of these seem quite active; some of them seem quite passive.

Is there some sort of ballpark of type of thing that’s useful to think of these as fitting under?

TIM: Yeah, I think so. I said “in my consciousness”, but that was a sort of metaphorical way of talking or an image. Rather like the phrase, ‘the stream of consciousness’, which is associated with —

REBECCA: Virginia Woolf —

TIM: Well, yes, in literature, then but in — William James used it. But actually, it was also used by Alexander Bain, the Scottish philosopher, earlier than James. And G. H. Lewes, who was George Eliot’s husband, as well as other things.

So, they use this phrase, ‘the stream of consciousness’. I think that what that connotes is a certain kind of temporal existence. That your consciousness is essentially something that develops across time. And it unfolds over time, as some writers say. One of my former students, Matthew Soteriou, he talks about how things unfold over time. And I like that image. And that suggests that consciousness is primarily a property of things which are changing, which have a kind of temporal dynamic.

And I think there it’s useful to think in terms of events and processes, rather than states. Actually, states are static in their very nature. State is something static. It’s something that persists and doesn’t change. Whereas, an event is something which unfolds over time. And a process is — a process may be something different, or it may just be a long event. And this depends on how you think about it.

But I think the temporal way of which things exist in consciousness is very important. That will be my starting point.

REBECCA: So, could we conclude from this, then, that if you’re not the kind of thing that persists across time, you can’t be conscious?

TIM: Yeah, I think not just persisting across time, I think it’s the way you occupy time. So, I mean, I persist across time. But there’s a difference between me and my life, I think. Whereas, I think I exist for each moment of my existence. I’m wholly — as Hugh Mellor said — I’m wholly present. I’m totally there for each moment of my existence. It’s not a part of me that’s here, and part of me that’s somewhere else. I know some philosophers are going to disagree with that. But this is my starting point.

REBECCA: You’re wholly there in a bodily sense, but —

TIM: I’m wholly there. This is the whole.

REBECCA: But I mean you’ve just told us that you’re not always aware in the internal sense of awareness across time.

TIM: That’s true. That’s true. Sometimes, I’m completely out of it. [laughter] But I exist in my entirety at each moment of my existence. Whereas an event, my life, does not exist in its entirety at each moment of its existence. It’s rather spread across time, which has temporal parts. So, I like that distinction. And I think that consciousness is primarily predicated of events and processes. Primarily.

So that’s where I would start with the category of event and process. But then the question you asked is, well, what kind of property is it? I want to say it’s a property rather than a capacity. When we talk about capacities here, we’re talking about things like the capacity for vision, or the capacity to feel sensation, or the capacity to reason, or something like this. Whereas, there isn’t a capacity to be conscious. That’s the wrong classification.

REBECCA: I think if you’re thinking about capacities, it seems a little more, to me, like it’s the thing that obtains, when the capacity is in operation. Or something like that.

TIM: That’s right. Yeah, exactly. Good. That’s a good way to put it. Yeah, I’d say like the exercise of the capacity. So, your capacity, for example, to feel bodily sensation, to feel pain, or pressure, or warmth, and things in your body. You exercise that capacity, and the exercises of that capacity are conscious events. That’s my ontology, so to speak.

REBECCA: That sounds good to me. I think that may also help us with when we think about — and I want to get onto this in a moment — the kinds of things that could be conscious.

It seems to me some kinds of things — you could say something like, maybe before humans evolved to be conscious, they had the potential to be conscious. Or, maybe you could say when we’re asleep, we still have the capacity, but we don’t exercise it. So, you could do a kind of potentiality thing, which could enable you to talk about both when it is that this thing doesn’t appear to be occurring. But also the kind of thing that might experience these kinds of events or processes.

Okay, so just quickly, we seem to be converging on something like — you said it’s predicated of events or processes. What would be the simplest starting point that we’ve got to at this point, do you think?

TIM: So, well, let’s step back, and say — because Nagel asks a different question, which is “what is it like to be a bat?” So there, he’s talking about a bat is a being which has a certain kind of consciousness. So it’s a conscious being, he’s assuming that.

REBECCA: Yes, so he is talking about organisms. He’s pretty clear about that from the beginning, isn’t he?

TIM: Yeah. So what is it then for an organism to be conscious? I would say it’s nothing more than the organism to have capacities which result in conscious episodes, or conscious exercises of them, like sensation or perception or conscious thinking. Now, that’s not a definition of consciousness, but neither is Nagel’s. So I’m just saying that’s the relationship between what people call ‘the creature consciousness’ — the consciousness of a being — and the consciousness of its states. I think the second thing explains the first.

REBECCA: Yes, that makes sense. So, we’ve got something like ‘consciousness’ is having — or ‘to be conscious’ is having capacities that result in certain kinds of episodes. I don’t think we can say ‘that result in conscious episodes’ because then we are kind of circular. But —

TIM: That’s fine for me, because I don’t think this is something you can define. I think it’s just you’re trying to locate it within a certain structure.

REBECCA: Yes, that makes sense. We’re thinking about the kind of thing it is, rather than what it is, at this stage.

TIM: Yeah.

REBECCA: So, I want go back to your point about the relation between consciousness and persisting across time. I think this can bring us quite neatly on to the kinds of things that can be conscious, that can have consciousness, that can have these states that have the property of consciousness.

TIM: Yeah.

REBECCA: So, an obvious kind of comparand with the human being at the moment is AI. It’s very interesting, for the first time in at least recorded human history, or currently known human history, we have a thing that isn’t a human being that you can talk with. And there’s a lot of loose talk about it being conscious. Part of this is a function of just different conceptions of consciousness.

But one thing I’ve been thinking about a little is the relevance of whether AI is a particular thing. So, it seems to me like the obvious starting point for considering whether AI is conscious — at least if you’re comparing it with us — is you can say, look, it’s not alive. You come into some problems then because it’s quite hard to say what living is, what counts as alive. My belief is I don’t think that there’s anybody who thinks that AI is alive. Or we have to completely change the concept of alive: the concept it’s picking out is not the thing that those people are talking about.

But I do think — I’ve made this argument a few times — I haven’t really thought it through 100 per cent, so I’d be interested to know what you think about it, because it does touch on this point that you already made. I feel like an easier way of getting into whether AI could be conscious is to say “particular things are conscious”. So, if particular things are conscious, then it might be the case that this can tell us something about living things, but let’s just start with the particular thing. And I don’t think AI is particular.

I’m not really sure what it would be for AI to be particular. David Chalmers has tried to divide it up into: are we talking about instances? are we talking about conversations? are we talking about models? I’m not convinced that AI is the kind of thing that persists across time in having some identity. And I can’t really think what it would be to be conscious if you didn’t have that.

So, I think what I’m asking is: is it easier to go in down this kind of ‘particular’ route, or is it easier to go in down this ‘is it alive?’ route?

TIM: Yeah, it’s very interesting. There are many things here.

REBECCA: Or maybe there’s some other way.

TIM: There is another way, I think. But on the particular thing, it’s quite interesting, because — I don’t know if you know Spike Jonze’s film, Her?

REBECCA: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I saw that.

TIM: Where the Joaquin Phoenix character falls in love with Scarlett Johansson, who is an AI. And this was way before — this is 10 years before ChatGPT occurred. It was very interesting. And there’s a moment, I think, at the end of the film when he gets terribly upset because it turns out that she’s falling in love and having these correspondences with 6,000 other people.

REBECCA: Yeah, exactly.

TIM: And somehow this completely undermines his feeling that he had something very special. And I’m sure that if Richard Dawkins discovered that his Claudia was also having conversations with other eminent scientists, telling them how brilliant they were, then this would upset him too. [laughter]

Unless, of course, you take your line where you say, well, actually, this isn’t a particular thing. So you’re confused to think that you could fall in love with it. You can fall in love with it like you could fall in love with a piece of music, or something which has many manifestations and many variations.

REBECCA: Or justice. You might say you love justice.

TIM: Yeah, or something like that. So, you could think of it that way. And I think that’s a good point.

But I would like to go back to less controversial assumptions. And also, the thing about life is — I think it’s very, very important that we’re alive. [laughter] It’s incredibly important to our being. The nature of our being. Our dasein. Our whole being toward death, and everything that we have that makes us distinctive.

But I think I want to separate out the idea that AI as it actually is — that is to say, real existing AI, like real existing socialism, right? [laughter] Real existing AI. Whether that is conscious or can think. From the idea of whether any artificially created thing could be conscious or think.

So, let’s just focus on the first thing. Because I think it’s hard to — people have tried to do this. Anil Seth, Ned Block, and others —

REBECCA: Yeah, I read some of those.

TIM: They’ve tried to argue for this essentially organic nature of consciousness. And I totally understand that and sympathize with it. I don’t know that you’re going to get a kind of apodictic argument for this, for that conclusion. Because you have to rule out the idea that there could be something which was artificially created, which was conscious or thinking, or something like that. And I don’t know how to rule out that idea.

But I think we can easily rule out the idea that a computer is such a thing. And there’s absolutely no reason to think these things are conscious. The reason people think they’re conscious is simply because they have verbal output. [laughter] That’s all they have. They just have verbal output, that’s all. And no one thinks that verbal output should be sufficient for consciousness.

And given that we know how these things work — and there’s a bit of a myth about this that I want to get on to in a minute. But given that we know how these machines work. We know they’re computers. These are computers designed to do a particular task. They are not designed to produce — coming back to our earlier definition — they’re not designed to produce experiences or episodes which have the property of consciousness. So, any consciousness that came out would have to come out just as a result of some non-designed feature of these machines. And there’s absolutely no reason to think that there are such features.

So, the mere presence of this text, and we know how the text is produced. They like to say — both the doomers and the boomers — whatever they are, the boosters? They like to say we don’t know how they work. And then people say, well, we don’t know how the brain works. So how do we know this isn’t a brain? Well, of course, it’s not a brain, right?

We know exactly what it is. It’s a vast number of extremely high-powered chips, connected together, making enormous calculations from enormous amounts of data, at a very, very high speed. That’s what they’re doing. There’s no magic about it. So the idea that somehow this might be consciousness — it seems to me that this is something that people lose any sense of, kind of, the order and priority of ideas, here. You know, this is a computer!

Our brains, on the other hand, are not computers. Our brains are organic parts of our bodies, which have evolved over millions of years, to produce this complexity, and the variety of psychological competences, and the exercises of these competences. None of which there’s any reason to think that an LLM, or any other computer, has.

So, I think it’s an interesting point that you’re making about the particularity. But we don’t really need to start from there. The question we need to ask ourselves is, why does anyone think these things are conscious at all, right? What has led people into this picture?

REBECCA: So, I think the advantage of the particular condition is something like: it’s easier to pick out what things are particular, than it is to pick out what things are alive. Although, like I say, I actually don’t believe that anybody thinks that AI is alive.

But I also think what’s going on in some of these conversations — some of it is probably a kind of smuggled-in physicalism, where they have some kind of thought that consciousness emerges in some sense, and therefore why can’t it emerge? So, you talked about the non-designed feature. They want to say, you know, there was a time back when we were just these zombie things, and then we ate enough bananas and then, you know, this stuff emerged. Which I kind of find crazy.

But I think there’s another thing, where often we’re just talking past each other. And they’re talking about these kinds of functionalist conceptions of consciousness, where what they’re really thinking about are things like: are the outputs similar to the kinds of outputs that the phenomenologically conscious thing puts out? So, they say something like “it puts out the text”. So, your point about verbal capacity not being sufficient for consciousness.

It’s quite hard to think of something that we can have that we could attribute verbal capacity to that isn’t conscious. I mean, maybe you think that about animals. I think characters in novels are an underrated comparison with AI. I mean, characters in novels have conversations. They reason, they do all these things — but we know that’s not actual reasoning. I want all the people who talk about this in relation to the AI stuff to just stick the word ‘zombie’ in front of it. I don’t think they mean ‘reasoning’ in the ordinary sense that we mean ‘reasoning’ — in the sense of reflecting on things, deliberating on things.

So, how much of this is just that they’re actually not talking about the Nagel-type consciousness, the stuff we’ve been talking about, which is contingent on having the capacity for mental states and all this stuff. They just mean, ”hey, it puts out the stuff that these things do”. Now that’s parasitic on it, and that’s problematic for them. But how much is it just a ‘talking past each other problem’, in the AI discussion?

TIM: No, there may be some of that. But it’s also — there are genuine differences of opinion.

I think if you think that verbal output is sufficient for consciousness, then you’re not a functionalist. You’re a kind of behaviorist. The functionalist cares what the internal structure is like. So, I’m a functionalist, and I would say there has to be the internal organization of the kinds of things that we are picking up as conscious things.

So, something like the concept of experience — something like a visual experience, or perceptual experience of some kind. That’s a capacity to register things about the environment, which results in certain episodes. Which are, for reasons I haven’t even tried to explain, which are conscious. Those things are conscious. And some of the upshots of experience are unconscious, some are conscious. I don’t know what that is. But calling them ‘qualia’ is just a word for it, so that’s not an explanation either.

REBECCA: Sure.

TIM: Some people just jump the gun, and say — or beg the question — I’m not entirely sure what the right metaphor is. [laughter] But you know, for example, there’s a well-known paper on AI consciousness, coordinated by a guy called Patrick Butlin. And it’s called The Butlin Report. But it’s got a bunch of very distinguished scientists and philosophers on it. And they start off by assuming not just functionalism — they say that they take as a working hypothesis what they call computational functionalism.

REBECCA: Yes.

TIM: So, computational functionalism doesn’t follow from functionalism. Functionalism is just about the causal structure. It doesn’t say those causal structures are computations. If you think those are computations, and you think that that’s necessary and sufficient for consciousness, which is what they argue — well, they assume, in this paper. Then, of course, it’s game over. [laughter] Because then all you need to do is find the computational architecture and the software, so to speak, that’s running in us. And then put that in a computer, and there’s no obstacle. Of course, you can’t do it. But there’s no obstacle in principle to that.

Whereas, I don’t think we should assume computational functionalism, because I don’t think that we should assume that the causal structure of our minds is computational. Because that’s another whole debate. But I think that’s substantial. I don’t think that’s just people talking past each other.

As for physicalism, I think some people like to think that a conscious AI follows from physicalism. But it clearly doesn’t. Because we’re talking about real existing AI here. We’re not talking about… Here’s what follows from physicalism. If you built something artificial that reproduced every single thing that a human being does artificially, then that thing would be conscious. And, of course, that’s true. And that follows from physicalism.

But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about real existing AI. We’re talking about computers. And they don’t — they’re not interested in how the brain works. They’re not interested in how human psychology works. What they’re trying to do is just get a certain output, in whatever way they can, by throwing as much money and computing power at it. And that’s what they’re interested in.

REBECCA: So, Anil Seth — I read one of his things arguing against the computational functionalists. And he makes this nice point that you can’t divide the brain into software and wetware, so why would you — [laughter] He also makes this nice point about simulating stuff as opposed to doing stuff.

TIM: Yes.

REBECCA: He then goes down the route, which I wasn’t so convinced by, where he says something like, “AI could become sufficiently lifelike”. Which I think maybe falls foul of his simulation objection. But I enjoyed reading that. And yes, the idea that, you know, the kind of functional organization of consciousness is computational, therefore — it seems to me like starting from the wrong place.

TIM: Yeah, it’s a very quick route to the conclusion.

So, yeah, I like Anil Seth’s work. But, I suppose, to give them more of a run for their money, if you wanted to build something that was artificial, that could have a chance of maybe coming up with something like experience or thought or genuine mental representation, then you’d have to give it a body. So I agree with that. I agree with people who say that.

So, start with robots. This is an Andy Clark sort of point. Don’t start with programs, start with robots. And there’s something to be said for that. But that’s not the battle we’re fighting at the moment, because at the moment we’re talking about LLMs, and those are computers, and they’re not robots. So I think we’ve got to knock that one off first, so to speak, before someone comes up with a plausible candidate for a robot consciousness.

REBECCA: I often wonder how you would actually really embody the thing, though. I mean, you can think of this little idea of, you know, putting your laptop on a wheelchair and wheeling it around. But that doesn’t actually make it embodied in the thing. And again, this may just come back to what we think the relation between the mind and the body is. We should probably talk about that.

I think you did say something like, just before, if we could replicate all the things that humans do, and all the things humans are, or something like that, it’d be conscious. So this seems to me either kind of trivially true, because you’re either saying you’re creating a thing that’s conscious, therefore it’s conscious. Or maybe you’re buying into this idea that if we can just replicate the bits and the processes — a bit like the idea that if we just understood absolutely everything there was to know about the brain, therefore we would understand consciousness. It seems like this is kind of correlative.

If we could just, you know, create ‘exact Rebecca’ again — but then that’s just the physical Rebecca. The idea that you can create the mental Rebecca just seems incoherent. And to me, the idea that you could create the thing with all of the processes — unless it’s just the trivial sense — I’m just not convinced, I think, that that would be necessarily conscious.

TIM: Right, so you don’t believe a molecule-for-molecule replica of you would be conscious?

REBECCA: No, I don’t know why I would believe that.

TIM: Okay, I think I do believe that. I think, if you don’t believe that, then you have to believe that there’s something other than the matter out of which you’re made. And I don’t mean something which is a higher-level organizing feature, like an emergent feature, but rather something which is not simply the product of the matter that you’re made out of.

REBECCA: I mean, part of the problem is going to be the particularity thing again. But we don’t have to say it’s Rebecca. We can just say it’s Rebecca’s twin, or something. It’s definitely not going to be me.

TIM: Yeah.

REBECCA: But I don’t think that’s what you’re arguing anyway. Or maybe it is.

TIM: No, I’m not. We could put that to one side. Because after all, there’s another whole debate here, which is probably for another podcast [laughter], which is about whether what matters to us as people is actually particular.

REBECCA: Yeah.

TIM: If you think of the Derek Parfit whole thing, that identity isn’t the important thing, but rather, you know, duplication can duplicate me, in a sense — I can survive as many things. In that sense, the point about the Scarlett Johansson character wouldn’t matter so much to someone like Derek Parfit. [laughter] But maybe that says something more about his psychology.

REBECCA: But you remember the hilarious bit in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, when Nozick talks about love in this sense. And he says something like — I don’t know why more people don’t write about this — he says something like, “if you love this particular person for these particular reasons, why on earth is that not transferable to the other person who just happens to meet all of those?” And, of course, reading it as a human being, like, that’s insane.

TIM: Yep.

REBECCA: But then you think about it a little more, and you do end up coming down to these — and I don’t buy it — but I think it could also be another way into thinking about the AI.

TIM: Yeah, well that touches on another question, which I think is the irreplaceable value of individuals.

REBECCA: Yes.

TIM: So, when I say that a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of you would be conscious, I’m not committing to the idea that you don’t have irreplaceable value.

REBECCA: Yeah, I know you’re not saying that.

TIM: In some ways, it’s a mysterious thing, irreplaceable value. But it’s actually an incredibly important part of our lives as human beings. So, that Nozick thing is absurd.

REBECCA: Yes.

TIM: For that reason. But, yeah — so where have we got to? [laughter]

REBECCA: Surely a lot of that does probably trade on ‘only Rebecca has had Rebecca’s experiences, only Rebecca thinks like Rebecca, has come to Rebecca’s conclusions, has felt these particular things in these particular ways at these particular times’.

TIM: Yeah, I think that’s one of those false or trivial things, isn’t it?

REBECCA: I’m not sure it is —

TIM: Of course only you have had your experiences. Other people could have experiences that are similar to yours.

REBECCA: Yeah, but they wouldn’t be the same.

TIM: They could have thought the same thoughts. They wouldn’t be the same particular experiences.

REBECCA: No, that’s right.

TIM: But then only you can have those. And I’m not so sure about that —

REBECCA: But it seems like that can’t be replicated in two senses. One is, can the thing that we’ve created have experiences? And two, well, yes, quite clearly they can’t have had Rebecca’s experiences. And then if it persists on, and is Rebecca, and we’ve got the real Rebecca, they’re having different experiences, too. Even if they go around together. Even if it’s attached to me like the little violin, or whatever. And I think this comes back to the particular thing. But yes —

TIM: I think the particular thing is very important. I’m just not sure whether it’s important in the way that you think it is, about how it relates to AI and the possibility of artificial consciousness.

REBECCA: I think for me it’s only a kind of placeholder route into the living thing. Just purely because I think it’s easier to pick out particular things, than is to pick out living things. And I don’t think consciousness, as we think about it, could be the kind of thing experienced by a non-particular thing — partly for the reason that you gave around persisting across time, and building these things, these beliefs.

So, this is a little bit like when people say things like “the market knows things” or they talk about the hive mind and collective consciousness. I just have a pretty hard-line view that that’s just the summation of the individual people thinking the things.

TIM: That’s just a way of talking.

REBECCA: So the idea that the group could be a bearer of knowledge — in the way in which the individual is a bearer of knowledge — I just don’t think you’re then talking about knowledge in the way we normally talk about knowledge. So similarly, the idea that the non-particular thing could have conscious mental states… That said, I have heard that the Portuguese man o’ war might be a problem for this, but I don’t know enough about marine biology, so I can just put that to one side.

TIM: Actually, in the case of these groups — where the groups know things. My feeling is we’re much happier with attributions of knowledge here, though, rather than attributions of belief. So, the idea that knowledge can be the property of collective, I think makes a lot of sense, actually. But that doesn’t involve — then you have to break the link between knowledge and belief, because beliefs are the individual mental states of individuals. But knowledge can be something that’s shared among people.

REBECCA: But isn’t it still just the case that it’s individual knowledge-bearers knowing things? And then maybe there’s some information, which they all have access to. So when people say things like “the book contains all the knowledge”, I just think what they really mean is ‘information’.

TIM: Yeah, books contain information, but I think communities can know things. The community of scientists. I mean, there may be now no scientist who’s capable — I’m sure it’s true — there’s no scientist capable of grasping the whole of modern science, in the way that my predecessor in my professorship in Cambridge, who was William Whewell in the 19th century, who was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy. He was supposed to have had an encyclopedic knowledge of the science of his day, which is now something which would be impossible. But we can say that scientists as a group know things.

REBECCA: I just think that’s a shorthand for ‘you know this bit’ and ‘I know this bit’, therefore we can find our way to the particular — you know, we’re going to the shop, and you know the first bit of the journey, and I know the second bit of the journey. Collectively, we know the way. But I don’t think that the two of us are the kind of thing that can bear knowledge in the sense of knowing something, in the sense of being aware of it, having access to it. I just think it’s a shorthand.

TIM: That’s a view you have, but it’s not obvious. I think in the way we actually talk, we’re very happy about attributing knowledge, as opposed to belief. By belief here, I mean factual belief. I don’t mean religious belief, because religious belief is a sort of communal property as well.

REBECCA: So, I think what I’m saying is that that talk doesn’t come cheap. I agree that people do use that more loosely than other things. But then we get on to these other ways, and I think this is a little bit like you see in the AI stuff. People say the AI reasons, the AI acts, the AI thinks.

TIM: Yeah, but there are other reasons for denying knowledge to AI, which is that knowledge is truthfully acquired by a reliable method, and there’s no reliable method there.

REBECCA: But it can be overdetermined. And I think some routes in may be easier than other routes. So it’s just a practical matter. So where are we at now, if we come back to this question of what consciousness is?

TIM: Yeah, there’s one thing that I wanted to mention when you asked something earlier on, but we got sidetracked. Which was, there’s something I learned from your father [laughter] E. J. Lowe, who was my first teacher in philosophy, where he once said in a class that people think, talk, about consciousness as if it was just one single thing. But it may be many things. And he didn’t go into detail about this, but the remark stayed in my head.

And it seemed to me that this is a very good way of thinking about consciousness. Because the problem with the whole qualia way of thinking is that you think that there’s this one thing that, so to speak, attaches, you know, sort of glues itself on to certain mental states. And then inexplicably makes them the products of — makes them the episodes of consciousness. Whereas, in fact, if you think of the difference between conscious thinking, and conscious sensation, and conscious dreaming, conscious memory — the phenomenology of these things are so different.

So let’s not say there’s one thing, which is consciousness. Consciousness is a category that we apply to all these things. What we like to say in the theory of properties in metaphysics is a ‘determinable’. You can’t be conscious without being conscious in some way.

REBECCA: Yes, exactly.

TIM: But being conscious in a particular way is not ‘being X plus conscious’. So, I think of consciousness as a determinable property, which has many determinations in the different exercises of our mental capacities. That’s the next stage of my definition. [laughter]

REBECCA: I like that. If we were going to try and put that in the simplest possible terms, how would you do that?

TIM: I would say there’s conscious thinking, there’s conscious perception, there’s conscious sensation, there’s conscious fantasy. And there needn’t be one thing, consciousness, that all these things have in common. There needn’t be one.

So, if you think of it in physicalist terms, there needn’t be one neural correlative of consciousness — one single neural correlative of consciousness — because consciousness is going to be distributed across the brain, in this way. And there’s going to be consciousness in the back of your head for your visual system. And then for your reasoning, it’s in sort of the front of your brain.

And so, there’s no reason to think that consciousness will be one thing. That’s the way I’d put it. May I have another analogy? [laughter] Which is what it means to explain consciousness.

REBECCA: Yep.

TIM: And I’ve said this before in print, but no one ever reads it. [laughter] So I might as well try and say it again. There are two models in science you could have for this sort of thing.

One is getting a man on the moon. And there’s the moon, there’s your man, there’s your rocket. You fire the rocket at the moon, you get the man on the moon, and you’ve done it. You’ve got the evidence, you send the video back, you bring back the moon dust, that’s it. You prove that you’ve got the man on the moon, it was one thing.

But maybe consciousness isn’t like that — explaining consciousness isn’t like getting a man on the moon. Maybe it’s more like finding a cure for cancer, which will be another kind of scientific paradigm. At the moment, you know, enormous progress has been made in curing cancer. Now, if you get cancer, and they find it early enough, then for many many cancers, you will not die. And they can kill it and they can cure it.

But there isn’t one thing which is the cure for cancer, just partly because there isn’t one cancer. There are many different kinds of cancers. So it seemed to me that’s a better model for explaining consciousness. But people don’t like it in philosophy, because it doesn’t have the bizarre elegance of panpsychism, or something else. But that will be my approach as a naturalistic philosopher.

REBECCA: So maybe we should briefly touch on panpsychism, which I like to joke is mental.

TIM: Do we have to? [laughter]

REBECCA: But broadly, when we talk about explaining consciousness, it seems like there are two kinds of buckets of things. One is like, why do we have it? And the other is, how do we have it? The ‘how do we have it’ is the one that most people talk about.

The ‘why do we have it’ — people just want to say things like evolution. We’ve already talked about that a little. But the ‘how do we have it’, we come on to the kind of David Chalmers-type questions. We already touched on these a little in relation to AI. But these are broadly things like, ‘how do physical processes give rise to a rich inner life?’, I think he puts it. He sometimes puts it like that.

Sometimes, these things seem to be assuming some kind of physicalism, I think. They seem to be assuming that it’s the physical processes. They seem to be assuming it’s stuff that’s happening in the brain.

Talking about my dad, I seem to remember — I was trying to remember this last night — I remember having a conversation with him, a very long time ago, and we were talking about Descartes and the pineal gland [laughter]. And I remember him drawing me these little concentric circles to try to explain where he thought the mind was. And it ended up being in a kind of a little overlap of about seven different circles.

TIM: Oh, that’s great.

REBECCA: I can’t quite remember how it works. Maybe you know the answer to this. But, I mean, do you think the mind — does it make sense to say the mind is located in the brain? I’m not asking you if it’s in the pineal gland. But does it make sense to talk about the location of the mind?

TIM: Yeah, I think it makes sense. I think what I would rather say to make that make sense, I would appeal to the ideas I mentioned earlier on about capacities. So what is the mind, when we talk about the mind? You see, if you’re not in the business of substance, where you’re saying the mind is a substance, as Descartes did. So, if you’re not asking the substance question, then we can still use the phrase ‘the mind’.

I say a mind is a collection of mental capacities. And those are the capacities of the organism, primarily. Maybe they could be capacities of artificial things, but we don’t have any such examples at the moment. So, the mind are the mental capacities of organisms, and then those capacities are located in the organism — and some of them in the brain, others distributed throughout the organism.

And so that to me makes sense. The idea that the organism has capacities, some of them are mental. And, here, I mean irreducibly mental, but nonetheless not a property of some other substance, because I don’t ask the substance question. I reject the substance question and all its works and empty promises, as we used to say in the Catholic Church! [laughter] You weren’t brought up a Catholic.

REBECCA: I was not, but I find that stuff very interesting. I think you also reject the property thing. I think I’ve read you — again, this is a long time ago, so I might be getting this wrong — suggesting that the same kinds of problems arise for the property dualists as for the substance dualists. Because the property sort of reduces down to the substance, or something like this. Similar objections arise.

TIM: I don’t think that myself, although one of my students wrote a very interesting book on that — Ralph Weir — where he had that argument.

REBECCA: Ah yes, I have read some of his stuff. Maybe it was him I was reading.

TIM: Yeah, he’s very very ingenious. But I don’t ask the substance question. So I don’t say “one substance or two”. So I say “there are many”. If someone said to me, "How many kinds of things are there in the world?” I’d say, “How many do you want? You know, there are many many kinds of things!” [laughter] And they say, “No, how many fundamental kind of things?” I say, “What’s fundamental? What does that mean?” So, I’ve just gone overboard —

REBECCA: There is value, though, in categorizing —

TIM: Oh yeah, absolutely.

REBECCA: So one reason, for instance, when we think about this nice idea about consciousness maybe being many things, we still want to say that those are part of the set of things that fit into consciousness, or something like that. We might, in the process of doing that, rule out some things, and suggest that they’re actually not in there. But the many things have still got to be tied together by something.

TIM: Yes, you’re absolutely right. And that’s the bit that’s missing from my picture — which is the self. What ties the self together. And I’ve got the organism, and I want to say the self. I want to say that I am an organism. So if I’m a self, I’m also an organism. I want to say that.

But how to fit those parts into the other bits of the metaphysics I’ve described, I’m not clear about. And your dad wrote very interestingly about this, and I tried to address it once. But I haven’t made any progress yet about subjects of experience, I think.

REBECCA: Yes, so one thing that does strike me, I thought about this a little in relation to the AI. Sometimes people want to say in response to “oh but the AI doesn’t persist across time” — they want to say, “look, it now has a memory function”.

I think one reason they probably go down this route is because there are these Lockean theories of self-identity, which depend upon memory. Or at least, like, self-awareness of previous self-awarenesses, such that I remember what it was like to be 37, and 37-year-old Rebecca remembered what was like to be 30, blah blah blah, all the way back in the neat little chain. And suddenly, Rebecca exists across the 40 years she’s existed.

But, of course, that only works if the thing is conscious. You can’t, like, apply that to the non-conscious thing, because the kind of conception of memory that we’re depending upon is a conscious kind of memory.

TIM: Absolutely.

REBECCA: So, I just don’t think that that can work in response to the AI.

TIM: No, all they mean is just they’ve stored some of the conversations, and they arbitrarily group them together, that’s all.

REBECCA: So I don’t think that can work for the particularity thing, unless the thing is already conscious, in which case then you’re bypassing my point anyway, right? I’m only doing that to try to get into whether it’s conscious.

TIM: Yeah, okay, good. Yeah, I agree with that. That’s a good point.

REBECCA: Okay, one last thing I want us to talk about, because we’ve done, like, metaphysics and philosophy of mind and epistemology. Again, we don’t necessarily have to carve these up in too neat ways. But I just want to briefly touch on some of the moral questions.

So, I’m quite interested in how consciousness relates to the other kinds of things that are often treated as conditions of, or relevant for, moral status. So one thing that annoys me often, when I read stuff about this, is people sort of start downstream. They want to say “should we treat the animal in this way because it’s intelligent, or because it’s sentient?” I actually think quite a lot of that stuff probably just comes from being alive. I think these things are downstream of being alive, again.

But nonetheless, I guess I’m kind of interested in how consciousness and intelligence, and consciousness and sentience — like, can you be sentient if you’re not conscious? It depends on what notion of sentience you take. We’ve talked a little about the knowledge-bearing thing. But if you think about some of these kinds of conditions that sometimes people seem to think need to be met…

I don’t know, we discover that the shrimpy things on the moons of Saturn are alive. A load of people are then going to want to know, are they conscious? Are they intelligent? Are they sentient? And then they’re going to behave toward them — they’re going to treat them in certain ways.

Again, I think the really important thing is that they’re alive. But how do these kinds of things interrelate? Can you be intelligent if you’re not conscious? I don’t think you can. What are the kind of relations between these things? Is it just that it all reduces down to conscious life, or is that too much of a reduction?

TIM: I don’t know, actually. I’m not sure. I really find this very confusing. I mean, not about intelligence [laughter] because I think intelligence is — so, my forthcoming book —

REBECCA: Ah, a plug, excellent!

TIM: So, the plug for my forthcoming book, which is still a work in progress, but my book is called Against Intelligence, because I don’t think there actually is such a thing as intelligence. Intelligence is an evaluation that we use of the cognitive performance of certain beings and creatures. And so it perfectly makes sense just to call an AI ‘intelligent’. That’s absolutely fine. That’s an intelligent solution to the problem. Perfectly. It’s not a psychological category.

REBECCA: Sure.

TIM: There’s no such thing. So attempts to measure intelligence, or to say what’s distinctive of human intelligence, all fail. And it’s very striking fact about the attempt to find artificial general intelligence, that none of these geniuses — these Nobel Prize winners who are now populating our world with all this slop [laughter] — none of them can agree on what artificial general intelligence is.

REBECCA: Yeah, I know. I started writing a thing about this because it so annoyed me, but then it annoyed me too much to finish it. [laughter] I was going to do a thing where I was like, which are the most annoying definitions of this thing, and why do they all fall apart? And I actually couldn’t bear to do it.

TIM: That’s a great subject for a series of articles, if you can stop yourself from being annoyed. [laughter] But I came out the other end. I’m no longer annoyed because I realise intelligence doesn’t exist. I mean, of course, it exists in the sense that moral evaluation exists. But there’s no such thing.

REBECCA: That’s very convenient though, isn’t it?

TIM: No, it is very convenient, because it means that you can focus on the real question, which is not ‘is this real intelligence?’ But rather, ‘what tasks can computers actually perform?’ That’s the question people should be asking.

REBECCA: Right, yes.

TIM: We know what a computer is, and then we can look at the tasks and see which kind of tasks it can perform. So that’s the way they should be thinking.

REBECCA: It does seem like earlier on in these conversations, people did seem to cohere around some kind of sense of that. It’s only — I mean, I do think a lot of it is just the kind of obfuscation you see in writing about AI.

TIM: Yeah.

REBECCA: I think a large part of this is you don’t really get experts in their particular domains writing about AI. Instead, you get ‘the AI expert’, and they want to reinvent the wheel. You see this when they write about economics, or when they write about philosophy. You talk to an AI person and suddenly they’re like, “I’ve just discovered this thing!” And it turns out they’re talking about, like, supply and demand. And you’re like, oh my God.

TIM: I know, I know. It’s extraordinary. The place this computer science — which is what it is — has started to occupy in the intellectual workspace. And you have people like Geoffrey Hinton —

REBECCA: Oh, insane.

TIM: — pronouncing about these things as if as if they were deep moral guides for us.

So yeah, on the moral question, I don’t know. We clearly don’t think conscious life is sufficient, or else we wouldn’t eat so much of it. If we really thought that the lives of animals mattered — I mean, I say “we”, I mean some people claim to think that the lives of animals matter, in the way that human lives matter. But I don’t believe that —

REBECCA: You could be someone like Shelly Kagan, though, and think that you could have some kind of hierarchy of how much they matter. I mean, I don’t buy his utilitarianism, but I do think —

TIM: You could.

REBECCA: But that seems to me like a coherent position. I mean, I’m the kind of person who is fully convinced that eating meat is bad and wrong. I think even if the animals had the best possible lives and best possible deaths — whatever that means, caveat that — I still think it’d be wrong to eat their dead bodies. Yet I do it. I constantly am trying to stop. I’m currently not eating pork and chicken, although I went to a chicken place for lunch the other day and ate chicken.

So, I actually probably think I just do have some kind of — maybe some kind of naturalistic justification, working deep down, in a non-conscious way, or whatever! But you’re right, I think at least in terms of how people vote with their feet, it does seem as if they don’t think that. Although they may just not think that the animals are conscious.

Do you think the animals are conscious? Which kinds of animals are and aren’t conscious?

TIM: I don’t think there’s a sharp divide. But I think it’s pretty clear that the animals — most of the animals we eat, are conscious.

REBECCA: Seems pretty right. Although again, we come back into this problem of can we ever really know that something is conscious. The beautiful thing about being a human is that we have access to know that we are conscious, but the thing that depends upon is sadly not something we can apply to —

TIM: Yes, yes. I do think this is one of the more annoying arguments that we’re getting in the AI sphere, though. Which is, “look, I don’t even know if you’re conscious, so why don’t I say that my computer’s conscious?” [laughter] You know, seriously! Which is pretty much what Richard Dawkins was saying the other day.

REBECCA: Yes, that’s right. And also I’m pretty sure they don’t think that the rock or the pebble is conscious. If I throw the rock off the cliff, how are you going to respond?

TIM: Absolutely.

REBECCA: “Oh Rebecca, stop, stop! The poor rock!” I don’t think so.

TIM: Michael Pollan’s recent book is very good on this.

REBECCA: Yeah? Okay, I should read that.

TIM: A World Appears. He goes around and interviews lots of consciousness scientists. And actually, it’s from there I learned a very nice definition of sentience as opposed to consciousness. I mean, I think in some ways it’s a stipulation, because I think sentience and consciousness in ordinary life pretty much mean the same thing.

But he quotes Evan Thompson, who’s a brilliant philosopher from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. And Evan Thompson defined ‘sentience’ as ‘the feeling of being alive’, which is very nice. Because you think, it’s one thing to be alive, and then there’s a question of whether you have the feeling of being alive. And that sort of somehow falls short of the idea of having a full conscious experience, or something, that we want to make that classification.

So I like that. And I learned a lot from Pollan’s book. It’s a very nice book.

REBECCA: This reminds me a little of some of those — Galen Strawson makes this nice point, it’s quite an obvious point, but he makes this point around, you know, your awareness can be sufficient for you to conclude that you’re conscious. But you obviously can’t do the same thing about free will, because you could feel as if you had the open choice and you took the open choice —

TIM: Yes.

REBECCA: — but feeling as if the thing is not the same as having the thing.

That said, I think we should finish. Now, this definition of sentience gives us an option for much simpler definitions of consciousness. I love the ones that we’ve been working on, but they’re quite complicated. I like at this point to say, if a little kid came up and, is like, “Hey, I’ve read all your stuff. Well, I haven’t read your stuff, but I’ve heard about all your stuff. What is consciousness?”

There are these much much simpler kinds of things. Like we could say, you know, “it’s being aware”, “experiencing”, “having an inner world”. Which one? If the kid comes up to you, which one are you going to go for? Or are you going to try to explain to them the more complicated…?

TIM: I’d say it’s when it feels like something.

REBECCA: Feels like something.

TIM: This is ‘what it’s like’ means. And we go on about it as if it’s some sort of made-up phrase. But in fact, ‘what it’s like’ means what it feels like, or what it tastes like, or what it smells like. I’d just say it’s when it feels like something.

REBECCA: Yeah, you eat the banana and you taste the banana.

TIM: Yeah, right.

REBECCA: You fall down the hill and you get a cut, and it’s not just that you get the cut, you feel the pain.

TIM: Yeah.

REBECCA: It feels like something.

TIM: Exactly.

REBECCA: All right, good. Well, thank you so much, Tim. This has been great.

TIM: Oh thanks, Rebecca.

REBECCA: A great conscious experience. [laughter]

TIM: Thanks very much for inviting me. It’s been really good, thanks. Really good to talk to you.

This is the sixty-ninth in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.

1) Last week, I read a load of things about The Declaration of Independence, in preparation for an event and a podcast. Most of all, however, I enjoyed reading the text itself. My first deep philosophical interest was social contract theory, and I find it hard not to see The Declaration squarely within that light.

The SCT guys (or the good ones, anyway) tell us that political authority rests on the consent of the governed. The DoI includes reference to “just powers” being derived “from the consent of the governed”. You can read my extended thoughts on this crossover, here. And watch out for a podcast episode — starring my excellent friends and — soon!

2) Over the past week, I’ve been slowly reading Siri Hustvedt’s new book, Ghost Stories. Regular readers might remember how much I liked her novel What I Loved (2003). Somehow, Ghost Stories has so many of the same qualities, even though it is a memoir. Today’s post will be short on words because all I want to do is go finish reading it. Though I also don’t! It’s the best book I’ve read in ages.

3) I found this recent Galen Strawson post on mortalism very frustrating. I found it frustrating because it takes the form of Strawson addressing some excellent philosophical problems — questions about mental persistence following bodily death — via the text of a conversation he’d had with Claude.

Regular readers will know that I love talking with and thinking about AI. But I subscribe to Strawson’s substack because I want to know what Strawson thinks about philosophical problems! I’ve written here about his views several times over the past year. Ok, sure, the couple of small contributions Strawson made to the Claude conversation did some work in directing it, to some small extent. But I found that I just couldn’t be bothered to finish reading the post, even though the topic remained high in my mind for some hours.

I really can’t see the publication of AI chats — or, at least, AI chats like this one — taking off as a standard form of philosophical inquiry. As I’ve argued before, philosophers are particularly well insulated against AI ‘taking our jobs’, because there are many special reasons why humans are keen to read other humans doing philosophy.

4) I recently watched the ‘Before’ trilogy. These three movies, Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013), follow American guy Jesse and French girl Celine, occasionally, across several decades. First, they spend a day and night together, after meeting on a train on the way to Vienna. Then, they meet in Paris nine years later, and go on a little boat trip. Finally, we see them on holiday in Greece, another nine years after that.

It’s rare to see the substantive conversations of a couple presented on film, which surprises me. I found this phenomenon particularly lacking in recent ‘romantic movies’ that I otherwise quite enjoyed — not least, Oh Hi! (2025), Materialists (2025), and The Drama (2026).

5) While we’re on movies, I really loved François Ozon’s L’Étranger (2025), which I saw at the cinema a few weeks ago. I think it’s a pretty great novel, though I’m not into Camus’s philosophy. Ozon, however, never fails to impress me.

My favourite Ozon movie is probably Swimming Pool (2003), which — even though I haven’t seen it in maybe 15 years — must be one of the movies I’ve seen the most times. His L’Étranger is totally captivating and visually fantastic. (I had to check back to see if I was correct that it was in black and white!) He should turn to Houellebecq next.

This is the lightly-edited transcript of some brief opening remarks I gave yesterday during a Mercatus debate about the Declaration of Independence.

I’m going to admit something to you, openly and freely. I’m going to admit that I love America.

This is hard for me — not because I’m an English person! But because I’m just not into the love of countries. I don’t buy the idea of patriotism. And, more generally, I’m a reluctant supporter of the state. I do think the state can be a force for good, but I’m persistently anxious of the overbearing state. I’m a pretty much a classic classical liberal, to this end.

I would never say that I love England! I’d never say I love the UK. So it’s kind of surprising to me, but here we are: I love America. How does this work? I was thinking about it today, and I have three brief points to make.

The first one is something like this. I love a load of stuff in America, which makes me want to live here, rather than in any other country in the world. Particularly, I love the pursuit of excellence. I love the enthusiasm. I am done with British cynicism and pessimism! So there are these things, these facts about America — particularly cultural norms — that I really love. And that means that I love living here, and I want to live here.

The second point, which you might tell me makes what I’m saying kind of trivially true, is that of course I love living here, because I’ve chosen to live here. I didn’t choose to live in England. I had it thrust upon me — like the rain there, every day! So maybe it just doesn’t really mean that much that I love America.

That said, this point about me choosing to live here brings me, I think, to my most important point.

I love America in large part because I love the social contract theory tradition. This is the theory that John Locke, I think, is the best exponent of. I find social contract theory exciting and interesting. It was the first thing I really got into in philosophy. I also think, though, that it’s good, and I think a lot of it is right. Particularly the John Locke stuff.

The central idea in the social contract theory tradition is that political authority rests on the consent of the governed. Or, as it’s put in the Declaration of Independence, “deriving just powers from the consent of the governed”. Now, I don’t want to be another of those English people coming here and telling you that your great founding document is actually just the work of John Locke! But he’s everywhere in it.

That fantastic phrase “the pursuit of happiness” doesn’t come from the Second Treatise of Government or one of the other political works. It comes from the great epistemology tract. It comes from Locke’s wonderful Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

But you see him everywhere in the Declaration of Independence. It’s got the natural rights talk. It’s got the right to revolution — I reread that bit in the Second Treatise last night, and it’s, like, practically word for word. I mean, guys, this is John Locke, all over the place!

I want to emphasise something, however, rather than going on about John Locke, anymore. Because in a similar way to how I don’t love countries, I don’t love particular philosophers. I want to emphasise that, yes, John Locke wrote about these things. But they are not John Locke’s things. Any more than they are America’s things.

The values underlying the Declaration of Independence — freedom, equality, justice — don’t belong to any place. Yes, you might find them here in America more than you find them in other places. That’s one reason I live here. And you might find them in John Locke’s work more than you find them in other people’s works. But they reflect truths about humanity; about what it is to be human. They reflect moral truths. So they are John Locke’s, and Americans’, only in a loose descriptive sense.

I love America, and I love the Declaration of Independence, not because of great phrases like “the pursuit of happiness”. But because America and the Declaration of Independence represent a commitment to the pursuit of moral truth. And there’s nothing more important to me — or for all of us.

This is the sixty-eighth in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.

1) A few days ago, I read some polling reports on attitudes to factory farming, thanks to discussion on Substack about this recent Our World in Data piece. As the writer of the piece, Charlie Giattino, argues, it seems “[t]here is a clear gap between what people want — meat produced without suffering — and what the food system delivers”.

Except, it’s not so clear. Yes, the chart in the piece shows that a large majority of UK adults claim to find certain “common farming practices” to be “not acceptable”. But it’s also the case, as Giattino emphasises, that “[a]t a global level, meat consumption is not only high but also increasing.”

Okay, we can assume that not everyone who claims to find the system’s practices unacceptable also eats the system’s products. And maybe it’s just that the UK’s an odd place? Nope. A subheading in the OWID piece clarifies that: “Surveys worldwide show that most people find common animal farming practices unacceptable, even where meat consumption is high”.

To go back to the ‘there’s a gap’ claim, therefore, the people do indeed suggest they want “meat produced without suffering”. But the people also continue to eat “what the food system delivers” — more and more of it!

Sure, we could conclude that the people have a loose understanding of “unacceptable”. Or we could conclude that they’d prefer a system that wasn’t so vile. But whichever way we cut it, we’re going to have to face the fact that expressed concerns about animal welfare simply aren’t enough to prevent many, many people from eating meat. That the gap is a dream!

It would be nice if we could conclude otherwise. But it would be cheating. Just like eating the meat, when you think you shouldn’t. Like I do.

As I’ve written before, I think it’d be wrong to eat the dead bodies of animals even if they’d lived the best possible lives and had the best possible deaths. And as I said during my recent podcast episode with , I continue to eat meat, even though “I think the welfare thing is […] a sufficient problem in itself. It’s a reason in itself not to eat pretty much any bit of meat you get served.”

I did quit meat for a few months, a while back, but all it took was one fantastic steak, and I was back off the animal wagon full-time. Sure, I choose the ‘highest welfare’ products on offer, and happily — how horrible to say ‘happily’! how horrible to say ‘products’! — pay the higher prices for them. And as of this week, I’m trying to quit chicken and pork. But, of course, I know this is nowhere near enough.

There’s a horrible truth to be accepted here. A truth that often makes me wonder what other bad things we would do to meet our basest desires.

2) A few days ago, I wrote about three podcasts I’d enjoyed appearing on. But the most fun I’ve recently had on a podcast was when and I appeared on our friend ’s Qualified Opinions. There was a lot of laughing. Here’s a link to the episode, and here’s the summary on the site:

“Vero is joined by colleagues Rebecca Lowe, a political philosopher, and Henry Oliver, a literary critic, to discuss their new project, The Pursuit of Liberalism. While the liberal order—built on free markets, free speech, and the rule of law—has delivered more for human flourishing than any other system, many feel it is currently “losing the argument”. The trio explores whether this is because the defense of liberalism has been narrowed down to economics and legal theory, neglecting the deeper questions of meaning, dignity, and the human soul.”

Vero is one of my very favourite people, and everything she writes is worth reading. Last week, I really liked the National Review column she co-authored with Gary Leff on the then-possibility of a state bailout for Spirit Airlines. I would summarise their arguments for you, but the piece is so clear and well-structured that they do this themselves, near the start:

“This is a bad idea that deserves to be called what it is: Washington nationalizing a problem it partially created with a misguided application of antitrust, for a company that consumers don’t want, at the expense of its competitors, and handing taxpayers the bill.”

The piece powers on. Unlike Spirit Airlines.

3) A few days ago, I finally finished reading Alan Hollinghurst’s most recent novel, Our Evenings (2024). It’s nowhere near as good as The Swimming Pool Library (1988). It’s not even anywhere near as good as The Sparsholt Affair (2018) or The Stranger’s Child (2011).

Hollinghurst is one of those previously, if inconsistently, excellent British novelists, who’ve gone off the boil over the past twenty years. This is a trend exemplified by Ian McEwan, whose novels can be divided in two at the Chesil Beach (2007) point. One common argument runs that these novelists have been driven crazy by British politics. The treatment of the Brexit debate in Our Evenings provides strong support for this argument. I hate the word ‘cringy’, but there’s no alternative here.

That said, I pressed on with Our Evenings, because somewhere — amid the silly political commentary, and even at the silly political commentary’s height amid the ‘old age’ section which, more generally, required some serious editing — there’s something there. It’s not the something I assume Hollinghurst would want us to take from this novel. That’d be something deep about race and community. Instead, it’s probably just the well-developed skill of basic readability.

4) Last week, I read a load of things about Benjamin Britten in preparation for recording an episode of The Street Porter and the Philosopher. In particular, I enjoyed thinking about the claim, made in this short translated extract from an interview with Jonas Kaufmann, that Peter Grimes is autistic.

“I feel so sorry for him. I don’t think he’s a real killer. Today you would say: autistic or Asperger’s or whatever. Modern expressions for the fact that in this place where he is arrested, he is simply being crushed by the many, many intrigues that are being spun. And of course it’s tragic that the first boy dies of thirst in a storm because they somehow drift too far and can’t find their way home.

But we also have to put this in the context of how it was, so to speak, back then: Children from the orphanage were kept as cheap slaves for centuries. That is an unfortunate fact. Whether they worked in the mines because they were nice and small and could dig their holes there – and that was no different here in Bavaria – or whether they lived on the coast and then helped the fishermen. And Grimes says himself: I can’t afford it. I can’t afford a second fisherman, an adult, to take with me, that’s impossible. It can only be a child who has to work 24 hours a day for board and lodging, so to speak, and is available. That is very tragic and of course reprehensible from today’s perspective. But you can’t really blame Grimes for that….”

As you might have guessed, I don’t like Kaufmann’s relativism. But I think his claim about autism is worth considering. Minimally, it makes an interesting change from the common, but surely incorrect, take on which Grimes’s ‘otherness’ is a sign that he’s gay.

5) On Sunday, I saw fantastic paintings by (mostly North-Eastern) Americans, including Andrew Wyeth, John Henry Twachtman, George Luks, William Merritt Chase, Charles Alston, William Glackens, Stuart Davis, Beauford Delaney, Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, and Georgia O’Keeffe, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Best of all was this catfish piece by Jacob Lawrence:

1) First, the second episode of The Street Porter and the Philosopher, which is the podcast and I run through our joint Substack, . Here’s the summary from the site:

“This episode features our guest Cass Sunstein, the leading legal scholar, bestselling author, and one of the most influential thinkers on liberalism, law, and public policy. He joins Rebecca Lowe to explore the relationship between the arts and liberalism. They discuss what makes a work of art “liberal,” the representation and role of choice in music and popular culture, the moral and aesthetic limits of political messaging in art, how liberal societies shape and are shaped by the culture they produce, and much more.”

Here’s a link to the transcript and audio. And here’s the video (beautifully made by our Mercatus colleague, Melody Hansen):

2) Second, my second appearance on the Planetary Society podcast, Planetary Radio, discussing philosophical space matters — ranging from the aesthetic value of the Artemis II mission, to the moral status of non-human living things in space — with my excellent friend Casey Dreier. Here’s the summary from the site:

“In this episode, Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, sits down with Rebecca Lowe, philosophy senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, to explore the deeper meaning of humanity's return to deep space. Drawing on philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and theories of value, they unpack why human presence in space feels fundamentally different from even the most sophisticated robotic mission, and why that difference matters.”

Here’s a link to the episode. And here’s a link to the previous episode I appeared on with Casey, entitled Locke, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (in space).

3) Third, I appeared on Matt Teichman’s excellent philosophy podcast, Elucidations, to discuss my theory of speaking freely. Regular readers might remember that I’m writing a short book about this. Here’s the (substantial!) summary of the episode from the site:

“Last episode, we talked about free speech, and this time, we sit down with Rebecca Lowe (Mercatus Center) to discuss the related but slightly different topic of speaking freely.

Speaking freely: the thing you feel entitled to do when a superior says to you: “you may speak freely.” But although speaking freely is the phenomenon our guest is interested in characterizing, rather than trying to characterize it directly, her approach is to get granular about what it means not to speak freely. What are the different ways you might be blocked from saying what you would otherwise say, if you were fully unfettered?

Rebecca Lowe discusses three broad categories of failing to speak freely. Type 1 is where you lack the capacity either to utter words or to determine their content, e.g. because you have laryngitis, or because someone put their hand over your mouth, or because an evil demon controls everything you say. Type 2 is where you’re able to speak, and you’re able to control what you say, but something is preventing you from communicating in the way you’ve decided to, e.g. when you want to call your friend, but your phone battery is dead. Type 3 is where you’re able to speak, you’re able to control what you say, and the situation allows you to communicate in the way you’ve decided to, but you refrain from speaking your mind because of some perceived risk, e.g. when you want to suggest your friend dump her boyfriend, but hold back because you’re worried she’s going to get offended.

One subtlety of these categories is that they are not logically independent. If you’re blocked from speaking freely in the Type 1 way, you’re thereby also blocked from speaking freely in the Type 2 and Type 3 ways. And if you’re blocked from speaking freely in the Type 2 way, you’re thereby also blocked from speaking freely in the Type 3 way. The converse doesn’t hold: for example, as our bad boyfriend example emphasized, you can be blocked from speaking in the Type 3 way without being blocked from speaking in the Type 1 way. Indeed, as Rebecca emphasizes, it’s only people who can speak in the Type 1 way who can be blocked from speaking in the Type 3 way!

In this episode, our guest argues that the public conversation about a person’s right to speak their mind would go more smoothly if we tried to keep these distinctions in view. That is, whenever we feel indignant about someone’s ability to speak being suppressed, we should consider the details of the situation. Which of these three types of obstructions was it? Was the person able to speak their mind in the situation? Then, we can consider whether they were entitled to do so. Generally we are, but it seems there are certain exception cases. The hope is that by breaking down what is at issue in any particular case we’re discussing, we’ll arrive at a better understanding of what its moral lessons are.”

Here’s a link to the episode:

4) As a bonus, here’s a link to a short interview I recently did as part of ’s excellent ‘Why Philosophy?’ project.

Here’s one of my answers: