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 convicted 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 AI writing. I see this particularly in AI writing 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:

This is the sixty-seventh in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.

1) I spent some time this week thinking about two big UK political developments. First, the news on Friday that what’s generally referred to as ‘the assisted dying bill’ had failed to become law in England and Wales. This news came as a great relief to me.

I’ve written here several times about my strong opposition to the bill. In particular, I wrote a long piece about why I think it’s wrong to characterise the legalisation of assisted dying as furthering individual freedom, and another about how hard it is to protect against the so-called ‘slippery slope’ when designing such bills.

Here’s an extract from the former piece:

“The second reason I think it’s wrong to characterise last week’s parliamentary developments as furthering individual freedom is because they threaten a concerning increase in state power over the individual. Of course, overbearing state power is not the only threat to individual freedom. But it is a long-standing and serious one. And last week’s parliamentary votes threaten a concerning increase in state power because the directly consequent instances of assisted dying and full-term abortion they augur would be new instances in which the state endorsed, provided, or regulated the termination of human life.

This is clear in the case of assisted dying, at least as presented in the assisted dying bill. If the bill becomes law, then state-regulated medics will become causally responsible for the deaths of the people in England and Wales who undertake assisted dying. Of course, this causal responsibility will be jointly-held with the dying people, unless we shift to a Canada-style euthanasia model. This is because, as I’ve written about here before:

1) suicide is self-directed, 2) euthanasia is other-directed, and 3) assisted dying is both self-directed and other-directed. That is, all cases of both ‘assisted dying’, and ‘euthanasia’ involve the relevant physical actions of another person (or people) aside from the person whose death is the goal. But whilst in cases of ‘euthanasia’, it’s the other person alone who undertakes these actions (which is what happens in almost all instances of Canadian MAID), it’s always a joint enterprise in cases of ‘assisted dying’.

In this context, while discussion about assisted dying often centres on questions like ‘shouldn’t people in pain be allowed to end their lives?’, and ‘why should the state prevent them from doing so?’, those questions are really better suited to discussion about suicide. Whereas, the fundamental question to be asked in relation to both assisted dying and euthanasia is ‘do you have the moral authority to permit someone else to end your life?’. And only if the answer to this question is ‘yes’ can we then move on to whether such matters should be outsourced to the state.

As it happens, my view is that I can no more permit someone else to end my life than I can permit them to enslave me. But I don’t need to make that argument here. Rather, all I need is to emphasise that if the assisted dying bill becomes law, then the state will increase its involvement in the termination of human life, in terms of both provision and regulation, as well as effective endorsement.”

I won’t write any more on this topic today, except to say how much I hope this might be a moment of recalibration — and not just for people in England and Wales.

The other UK political development I spent time thinking about this week did not bring me relief. I’d almost forgotten the insane idea, first proposed by the Conservatives back in 2023, to introduce a year-of-birth-determined prohibition on smoking. Yes, you thought that through correctly! If you were born in Special Year X, and your friend was born in Special Year X plus 1, then it would fall on you to buy the cigarettes from the corner shop, even if you were both over the age of 100!

Or as a Reuters piece describes it:

“The Tobacco and Vapes Bill raises the legal age for buying tobacco by one ​year, every year, starting with people born on or after January 1, 2009, meaning ​affected age groups face a lifetime ban.”

Insane!

Now, I say I’d almost forgotten this idea. But it’d be more accurate to say that, even though I did know that Labour had taken the policy on, I had mentally relegated it away from the realm of real life, and into the camp of “Hey, this’ll make you laugh! Here’s the craziest piece of UK policy thinking ever!” So I was caught off guard, therefore, a couple of days ago, to learn that it is about to become law.

Here are my thoughts on the matter from 2023, which still hold. And which will continue to hold when I am 100. Unlike, I bet you a lot of money, this insane law.

2) Back on the topic of death, last night I read the Dying chapter from Robert Nozick’s The Examined Life (1989). Regular readers will know how much I enjoy reading Nozick. And this chapter, while light on through-composed argumentative value, is what the English People call ‘a real treat’. I mean, okay, if you want to read a short but properly serious philosophical inquiry into death, then turn to Nagel in What Does it All Mean? (1987). But Nozick is much more fun!

Anyway, here are a few thoughts on the substance of Dying. To his cost, Nozick ties together his thoughts about death with his long-time interest in project pursuit. You should be more “willing” to die if you have met your most important goals, he begins by suggesting. And, more convincingly, you should be less willing to die if you have not. He saves his most novel big idea for the final page of the chapter, however.

This is the idea that towards the end of an “ample life”, you might valuably consider choosing to do “more dramatic and risky” things to help younger people to further their ends. This idea, while building on several themes from the preceding pages, comes as a real kicker. That said, as with other moments in the chapter, it feels as if Nozick here is being both defeatist and undermining of the equal value of all human lives.

Don’t you know we’re going to live forever? (Okay, he does briefly discuss this possibility.) Why focus so hard on when the end will come? All these calculations based on time-limited predictions about the length of life! All this quasi-deterministic talk of “timeliness”! A moment of relief comes when Nozick remembers that we might, just sometimes, set ourselves new goals. But a question looms heavy, across the chapter, about the value of the lives of those unable to engage in project pursuit. A similar question looms in the moments where Nozick slips, without acknowledgement, from ‘what you think is important’ to what objectively counts as such.

Of course, Nozick didn’t live forever. He didn’t even live for as modestly long as he predicts in this chapter. That part is hard to read.

Dying is otherwise notable for this neat prediction about contemporary AI:

3) As I wrote here recently, I think we don’t talk anywhere near enough about our obligations to plants. I was excited, therefore, to read a recent MIT News story entitled Plants can sense the sound of rain, a new study finds. Sometime soon, I will read the study in question. But the news story annoyed me so much that I need time to recover. A plant seed being “jostled” by vibrations caused by sound waves is not the same as a plant seed “hearing” or “perceiving” or “sensing” sounds, even if the jostling causes the plant seed to grow!! Come on, guys.

4) A few days ago, I published the latest episode of my philosophy podcast, Working Definition. This episode is on the topic of equality, and it stars my excellent friend Teresa Bejan. Nozick makes a couple of appearances in the episode, including in this section:

REBECCA: […] That said, thinking about conceptual analysis, you just mentioned putting this stuff in historical context. How do you find, as a historian of ideas who is interested in conceptual analysis — how do you go about assigning weight to the different ways people have thought about concepts across time? And to historical definitions more generally?

So I mean, one concern I think I would have if I got really really excited about all the historical stuff is, I might fall into that trap of making historical facts into normative grounds. That’s something that I think, you know, Nozick in the theory of entitlement is entirely guilty of, for instance. I mean, it’s sort of the is-ought problem. But I guess my first question is something like how do you differentiate between the different historical conceptions, if one of the things you’re interested in is the historical context?

TERESA: It’s such a good question. And it’s something I’ve really struggled with in the writing of this book. And I, you know, I like to think I cracked it, but you know, maybe readers will disagree.

REBECCA: I have faith in you. My money’s on you.

TERESA: Well, because one of the things that attracts me to the history of political thought, because I’m not really — I wasn’t trained as a historian. You know, my undergraduate degree was a great books degree. I then did a master’s degree in intellectual history, but then did a PhD in political theory. I mean, I’ve always been happily in the kind of normative presentist camp.

But what attracts me to the history of political thought is just, I think often, is that it helps us recognise the not just conceptual change over time, but also the ongoing kind of politics of language. So one of the things that really interested me in the book was thinking about equality talk, if you will. So, sort of, what are we doing when we’re reaching for the language of equality? What is that language doing for us?

And so I’m trying simultaneously to keep one eye on kind of this, the development of equality talk. And then also to get ahold of all of these different conceptual relations that are being folded under that umbrella.

We also touch on Jeremy Waldron’s book, One Another’s Equals (2017). I’ve read quite a lot of Waldron, and particularly like his discussion of Locke on democratic deliberation (an under-discussed topic!) in The Dignity of Legislation (1999). My copy of this book is currently somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, however, so you’ll have to wait for my substantive thoughts.

Meantime, while thinking about Waldron’s work today, I came across this 2006 LRB review piece by him, mostly focused on the question of whether we should value being exposed to ‘hate speech’. Waldron criticises the writer whose book he’s reviewing for lacking analytic rigour in addressing this topic. But while he, Waldron, sketches out the scope of such an approach, he doesn’t offer much by way of strong conclusions. It’s refreshing, however, to read a UK-press book reviewer explicitly engaging — indeed, prioritising engaging — with the book being reviewed.

And I enjoyed Waldron’s frustration at the cashing out of the First Amendment.

“It’s a strange dichotomy because, in other contexts, American civil liberties scholars have no difficulty at all in seeing a connection between speech and the possibility of violence. They point to it all the time as a way of justifying restrictions on citizens’ interventions at political gatherings. If Donald Rumsfeld comes to give a speech and someone in the audience shouts out that he is a war criminal, the heckler is quickly and forcibly removed. When I came to America, I was amazed that nobody thought this was a violation of the First Amendment. (Shouting comments at public meetings was another of my favourite pastimes when I was young and irresponsible.)”

5) Last weekend, I went to the Phillips Collection in DC. It’s one of my favourite galleries, anywhere. I love the Rothko room. But the room I value the most is the one with (half of) Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1940-41). The series depicts the internal migration of black Americans from the South to the North of the United States, in the first half of the twentieth century. Lawrence shows landscape, industry, and transport, through careful geometric layouts and bold but dulled colours. He shows hardship tempering hope.

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 Teresa Bejan. Teresa is a professor of political theory and a fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford. She’s the author of Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration. She’s working on the Clarendon edition of John Locke’s Letters on Toleration, a very exciting project. And she has an exciting new monograph coming out soon called First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism. She’s also always very fun to talk with.

So I’m delighted that she’s here with me today and, yes, that we’re going to be talking about equality. Thanks so much for joining me, Teresa.

TERESA: Thanks for having me.

REBECCA: So I was wondering, do you have a handy, neat, simple definition of equality for us? You know, some kind of starting point, which means we can then just spend the rest of our time having fun. You know, you telling me cool stuff about the Levellers, that kind of thing. Any chance of that?

TERESA: [laughter] Well, I’m afraid, Rebecca, the bad news is that I do not. But, you know, I’m hoping that in our conversation, that you might be able to help me. Because one of the things that drew me to writing a book on equality is just the way that it seemed to me that the apparent simplicity of equality — because I do think it strikes us as something that should be pretty simple. So just conversationally, we often think of equality as describing a kind of mathematical and quantitative relationship, a relationship of quantitative identity that should be open to measurement. So we should be able to tell when things are equal and when they aren’t.

But that apparent simplicity comes up pretty quickly against this reality, which is just that when we talk about equality, things get complicated very quickly. And so, one of the things I argue in the book is that instead of one clear and distinct idea of equality operating in the history of political philosophy, what we have is a host of many different complex ideas or aspects of equality.

So, in the book, I sort of trace different senses of equality from absence to evenness, balance and proportion, indifference and parity. And I hope that in this discussion, we can sort of come on to some of those senses and what they might do for us.

REBECCA: Yeah, that sounds very good to me. I’m very aware that philosophers — if you ever say anything to a philosopher like, “Hey, I really care about equality,” the first thing they’re going to say is, like, “Which kind of equality?”, or “What kind of equality?”, or “Which kind of egalitarian are you? Are you, like, a liberal Rawlsian egalitarian? Are you a socialist?”

So yes, and I think actually just even the everyday person in the street, if they read the newspapers, they probably have thought about things like equality of outcome and equality of opportunity. I tend to think those are pretty overdone and not always that helpful. But what I think I’m saying is that you just get straight into the idea of ‘equality of what?’, or ‘what kind of equality?’ you’re talking about. So this sounds to me right.

One thing I’m interested in, though — I’ve been thinking a little about this this week — I literally just put something on my Substack about this because you made me think about it so much — is, could there be something nonetheless that ties all of these things together? Some kind of glue that ties all of the matters of equality together to make them… Is too much of a thing to ask? I mean, there are other possibilities here, like there’s some kind of weird bundle, or family resemblance, or —

TERESA: Well, I think — so no, I don’t think it’s too much to ask. And I think maybe we can come to a sort of, maybe, if not quite an agreement, a kind of general sense of this thing that equality might be. But I would also want to argue that when we talk about equality as a political ideal, there I think there’s a much more definite bundle, as you say, or kind of collection of aspects of equality that we have in mind. And I think there’s a lot of — a lot to be said about disaggregating those senses, and kind of trying to get really clear on what each entails.

But your point about the political philosopher says, you know, we can agree that equality ought to be a value. Indeed, we might actually agree that equality is in some way definitive of distributive justice. But nevertheless, that leads us next to this question of ‘equality of what?’ And so you had this great debate in late-20th-century political philosophy of sort of ‘equality of what’? What is the currency of egalitarian justice?

But that debate, which was very interesting [laughter] and exercised a lot of very intelligent people for a long time, had some characteristic frustrations or even problems. So one problem is that it treats equality as being exclusively a question of distribution, and distributive justice.

REBECCA: Yes, I agree, I do think that’s a problem.

TERESA: So that there is some ‘what’ that we can divvy up into more or less equal shares and then distribute to equals. I mean, so that came up against what we think of as the relational egalitarian critique nowadays, following Elizabeth Anderson, that says, well, actually, maybe equality isn’t actually primarily a distributive principle at all. What it is is a relational principle. So it goes to how we treat one another as equals in standing. And so then, you know, there’s a whole debate about whether or not relational equality can be reduced to distributive equality in some sense, or vice versa.

But I suppose my sense, as someone who is broadly sympathetic to a lot of the points made by relational egalitarians, is that pressing that distinction between distributive and relational equality doesn’t get us nearly sort of deep enough. That instead, we need to really press the distinction deeper into the different senses of equality we have in mind.

So going back to some of those I mentioned earlier, you know, is equality a relationship of balance, in which we’re sort of setting two things that are different in kind and don’t share a unit of measurement against each other in some way? Is it a relationship of indifference, in which we recognise the differences between these sort of putatively equal parties but nevertheless refuse to take them into account? So we might think of that, then, as being equality as an ideal of procedural justice.

Or finally, the thing I think that a lot of relational egalitarians actually have in mind is equality in the sense of being an equal or being a peer. And so there I’d say actually, you know, we might be better off talking about parity of standing, than using this kind of mathematizing, quantitative language of equality.

REBECCA: I think that’s a really good point. I like that. I mean this, the distribution thing, bothers me for various reasons, although I also love reading that literature. It’s some of my favourite philosophy in the world.

I think, A, because distribution implies some kind of action. Maybe not as much as something like allocation — but distribution, I think, still does. And if you believe in God, then maybe that takes away some of those problems. Or you have to believe in a particular kind of God. In the past, that might have been more likely in political philosophy. I would probably personally not, even if I personally did, although I don’t.

I also think, however, it leads us on to those kinds of crude senses of talking about equality where people talk about pies. You know, they talk about slices of the pie. And then you get the capitalist who comes along and says, “Oh, but growing the pie!” The problem for me with all of those things is, the pie suggests that there is some kind of fixed outer full set of things, of which you’re taking a portion or a share.

So your portion or your share is in some sense, I think your point around, like, has some kind of quantitative kind of qualities because it is a portion of the share. Now, that might well work for certain kinds of concerns of justice. But I think in particular your point about this relational matter. Or, at least moral status. So if you think of something like equal moral status, as just in the basic sense of we’re all human beings, therefore we’re equal because we’re all a member of ‘being a human’. I’m not really sure where the pie is.

I mean, pie, then, I guess is humankind. But humankind is also the set of people you’re thinking about the relations... I think also some of these really fundamental things that we hold equally, like equal rights and equal freedoms, I also don’t think they fit very neatly into this, into this pie problem, either.

TERESA: No, so, right, so we might say there’s a kind of obvious, maybe a twofold mistake, right? So treating the sort of preexistence of this pie to be divided, that’s sort of, as you say, we talk about equal distribution, it encourages that kind of thinking.

And also your first point, which also implies the existence of some kind of authoritative distributor or decider. And so I think, I know I’m borrowing this phrase from somewhere. I think it’s Jacob Levy. But the idea that it encourages us to think of the state in particular as a kind of machine for distributing justice, right?

REBECCA: Exactly. And particularly when you think about something like rights. I mean, they’re equal just purely in the sense that we all hold the same thing, right? That’s a very different kind of way.

TERESA: But is it even? I mean, so Rogers Smith has a really interesting article published a few years ago where he just makes the point that one of the things that’s appealing about rights talk, I think, is precisely that it would seem to lend itself to this kind of distributive way of thinking about equality. We can have equal rights in the sense of having the same set of rights. But Rogers just points out that very rarely in, you know, in liberal democracies does anyone actually enjoy the exact same set of rights.

REBECCA: Oh, yeah, all I would apply this to is some basic set of moral rights that we each hold in virtue of being human. So something like, we all hold the right not to be tortured regardless — I mean, this is just a matter of moral fact. Not all historians of ideas believe in moral facts! But inasmuch as, whether you believe in it or not, there is a concept of rights, which is, you know, these are the kinds of things we have, as the kinds of creatures we are. They afford perfect moral obligations.

In that sense, something like that set of basic moral rights that we all hold, we don’t hold because they’ve been given to us — unless, like I say, you believe that God created us as we are. And I think it’s weird to think of them as being part of a pie. Because, I mean, I’m just not really sure what the pie is, again, in that situation.

TERESA: Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, I sort of admit in the book that for a somewhat long academic monograph about equality, in which I do touch on debates in contemporary moral and political philosophy about so-called basic equality — so this kind of basic sense in which we are one another’s equals, to use Jeremy Waldron’s phrase — I don’t say very much at all about the basis of equality.

But I think for a lot of moral philosophers in particular, that is the question, because it’s only once we have a sense of the quality, or qualities, in virtue of which we are equal, that we can then know what sort of entailments follow from that. So if we are equal with respect to moral personhood, that would suggest that we are therefore entitled to rights that sort of act as a framework, within which we can exercise and develop that personhood.

So, I mean, that’s absolutely something that a lot of the historical figures I talk about are interested in. And, as you intimate, I mean, the answer for them is that there is an authoritative distributor, namely God [laughter]. And that our equal rights and liberties must have something to do with the fact that we are created in his image.

But for my own part, I’m just still stuck on this prior question of what on earth we mean when we say that we are equal, or one another’s equals. And again, particularly wanting to press on that — what I think is actually a disjunction between being equal, and being an equal. I think that those are just two different things.

REBECCA: Yes, so I mean, I think — I thought about it very hard this week. It’s not a very long period of time! But I think the thing that I am happy to claim is something like, it seems to me that equality is about morally relevant sameness.

So it’s something like, if you think about, I don’t know, equality of height. You know, let’s say you’re taller than me, or that I’m taller than, I don’t know, the child in the street. That doesn’t seem like a morally relevant non-sameness. There are some niche examples in which it might be. Let’s imagine we both grew up in the same country, where certain children, but not all children, aren’t given enough food because they’re members of certain groups or something. But that seems to me like a pretty niche side example. So I’m happy to say, generally, relations of height are not morally relevant.

Whereas, if you get two citizens who have the same legal right to political participation, that seems quite easily like some kind of morally relevant sameness. To the extent that, if one of them has it and the other doesn’t have it, we might say, why is that the case? Shouldn’t it be the case?

So I think, now I know from what you’ve suggested, but also from having read a little sneak preview of your book, that you might not be happy to accept this reliance on sameness. You also might want to ask something like, what’s the difference between sameness and parity?

I think I’m just happy to bite the bullet on sameness playing some role in equality because I think ‘equal’ has to. And to me, equal speaks of a kind of sameness. We can then argue about what the sameness is, or why it’s relevant. I think I’m probably just happy to come down on this morally relevant sameness as some tying-together feature factor.

TERESA: And as a creature of the same kind, Rebecca, I am happy that you are happy. [laughter] That is relevant to me. If you’ll just permit me an excursus just on what you said earlier —

REBECCA: No, that’s nice! [laughter]

TERESA: I’m going to butcher the historical particularities, but I do think it’s relevant. I mean, I think that one of the sources of the very prominent historical idea that people in the past, that the world had been initially inhabited in this golden age by a race of giants, was the fact that sort of people in the dark ages were digging up skeletons that were much, much bigger than they were. And that just had to do with sort of better nutrition in the past than after these — anyway, I’m butchering that. But I think it is interesting, right, to think about the historicity of thinking about human beings as being of the same race, and not a sort of distinct species.

REBECCA: Yeah, and again, as an analytic philosopher, I’m going to be looking for some kinds of conditions or something. I’m probably just happy to say we share certain capacities, even those of us who unfortunately can’t exercise those capacities well. The person in the coma still has the capacity for free agency even if, sadly, they spend the rest of their time in the coma. There are certain of these things which mean that if you meet sufficient of these conditions, therefore you’re an instance of being a human. Therefore we’re all part of the same group.

And just in that really thin basic sense, we are each other’s equals in the sense that we have this sameness. And I do think some basic set of rights and obligations can be derived from this. I know that’s going quite a long way from something quite small. But to my mind, that’s the kind of thinking that’s operating within these notions of — liberal notions of being one another’s equal, I think.

TERESA: I think that’s right. And I think that a very, you know, powerful presentation of that kind of argument is made by Jeremy Waldron in his book One Another’s Equals.

REBECCA: Yes, it’s a good book.

TERESA: It’s a good book. And, you know, Jeremy Waldron is in particular a very close and sympathetic and humane reader of John Locke and the kind of argument that you find in Locke about equality. And I think that Jeremy’s right about that.

But just to go back with you to the point about sameness. I think that you’re right that it’s very difficult to think, or really to speak about equality, without appealing to some sense of sameness. But one of the things that was so striking to me in trying to trace this history of the evolution of ideas of equality into something that we can think of as being broadly egalitarian, in 17th-century England, is the absence of sameness as a specification of equality.

What we get instead — and I think this is really interesting, and actually may get us some way towards the promise of something like a kind of essence of equality — is not sameness. But equality as the absence of difference. So it’s this kind of negative formulation.

So you get this very intriguingly in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where he defines the equal as, in terms of a kind of, what he calls a contradiction by privation. It’s the absence of difference where you would expect to find it. And I like that because it — I mean, it does a number of things. It draws us to this sense of sharing something, but also to the difficulty of specifying, without problems, what that something is. But if we say it’s a kind of absence of difference where we would expect to find it, it simultaneously allows us to gesture towards sameness while recognising diversity.

REBECCA: It’s quite — it’s kind of scientific. It reminds me a little of, I don’t know, falsificationism, or something.

TERESA: Yeah.

REBECCA: Yeah, that’s clever. I kind of —

TERESA: Aristotle was clever. I mean, he’s not always clear.

REBECCA: He was very clever, wasn’t he?

TERESA: He wasn’t clear, but he’s definitely clever. [laughter]

REBECCA: I agree. I think he’s incredibly clever. And I think usually when he comes up with something like that, we should take it pretty seriously, even if we end up thinking it’s wrong. I just think my initial thought off the top of my head is, we’re probably going to come to something pretty similar. If we build up this absence of difference sufficiently that we get something to be able to tie us all together, that might well point to a kind of sameness.

TERESA: Well, so, what’s interesting about the Lockean argument that Jeremy Waldron updates in his own work on basic equality is that, for Locke, it is really that we’re sort of naturally equal, in that we’re all born for liberty, in Locke. So even going back to that sort of sense, “being born for” doesn’t then mean that we are all exactly equal in our realization of that — of that natural faculty. That something could go wrong, that children have a lot of growing to do, et cetera. But that it’s that kind of equal freedom. And that’s the point, and everything kind of flows from there.

I mean, part of what I’m interested to do in the book, though, is pull equality and liberty apart. Not completely, but just to say that, you know, you get these very long-running claims in Western political thought, and also we find them in the Stoics. We find them in Roman law. We find them in natural law theory. About the natural liberty of human beings. And I would say actually, for the most part, claims about equality before early modernity are really claims about equal freedom.

REBECCA: Yes, yeah, that makes sense.

TERESA: But there is still a kind of claim that is made separately from that, including by imperial jurists like Ulpian — so this is roughly 2nd, 3rd century CE — just saying that all humans are equal simpliciter. So you get the statement in the Digest, “Omnes homines aequales sunt”, or at least, according to natural law, all humans are equal. And so I am interested in that kind of ‘all humans are equal full stop’, as kind of a separate claim from the liberty claim. What could that mean? [laughter]

REBECCA: Yeah. I mean, the modern person would come back to this idea of equal standing. But it’s unlikely, or at least it seems to me relatively unlikely, that that thought is being put out in that sense.

TERESA: Yeah, it’s not there in — I mean, that’s not Ulpian’s thought.

REBECCA: Yeah, my limited reading of those — I’ve read some of that stuff in relation to the development of the term ‘rights’. I actually don’t really buy this idea that rights were only thought of in, I don’t know, 1400, and then gradually became the case. [laughter] You know, I believe in moral rights, so I think they obtained even if nobody had ever thought of them.

But I also — I think sometimes when you read commentary on those kinds of thinkers, you get these kinds of claims, like, almost as if everybody was some kind of massive blur, back in Roman and Greek times. That they had no individuality. That people thought of each other as some kind of part of some mass blob. I just struggle to get off the ground on that [laughter]

Maybe I’m just very bad at getting into the head of the ancient Roman person. But also if you read Catullus, I mean, if you read any of these poets, they have a sense of individuality. They fall in love with particular people, right?

TERESA: Absolutely. Well, in my own reading, and I’m by no means expert in this, I am an early modernist by training. But my own reading of these ancient Roman sources for the book is that, you know, the distinctiveness of the claim being made by imperial jurists like Ulpian has to do with this — well, I mean, firstly, Ulpian is making a distinction, and that distinction in the context of a discussion of slavery.

REBECCA: Yes, I assumed —

TERESA: With respect to the civil law, there’s a fundamental distinction between slaves, who are not legal subjects, and non-slaves, who are.

REBECCA: I mean, you get the same move in Aristotle, but to make a different point. Comparisons between the ways in which slaves and non-slaves are treated in order to try to say things about being human. Although sadly Aristotle doesn’t get that one right.

TERESA: Maybe we can come back to Aristotle. But I’m not, I just realised, I’m not because I think he’s — not because I’m saying I think he’s right.

REBECCA: No, no, I know.

TERESA: But just, I think what he’s saying is quite complicated. But with Ulpian, I think by implication what he is saying — and I think this is grist for your mill, Rebecca — is that, okay, well, if some human beings, i.e., slaves, are not legal subjects with respect to the civil law, that means that if all humans are equal with respect to natural law, what Ulpian seems to be saying is all humans are legal subjects with respect to natural law.

And so you might say, okay, well, what does that mean? That doesn’t entail that they have the same set of natural rights in a kind of Lockean sense. That would be ahistorical. But it certainly means for Ulpian that they are all, you know, subject to the benefits and burdens of legal justice.

REBECCA: Yes, that’s right, because —

TERESA: And that seems important.

REBECCA: That seems incredibly important. And I guess this is where you come on to these descriptive - normative points around ‘we are descriptively the same in these certain ways, therefore this gives rise to certain obligations to treat each other the same way’. Because I know that you’re conscious like I’m conscious — or at least I have pretty good reason to believe it — therefore I won’t push you off the cliff. Whereas the rock, I’m not going to feel bad about pushing the rock off the cliff. I don’t really know many things about rocks. But one thing I know that’s different between you and the rock is… And if I can build this kind of picture up sufficiently well, it can just help to inform me about the kinds of ways I should treat the other things in the world that are similar to me, or something like that.

TERESA: Yeah, and so in the Roman worldview, I think there’s actually something quite — I don’t know, there are lots of revolting things about it. But I think something quite intriguing, which is that, you know, amidst all of these different kinds of law — I mean, the Romans had a very distinct sense in which Roman law was, you know, the best law. You know, the lawiest law that was ever lawed, you know! [laughter] But amidst all these different kinds of law —

REBECCA: Making law great again!

TERESA: Exactly. Human beings as such are beings capable of law.

REBECCA: Yes, right.

TERESA: And you know, in the context of, you know, third-century imperial jurisprudence, I mean, this is — you know, Ulpian is a legal adviser to the emperor Caracalla, who is known today, if he’s known at all, not just because he’s one of the crazy ones in the new Gladiator movie [laughter]. But because he issues this incredible edict in the early third century, making all non-enslaved subjects of the Roman Empire, citizens.

So that goes back to rights. So to be a citizen means that you have certain iura, certain rights, in addition to being, you know, subject to and benefiting from the ius civile. So again, you don’t want to push that too far. Not every Roman citizen had the same set of rights, these rights are not human rights, et cetera, et cetera. But that kind of — I do think, in a way, when we talk about basic equality in contemporary anglophone political philosophy and moral philosophy, we’re actually still kind of participating in what is fundamentally a Roman discourse.

REBECCA: Yeah, certainly the distinction between moral rights and legal rights would track something like this. So we might say, like you said, human rights — broadly, human rights kind of track this modern, early modern, sense of natural rights. Rights we hold because we’re all human, something like that. As opposed to the kinds of rights that obtain within certain kinds of political societies, certain legal rights that are afforded.

But also, I have this view, for instance, that I’m not really sure it makes sense to talk about having a right to political participation, if you’re living in a pre-political society. I have a funny locution where I think of it as having a ‘potential right’ to that. That’s a very strange, metaphysically-imbued thought of going about rights. But nonetheless, it seems like it’s the same kind of idea operating. That there’s a distinction between the kinds of obligations and other moral matters that pertain to us as humans, and those that are kind of conventional or arise from certain kinds of rules we put in place, collectively or otherwise.

TERESA: Yeah, I think so one of the things I have long found so perplexing about equality in political philosophy is precisely the way in which moral equality and political equality don’t seem to be held apart sufficiently, in that way.

REBECCA: Yeah, great point.

TERESA: You can also sort of realise that actually the entailments can’t be the same, won’t be the same. But nevertheless, I actually think — and then doing this historical project where I really was trying to excavate the groundwork of these arguments that I was being presented with, in just reading contemporary political philosophy — was that actually, equality doesn’t really become effective or salient as a political ideal, until the 17th century.

Partly because that’s when this distinction between the natural equality of human beings and the sort of legal equality that they enjoy, specifically in England with respect to the common law, is coming apart. And it’s being sort of systematically undone by people who don’t have a lot of training in either natural law or common law. [laughter]

REBECCA: It’s not a coincidence, then, that this is the time of the social contract theory, then.

TERESA: No, no. And I wouldn’t at all want to say that — you know, the social contract’s not my focus — but certainly I’m trying to contextualise influential theorists of the social contract who then have cast quite a long shadow, so Hobbes and Locke.

REBECCA: Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me. I love the social contract stuff. I tend to take a very ahistorical way of thinking about things. But when I learn that actually, you know, there is this great historical context for explaining why some of these thinkers might have thought these particular kinds of things at this particular time, that’s very exciting.

TERESA: Yeah, well, thank you. And I do — I’m sort of a perverse kind of historian of political thought, in that I’m constantly wanting to show that — you know, we tend, people like you and me, Rebecca, we tend to valorise these great philosophers of the past, the Hobbeses, the Lockes. [laughter] But for some reason I keep writing these books where I have to show, well, actually what they’re doing is kind of reacting to, and sort of reacting against, these much more interesting arguments that were made by these people you’ve never heard of.

REBECCA: Yeah, that’s a great point.

TERESA: In the book, the key theorist of equality for me is a guy called John Lilburne, who, if he’s known at all, is known as kind of one of the leaders of the Leveller movement.

REBECCA: He’s from my neck of the woods. He’s from County Durham, I believe.

TERESA: Yeah, yeah, he is! Durham gentry, absolutely. It’s so funny, my other sort of favorite obscure — and less obscure than Lilburne now, thank goodness — but is Mary Astell, who’s also kind of downwardly mobile Newcastle gentry. [laughter] So it’s funny, something was going on there.

REBECCA: It’s very funny thinking of this idea of people from the North being posh. [laughter] Hugo Rifkind wrote a novel about this recently, about whether Scottish people can be posh. It wasn’t a terribly good novel, but this is just an interesting conceptual point.

That said, thinking about conceptual analysis, you just mentioned putting this stuff in historical context. How do you find, as a historian of ideas who is interested in conceptual analysis — how do you go about assigning weight to the different ways people have thought about concepts across time? And to historical definitions more generally?

So I mean, one concern I think I would have if I got really really excited about all the historical stuff is, I might fall into that trap of making historical facts into normative grounds. That’s something that I think, you know, Nozick in the theory of entitlement is entirely guilty of, for instance. I mean, it’s sort of the is-ought problem. But I guess my first question is something like how do you differentiate between the different historical conceptions, if one of the things you’re interested in is the historical context?

TERESA: It’s such a good question. And it’s something I’ve really struggled with in the writing of this book. And I, you know, I like to think I cracked it, but you know, maybe readers will disagree.

REBECCA: I have faith in you. My money’s on you.

TERESA: Well, because one of the things that attracts me to the history of political thought, because I’m not really — I wasn’t trained as a historian. You know, my undergraduate degree was a great books degree. I then did a master’s degree in intellectual history, but then did a PhD in political theory. I mean, I’ve always been happily in the kind of normative presentist camp.

But what attracts me to the history of political thought is just, I think often, is that it helps us recognise the not just conceptual change over time, but also the ongoing kind of politics of language. So one of the things that really interested me in the book was thinking about equality talk, if you will. So, sort of, what are we doing when we’re reaching for the language of equality? What is that language doing for us?

And so I’m trying simultaneously to keep one eye on kind of this, the development of equality talk. And then also to get ahold of all of these different conceptual relations that are being folded under that umbrella. You know, we have this kind of umbrella term ‘equality’, and then all these things that are getting kind of smuggled underneath it. And so what I try very hard to do is to, yes, tidy up, make clear distinctions in places where the historical figures I’m interpreting wouldn’t always have made them themselves. But nevertheless to do so in a way that is honest and faithful and above the table.

And then also to be very careful, then, when I do do that pivot to the kind of returning to present debates, to say — you know, there was a lot of pressure on me at various points during this project to say, okay, Teresa, which is the historical conception of equality that you are recovering that’s going to solve our problems? [laughter] Which should be normatively, you know, normatively binding for our purposes? And I just don’t think that the history of ideas works that way.

What it helps me do is kind of tidy up muddles. And then, you know, be able to speak more precisely about the kinds of claims that we’re making. And my hope, which I suppose is maybe somewhat Pollyanna-ish, is that if we do clarify some of this complexity. If we acknowledge that equality entails these kind of contradictory demands, contradictory claims, and it can’t itself resolve them alone, then we will actually make some progress, in deciding, you know, which demands we agree are worth making.

REBECCA: I really like this. I think this focus on equality talk reminds me a little of ordinary language philosophy. The idea, you know, we’re thinking about how people actually use these terms in order to get at the concepts they’re referring to. This doesn’t mean that the concepts themselves are relativised to the words. What it means is, like, there are some concepts out there. We refer to some of these concepts when we talk about things. And if we suddenly decide that this word should refer to something which is entirely different from the thing that people have been picking out with this term over time, that seems like a mistake. Not because there isn’t some different concept, but because we should come up with a different word for that thing.

TERESA: Exactly.

REBECCA: So it’s about the relation between the words and the concepts. And the concept is the important thing philosophically, substantively. But the words set some boundaries, right? And enable us to do things like make these distinctions. So, yeah, I like this. I like this way of approaching things. It seems to me logical. And also, it picks up truths about the world. Not just in terms of what concepts there are, but also how we’ve thought about them, what kind of wealth of knowledge there has been over time around thinking about the relations between concepts, and particular concepts.

TERESA: Yeah. And I would say this is a sort of comparatively small point, but I think an important one. I mean, we’ve talked already about how Jeremy Waldron appeals to John Locke and trying to explicate the meaning of basic equality today. You know, Nozick also appeals to Locke, but you know, Nozick’s Locke is not necessarily Locke’s Locke. But anyway, setting that aside…

REBECCA: Nozick is very — I love reading Nozick, but Nozick is very, very loose on all of these matters, I think. [laughter]

TERESA: He’s very loose. But I also think it’s relevant that people who are thinking about the meaning of equality today in a more recognizably ahistorical analytic philosophical tradition are nevertheless feeling the need to gesture towards these historical figures. And I think that tells us something about the way that an appeal to the past is always anchoring our equality talk.

And I think that is — that observation is just particularly relevant, I think, in 2026. We’re in this 250th anniversary of independence, thinking about the Declaration of Independence. And so I think, for me at least, it seems especially important, then, that when we are appealing to historical assertions of equality in contemporary arguments, that we’re doing so in a way that is sensitive to the gap between, sort of, our meaning and theirs. So that we are, you know, maybe this is a recognition of their basic equality, Rebecca. [laughter] But yeah, that we’re not, sort of, doing a kind of violence to what they actually said.

REBECCA: Yes, I think this is a nice way of looking at it. You also remind me — you make this point in the sections of the book that I read around the way in which equality talk has sometimes been used to impose hierarchies. We sort of touched on this a little earlier. The kind of, you know, hard-nosed, dry, ahistorical, analytic philosopher in me wants to say: we shouldn’t let that kind of thing get in the way of our conceptual engineering! Just because this has been used for bad ends doesn’t mean it’s bad!

But nonetheless, we do come back against this point that equality, in terms of the term that’s picking out some concept, is nonetheless something that has been used over time. And our usages of it in terms of picking out the concept are undeniably shaped by that. I mean, this is a hard thing to navigate. No matter how ahistorical you are, we are bounded again, in some sense, by the fact that we’ve had some kind of notion of some concept, and we’ve used this particular term to try to get at it.

TERESA: So I think again, for me, this is why it’s so important, for even people who are sort of resolutely ahistorical in the way that they approach these questions, nevertheless to have some awareness of this history. Because, and you know, this is probably, I think it’s — I mean, you know, I’m always wrong [laughter]. But I think that this will probably be one of the more controversial aspects of my argument, is just to say that the idea of equality, and specifically the claim that human beings are equal, has always been much more at home with hierarchy than we like to assume.

And for me, that’s not — I mean, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. So, you know, the idea of human equality, as we’ve already indicated, is extremely ancient. It is a Roman idea, fundamentally. And that means that it is an idea that is tied up, top to bottom, with a highly hierarchical understanding of the universe, of the polity, of the soul, et cetera. And so it’s not — I mean, especially, you know, you’ve moved to America now, so you, this is now your discourse as well.

We tend to want to talk about equality and hierarchy as straightforwardly being somehow antonyms. And thus that, you know, really unjust hierarchies like the American system of chattel slavery that existed side by side with these grand declarations, as in the Declaration of Independence, that all human beings are created equal, as a contradiction. And I just want to say that actually it’s not — that did not seem like a contradiction to people at the time. Although actually, in the case of Jefferson, I think he does see it as a contradiction, and feels complicated about it.

REBECCA: Yes, I think that’s right.

TERESA: But certainly in the 17th century, it’s only then that the idea that equality and hierarchy are contradictions is being, is coming into view. And so that seems to be such a firm and grounding assumption in contemporary discussions of equality, that it makes it all the more interesting, then, to ask, where on earth did that come from? Because in that respect, we’re just in a different world.

REBECCA: Yes. So I think one thing when I was thinking a little about, you know, this idea of the relevant kind of sameness that I think obtains in states of affairs that are equal. I feel like it’s states of affairs that are equal in this sameness sense between members of particular groups.

So, for instance, whether that group is all of humankind, and you say, you know, we all have this sameness in the sense that we have the capacity for free agency. Or it’s two citizens of the same nation, and we’re asking this question about why does one of them have the legal right to vote and the other doesn’t? And, of course, there are again some non-morally-relevant explanations for that — one of them is a baby! But most times, you know, that’s going to be something.

It then strikes me, thinking within this — so, I’m happy, again, to just say something like the fact that we are members of this big group of humanity means, therefore, we have some moral imperative to think about the instances in which members of our smaller groups have morally relevant differences. So, it’s something like that initial sameness, this very thin sense — I want to call it equal moral status or something, but we can argue about what it is — then kind of gives us this obligation to be thinking hard about instances when smaller groups aren’t equal in what seem like morally relevant ways.

I then have this question though about, like, does that mean that questions of equality don’t obtain between, say, humans and animals? Is it irrelevant to say I’m talking about equality when I think about the fact that, I don’t know, certain kinds of animals are treated really badly? Is that nothing to do with equality? Is it just to do with, say, justice? Although, again, some people are going to say justice is the domain of rights.

I mean, it feels to me like I can get out of it in some sense just by saying, well, I can do the same kind of move, and say it’s relevant to considerations of equality between humans and animals that we’re not the same in this basic sense that we are because we’re all part of the same group. But I wonder if that’s fudging it. I mean, does equality pertain to relations between humans and animals? The fact that, you know, people keep cats in their house and don’t let them out, whereas they do let their kids out. Is that a matter of equality, or is it just matters of other things?

TERESA: Okay well, I think I — you know, I can’t say I’ve thought about this systematically, but let me sort of venture a couple thoughts.

REBECCA: Sorry, I know it’s a weird. It’s a kind of slightly weird point. It’s just been playing in my mind a little.

TERESA: No it’s, well, I think partly what we’re doing when we’re importing equality language into discussions about animal ethics is that we are trying to say that, you know, animals ought to be sites of moral concern. And very often I think that equality talk just gets kind of inserted as a sort of, as a sign of moral seriousness [laughter].

REBECCA: Yes, that’s a great point. Morality is clearly more than just equality, right?

TERESA: Exactly. Right, and that would be my second point, which is that part of the problem we’re confronting is just our allergy to hierarchy in morality. Which, I just — I think that part of what I want to say is that if you care about equality, you should also care about hierarchy. And you should care about ethical hierarchy. That we can think of different hierarchical arrangements as being equality-preserving and promoting in some, in certain respects. And then others as being destructive of equality in other respects.

And I think probably what we’re really concerned about, in discussions of animal rights, is that — you won’t like this, maybe, because I’m going to go take a hard, hard turn into virtue ethics. [laughter] But I think it’s because we think that treating animals cruelly, and as though they are not sort of beings of moral concern, corrupts or perverts us as human beings, ourselves. So it will come into the way that we treat other human beings. And also, it’s simply not behavior becoming the kind of creature that a human being is. So, that’s a very old-fashioned way [laughter].

REBECCA: Sometimes, people say things like, oh I don’t know, “You’re wanting to blame this person for doing this thing to this other person, but animals do those kinds of things all the time!” You know, the animal, you get this —

TERESA: Right, right. We’re not prosecuting ducks for rape.

REBECCA: Yeah, exactly. Or in discussions of vegetarianism, people say, “You think you shouldn’t eat the cow, but does that mean that the lion shouldn’t eat the cheetah?” And it’s like, well yeah, as long as lions don’t have a sense of moral obligation, don’t have any awareness of these things, we can’t hold them blameworthy! This is quite easy to get out of those things.

And yes, I think if we don’t make those categorical distinctions, we’re at risk both of holding the animals responsible for something they just simply don’t have the capacity to be held responsible for. But yes, also effectively risking bloating our own — these kind of important matters that humans should be attending to.

Your talk of hierarchy, though, does make me think again of Elizabeth Anderson. So I think Anderson over-focuses on hierarchy. I don’t know if you read these new pieces she brought out last year —

TERESA: No…

REBECCA: About the psychological struggles of bringing about equality, in relation to our kind of desire for dominance, and how this is at odds with our desire to be treated with equal esteem. I just generally —

TERESA: I ought to have read these!

REBECCA: Yeah, I don’t know. Have a skim read. I’m not sure I got a massive amount from them. But it reminds me also — there’s this paper she wrote where she argues something like Adam Smith is not a radical egalitarian because he doesn’t sufficiently, like, smash down any particular, or all of the hierarchies. I think this is wrong, A, because I think if there is any radical egalitarian in the history of certainly that period of time, I think it’s Adam Smith, because he’s massively radical in terms of thinking everybody is capable of achieving some sense of moral judgment. This seems to me like, contextually, incredibly radical. But it also just seems to be a weird standard for her to apply. That you only count as a radical egalitarian if you destroy one particular hierarchy, or attack all of them, or something. It just seems to me over-focused on hierarchy.

TERESA: It’s an interesting thing. So I think that — so I haven’t read these pieces, but I think some of these thoughts are implicit and explicit in earlier things that she’s written. I mean, she says for instance of John Lilburne, my favorite Leveller [laughter]. Or the Levellers in general, that they, that the implications of their views, I think specifically it’s — so, Lilburne in his celebrated Postscript, Containing a Generall Proposition, of 1646, says that every individual man and woman has been created equal and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty.

So there are a number of remarkable things, here. But the most obvious one is that women are included, and included as individuals. So Anderson says of this, well, the feminist implications of this are clear, even if Lilburne, or indeed Locke — so I think she actually does talk about Locke in a footnote at that point — like, ought to have seen it. So that, I think, is an example of the kind of historically uninformed sort of reading of these past figures that I’m interested in.

But in a way, it also undercuts, I think, the radicalism of what Lilburne is doing with respect to women. So most men at that point didn’t have votes. So the idea that, but what Lilburne is saying here — and I think maybe this will appeal to you, Rebecca — is that women too have voices by nature, and ought to have a voice in their government. And so they don’t understand that in terms narrowly of a voice in the sense of having a vote, but having a voice in the sense of having the right to petition parliament.

REBECCA: Yes.

TERESA: And so that’s actually what you get in the Levellers, which is really radical. But again, if you sort of just put this idea that, like, equality is always and everywhere opposed to hierarchy, and to distinctions in legal or political status, you’re going to miss this incredibly cool and important point that is being made.

REBECCA: It is. And we should celebrate when people in the past managed to get things right, within the context of other people not. It’s like Adam Smith, again, not getting things right.

I do have time, that said, for constructing arguments from historical thinkers when they didn’t manage to achieve that. So I think you can say things like: Aristotle had all of the bits, he just didn’t put them together right. It doesn’t really tell us anything about Aristotle, though. On some level, it’s like, I don’t really care about who Aristotle was that much. I mean, I do obviously have those kinds of — I have intrigue about it. I hope one day they’ll find all of those lost works, and we can find out, you know, more about what he thought.

TERESA: Aristotle’s dialogues. Can you imagine?

REBECCA: Yeah, I know, it’d be amazing, wouldn’t it! Some of that, you know, they’re now opening up all the scrolls with clever AI and stuff. You’ve just got to hope that somewhere they’re going to find all this work.

TERESA: Well, speaking of AI, though, there — just, not to divert, but just to revert to a point made earlier about animals. I do also think that this thinking about equality is relevant to the case of AI.

REBECCA: Yes!

TERESA: And again, I suspect that many of the debates about AI personhood are actually kind of displaced debates about human ethics, and sort of what kind of people we become when we — when we treat AI as a kind of slave. And there I actually think that Aristotle’s discussion of natural slavery is really relevant.

REBECCA: Yes, agreed, I think — and Josh Ober’s written some good stuff on this, too. I think this is a really rich thing to look into. It also actually comes back to this point about distinctions. I think one thing that AI is very useful for is it probably helps us refine some of our thinking around human capacities, because we have something new to compare against. You know, for the first time in human history, or at least that we know of, we have some kind of non-human thing that we can talk with.

I mean, this is — this blows my mind every day. I don’t think it’s a person. I don’t think it’s got rights. I don’t think it’s ever going to be conscious. I don’t believe the silicon substrate is going to make it human, or any of those — although I’m interested in reading this stuff. But the idea that there is now something non-alive, something non-human, even just that, that I can have a conversation with, helps me to define down further, and refine down further, some of my views about what a particularly human capacity and capability is.

TERESA: Yeah, exactly, the things a human being can do that this other non-human intelligence can’t. But here again, as a historian, I’d want to say, but Rebecca, we have this whole history of thinking on precisely this question! Which is the thinking about the distinction between human beings on the one hand and angelic beings on the other.

REBECCA: Yes!

TERESA: A point I sort of make in passing in the book, but I would like to think about more is just the — this is another point about language and conceptual development — so just the strange circumlocutory phrase we use in English, ‘human being’. It’s very strange, right? Why do we use this phrase as opposed to simply saying ‘human’?

REBECCA: I have a philosopher friend who says you should always use ‘human being’ because ‘human’ is an adjective. I don’t think this is like…

TERESA: Well, that’s not correct [laughter]. But it’s interesting because they’re getting at a kind of — it seems like there’s a kind of moral valence to saying ‘human being’ that seems to recognise us as a kind of creature. And again, I’m afraid that it’s a lot of Christian theology in the background, here.

But yeah, so human beings are understood in contrast, in scholastic philosophy, with angelic beings. And the idea that is in the scale of creation, we are, you know, alike in being intelligent creatures, but unalike in the fact that we are corporeal and angels are not. And therefore, because this is also a kind of Christian Platonist worldview, that means they’re superior to us. But again, in trying to determine what a human being is like, I do think that there are really interesting parallels in thinking about angels and AI.

REBECCA: I love that. I always learn something new when I talk with you. I didn’t — I had not thought about the context of ‘human being’ being a comparison with ‘non-human being’ in the sense of angels. That’s incredible.

Okay, I think we need to wrap up. So I have a final question, which I think may get us somewhere down the line of coming up with some kind of attempt, or stab at a definition, at least in the first stage of going towards that. Which is, I’m going to ask you what kind of thing you think equality is. So you know, you mentioned before, I think, the word ‘ideal’. You said it’s some kind of — I wrote it down — something like a political ideal, I think you said. We also talked about it maybe being a moral ideal.

Another term that people often use, within philosophy anyways, they might call it a value. When philosophers talk about ‘a value’, they generally mean something that has value of some kind. It’s a bit of a weird locution. Normal human beings don’t say this so much.

Then, I think I’ve posited the idea in some sense that I think it’s a state of affairs that obtains when there’s some morally relevant sameness.

What kind of thing? And of course, it could be more than one thing. If we were to go about thinking what equality is, it seems like a good starting point is thinking, you know, what kind of ballpark of kind of thing it is. Are you happy just to say it’s an ideal?

TERESA: Yeah, so I would preface it by saying equality isn’t just one kind of thing. And I think that there is a way in which equality is a value, in the way that we’ve been discussing and, you know, but just to gesture towards that. But the kind of, the sense, the idea of equality that exercises me is, yeah, equality as a political ideal.

And as a political ideal, then, I think equality comprises, or I should say that equality combines, several of the different aspects we’ve been discussing. So it combines a sense of indifference as a kind of procedural fairness, which is germane particularly to the rule of law. Equality combines a sense of balance — so, within a kind of, under conditions of political equality, no one part of the polity ought to be able to dominate or consistently outweigh another.

REBECCA: Nice.

TERESA: So that refers to individuals in considerations of power, but also to social groups. And then finally, and again mentioned before, equality as a political ideal includes a very definite sense of the value of social parity. So even though we may have all these differences, and we may be unequal in myriad ways, nevertheless we can fundamentally stand as peers, or equals, within the Constitution, right? I like the Leveller sense of that having something very importantly to do with voice. Having a voice, having a voice that counts.

REBECCA: I like that.

TERESA: But again, so that would be my sort of threefold definition.

REBECCA: Yeah, that’s good. So we have equality combining procedural indifference, group and individual balance, and social parity — something like that. That seems to me good.

If, however, the little kid on the street comes up to you and says, “Hey, Teresa, I hear you’ve written this great book about equality. I need to go into school now and talk to them about what equality is…” Is there some simpler version? I mean, you actually just said “standing as peers”. I mean, I don’t think it covers absolutely everything, but I think it gets beyond some of those kinds of objections we addressed at the beginning.

TERESA: I think that’s right. So I, yeah, as a precis, let’s say “standing as peers and equals.” And then, you know, in the book I spell out sort of the ways in which those are different ideas.

REBECCA: I also, I mean, I think on some level we might get into circularity, if we say that equality is standing as equals. But I think if we say standing as peers, we might avoid that, at least.

TERESA: Yeah, or we might — yeah I don’t want to complicate things too much [laughter], but again, going back to that sense of, is there a kind of overarching meaning of equality that runs right through? I mean, I talked about equality as absence in Aristotle, but I think Aristotle is working there with a very influential image of equality. And that image of equality is the balanced scale.

So, the idea of the scale or balance, in which the pans are on a level. And so, the idea of kind of being on a level.

REBECCA: Nice. Being on a level.

TERESA: I think that is really important.

REBECCA: Being on a level brings us back to John Lilburne, again. The hero — the hero of the day.

TERESA: And the Levellers.

REBECCA: And the Levellers.

TERESA: For me, I agree with Liz Anderson that the Levellers are in a way the original egalitarians. So I am, I should say, and having sort of criticised aspects of her argument, I am very much in agreement with her on the salience of that historical example.

REBECCA: I think she’s a really interesting philosopher, as well. Just because I’m a little down on her late work doesn’t mean I don’t think she’s worth reading, generally.

Anyway, thank you so much. This has been fantastic. I feel like we’ve got a long way on one of the hardest concepts there is out there. So thank you so much for joining me, Teresa.

TERESA: Thanks for having me. You know, the great thing about finishing a book, and starting to talk about it, is that you can actually figure out what it was about the whole time. [laughter]

REBECCA: I love that. All my listeners, you’ve got to go get this book. It’s brilliant, Teresa is brilliant. And it’s going to be — it’s going to change the world. Like the Levellers! [laughter]

TERESA: Thanks, Rebecca.

This is the sixty-sixth in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.

1) I spent last weekend in one of my favourite American cities, St Louis. Among other excellent experiences including a ball game, I attended a philosophical half-day conference on T.S. Eliot, run by my friend . In preparation, I read a load of Eliot poems, and a few of his works of literary criticism.

I particularly enjoyed the poem Marina, which I don’t think I’d read before, though I recognised this wonderful line: “The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships”. I love it when Eliot describes boats and the sea. And I love his use of language, more generally. I often find the poems frustrating on a deeper level, however. Too complex! Too layered! Too much! And I really didn’t like The Frontiers of Criticism (1956).

In this somehow classic essay, Eliot discusses what literary criticism is, who does it, how it changes over time, and why it matters. He makes some clever points, including a nice claim about how the reading of literary criticism affects the writing of literary criticism. But his supposedly big conclusions about the relation between the concepts of ‘enjoying’ and ‘understanding’ fall flat. “To understand a poem comes to the same thing as to enjoy it for the right reasons”, he tells us, in a moment of full-on clarity — before going right back to talking about these concepts as totally separate.

There’s also a lack of clarity, throughout this essay, about the relevance Eliot thinks we should afford to the intentions of a poem’s author when attempting to determine truths about the meaning of its content. (Hardly an under-discussed topic in aesthetics!) Sometimes, he seems to dismiss this as irrelevant. Then suddenly, he’s making fun of people for trying to tell him what his poems are about! Yet various of his arguments here, as much as they count as arguments, unsurprisingly hinge on this unclarified central matter.

Of course, perhaps you want to tell me that the real problem is that I am expecting the standards of the analytic philosopher, when I am reading the work of a poet. That would be unfair to poets! But also, don’t forget that Eliot wrote a philosophy PhD thesis at Harvard, even though he didn’t take the exam required to attain the degree.

I tried last weekend to find and read Eliot’s PhD thesis, but constrained by time, the best I could do was skim-read a 1967 article about it. If the author of the article, George Whiteside, is correct — and it’s an exegetical article, featuring lots of quotations from the thesis — then Eliot’s focus was on appearance and reality. He was interested in what there is, and how we can know about it. He was inspired by F.H. Bradley’s monism and idealism.

I found myself wishing that Eliot could have read J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia (1962) before addressing all this. I found myself, while reading Eliot’s attempts to define ‘objects’ and ‘ideas’, thinking of the looseness of his literary criticism. But the conference was excellent. We saw the house where the teenaged Eliot sort-of lived; we read Eliot poems until late.

2) Today, I enjoyed this short post by my friend Philip Goff about William James on “drunkenness as a mystical experience”. Under the excuse of post-drunkenness, Philip’s post consists mostly in a quotation from The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). The quotation itself features drunken-type writing: over the top, overly confident, slightly veering, fun but untrustworthy. This part will stick with me, however:

Not through mere perversity do men run after [drunkenness]. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognise as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning.

Now, I don’t buy the preceding claim James makes about accessing truth through drunkenness — though this is owing, in large part, to the general problems I have with his pragmatist account of truth. And I’ll put aside his talk of mysticism and tragedy, too. But I like the idea of limited drunkenness as an option for experiencing excellence, at least when tied to the value of certain kinds of alcoholic drinks.

Choosing to drink good wine, for instance, in part for its delicious taste and in part for its enjoyable effects, seems to me not only rational, but one of the many valuable options on offer for spending some time. Alongside concerts and literature, as James says. (Good old pluralism!) Sure, you have to be clear about the personal point past which drinking degrades your capacity for making good choices. But some drunkenness can come sooner than that.

3) I was sorry to hear of the death of Robert Skidelsky. Here’s an excellent anecdote from his Money and Government (2018):

4) A few days ago, and I launched our new podcast, The Street Porter and the Philosopher, with a season of episodes on the arts and liberalism. This podcast is part of our project, which is dedicated to refocusing classical liberalism on the arts and philosophy alongside economics.

In the first episode, Henry talks with the excellent Sunil Iyengar about the value of reading. Is there a reading crisis in America? What’s the relation between reading rates and liberal culture? Watch, listen, or read, to find out!

Here’s a little extract:

OLIVER: I wanted to get to this because there are a lot of surveys being pushed in the media about the decline of reading, whether they’re your data, other people are doing surveys. There’s so much of this. There are so many graphs showing, “Oh my goodness, it’s going down.” One thing I’m getting from you in this conversation is that we don’t know everything we would need to know, and that we can make some tentative conclusions, but we should be open to the idea that the real picture might not be quite what it looks like.

IYENGAR: I think you’re right. The only thing I would caution about is we’ve been asking the question, in some ways, the same way for years and years and years.

OLIVER: That, do you read a book?

IYENGAR: Yes. Do you read a book of any type? It could have been any kind, et cetera. Now, of course, the ways people read have expanded enormously since 40 years ago or 30 years ago or 20 years ago. I think there is something to the trend line. There is a marked decline in the general population. Again, the thing to remind people is, it’s the general population.

People often say, “People are still reading. I’m seeing people on the metro reading Middlemarch.” I’m like, “That’s great. Where do you live. What’s your zip code?” I think you have to talk about the entire country, and it’s a pretty large country. If you see the rates eroding over a period of many years and somewhat—there was a blip here and there, but it’s pretty much a particular direction—I think it’s worth maybe sitting up a little more, then say, a poll, which is a snapshot survey, and it says that things seem to be fine because 80 percent of people are reading.

I do think there’s a lot of nuance, though, that we have to unpack. There’s a lot more we’d like to know as researchers, and I think there’s a lot the policymakers could know. I would say there’s a preponderant amount of these data showing that fewer and fewer people are reading works of literature, as we broadly define it, and also books in general.

It’s a great discussion, and we have much more to come. Watch out for a new episode every other Tuesday, for next few months..

5) Yesterday, I finally went to the Udvar-Hazy Center. I’ve been putting this off for various reasons — one of which being that I both wanted and didn’t want to see the Enola Gay. It hangs there all shiny yet ordinary, its movie poster name at a jaunty angle. I think I wish I hadn’t seen it. The only comparable experience I’ve had is visiting Auschwitz. Here’s a link to something I wrote here a while back about the importance of talking openly about the horrors of nuclear war.

This is the sixty-fifth in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.

1) The other day, I rewatched my favourite political speech, because I’d been talking with a friend about what RFK might have been like as a president. It’s the extemporised speech he gave the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination, in April 1968.

It’s a speech in favour of treating individual wrongs as individual wrongs, rather than as the basis for group conflict. It has strength as a statement of liberal values, as a well-judged attempt to relieve tension, and as a thing of beauty. Watch it or read it, not least for the Aeschylus.

On topic, I recently bought a collection of MLK’s writing on love, and you can expect to hear about it soon. A while back, I started reading the Jonathan Eig book about him, but found it nowhere near as good as Eig’s fantastic Ali: A Life (2018). I find boxing morally concerning and know nothing about it except for what I learned from that book, but I couldn’t stop reading, and particularly valued the way Eig situated Muhammad Ali’s life within political America.

2) I was thinking yesterday about John Simmons’ classic article “Denisons” and “Aliens”: Locke’s Problem of Political Consent (1998), so I had a quick reread of it last night. I like Simmons’ writing on Locke generally, and also his book on justification and legitimacy.1

This paper is mainly about tacit consent. That is, the idea, found particularly in Locke, that an important kind of consenting — a kind of consenting that is taken to morally underpin both state power and personal political obligation — can be given non-’expressly’.

I’ve thought a lot about the relation between political consent and obligation, and will write about it here at length, sometime. But, for now, the thing that made me think of this paper was a conversation I had with a friend about the legal protections a state should afford to resident and visiting non-citizens. I thought in particular about this section:

“While there were undoubtedly larger numbers of explicit oath-takers in Locke’s day than there are in our own, in neither time have these express consenters constituted more than a small minority of the permanent residents, and in neither time have these express oaths really even been taken to be what confers membership in the society (except, perhaps, in the case of the naturalization oaths taken by aliens). So most denizens appear to be thrown by Locke into the same group of non-members that include foreigners on vacation in the state.”

The question about what the members of a political society are owed and owe, and the question about what makes someone count as a member of such a society — indeed, as different kinds of members — are ever-pressing. They are, of course, being deliberated in America, at the moment, in the ongoing Trump v. Barbara Supreme Court case. You can read about that here.

3) Franny and Zooey (1961) brings together a couple of stories J.D. Salinger wrote for the New Yorker. Together, these stories outline the limited world of two siblings, now in their twenties, both messed up by early success on a TV show for genius children. We’re so clever, they tell each other, and imply to everyone else. Nobody gets it! Yet they are flailing — pushing away the opportunities and the people they care about.

I’ve been delaying reading this book since I was about 11, and fully obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye (1951). I was sure back then that Franny and Zooey wouldn’t be as good, but also that I should save it up to read. These were bad reasons to delay! But somehow they held until last weekend.

I was right about it not being as good. Franny and Zooey is all over the place. Occasionally, this is great. The opening Franny chapter feels urgent, for instance. The tension with the show-off boyfriend is pretty unforgettable. The chicken sandwich! And less often, this all-over-the-placeness is really fantastic. There’s a long scene in which Zooey is talking with his mother in the bathroom — an unbearable scene, for the most part — with a few astonishing moments. The way he talks to her! Against the blandness of the everyday items! Then a little later, the same, occasionally, in the sitting room.

Nevertheless, when the word ‘phoney’ finally hits, maybe three-quarters of the way in, it’s with a second-hand hit. Franny and Zooey feels like the attempt of a great writer to recreate his great book, in a more grown-up way. It comes across as childish.

4) I just started reading One L (1977), Scott Turow’s famous chronicling of his first year at Harvard Law School. As interesting as I find the idea of law, and as much as I love reading Hart and Raz and all those guys, and as many excellent lawyer friends as I have, I’ve never really understood why anyone would want to go down that route.

A few chapters in, it’s clear this book isn’t going to help with that. But it’s a great read. And it’s crucial to my ongoing attempt to understand this country. Some of it is also very funny:

“Look,” he told me, “if I was going to law school, I’d be going because I wanted to meet my enemy. I think that’s a good thing to do. And if I wanted to meet my enemy, I would go to Harvard, because I’d be surest of meeting him there.”

5) Perhaps this wasn’t the best week to go see Project Hail Mary. What could rival the real-life photos sent from Artemis? I went a few days ago, nonetheless.

I’m afraid I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about. I’d found the book too annoyingly written to finish. And while I stuck out the whole film pretty happily, it clearly can’t count as great, on any level. It’s not beautiful, the dialogue is limited, the story predictable. Sure, it’s fun, and moving at times. But there are so many vastly better space films.

That said, I’m assuming I napped through the part where Ryan Gosling attempted to communicate with the amoebas. And maybe that was the best bit! I mean, surely when he’d found it so astonishingly easy to converse with the first living thing he came across up there, he must have given the poor amoebas a bit of a chance.

This is the lightly-edited transcript of a keynote talk I recently gave at the Flight Software Workshop at Johns Hopkins APL.

What is the philosophy of space, and why is it so important?

So yeah, I’m a philosopher. I don’t know how many of you are interested in philosophy, have studied philosophy, have thought about philosophy. As I’ll talk about in a moment, one definition of philosophy — or at least one definition of what it is to be a philosopher, or one approach to thinking about who counts as a philosopher — sorry, we philosophers fuss a lot about our language! But one answer is to say that everyone does philosophy. I think this is true on some level. I think as human beings we are interested in the kinds of questions that we philosophers think count as philosophical. But I’ll talk a little about some other ideas of what makes somebody count as a philosopher.

I’m also going to talk about what I see as an emerging field within philosophy — I’ll talk about what that might mean, too — which I think of as the philosophy of space. I’m going to talk about why I think it’s particularly exciting. And when I ask why is it so important, one answer to that could purely be that it’s intellectually exciting. Or it’s particularly intellectually exciting.

How do you become a space philosopher?

But let me start by telling you a little about how I got into doing this thing I like to think of as space philosophy. To calling myself a space philosopher! I was associated for a short amount of time with a very cool space firm that my friend Gabriel in England runs, and I had this title, Consulting Space Philosopher. One of the reasons I agreed to get involved was I thought I’m never going to get an opportunity to have such a cool job title ever again. So, I like to have this on my website, on my CV: Consulting Space Philosopher.

So, how did I get into this? Well, I’m a philosopher. I have a philosophy PhD. I have a philosophy job. Most of my friends who are philosophers have these cool origin stories about how they got into philosophy. It’s usually things like, I was on a train — sorry, this is a British person’s story — I was on a train, and I saw this beautiful girl reading this book by Nietzsche — it’s always Nietzsche, particularly if it’s a boy reading the book — and I thought maybe I should go and chat to them.

Another of my friends was, like, oh I bought this book — again, at a train station! I mean this tells us something about at least the kinds of British people that go on to be philosophers. So, I bought this book at the train station, and it was Plato’s Republic. They have these great stories. Or, you know, there was this visionary professor at college, and he told me I should take a philosophy class.

I don’t have one of those stories because both of my parents were philosophers. So I don’t really remember not knowing this term ‘philosophy’. Of course, knowing the term is very different from knowing what it means. And one of the really big questions in philosophy is ‘what is philosophy?’. We’re going to come on to that in a minute.

So I was always interested in philosophy, because I guess as a kid you have some kind of interest in what your parents do. Also our dinner conversations were highly philosophical. I grew up thinking that showing respect is making objections to your friends’ arguments, because that’s what you should do. I learned relatively quickly, when I got a little older, that sometimes your friends don’t like that. Which maybe then is a good way of choosing who your friends should be, at least if you’re like me and you like talking about philosophy.

So I rebelled against this — the family tradition, the family business — in the most middle-class English way you can imagine. By going to Cambridge to study music. This didn’t end up being much of a rebellion, however, because the thing I was interested in then was the philosophy of music, which is a branch of aesthetics. And then eventually some years down the line, I gave in entirely and did a PhD in political philosophy. I’m now lucky to work at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, as a philosopher. I’m Philosophy Senior Research Fellow there, and amongst the cool things I get to do is run a philosophy working group. In fact, I gave a little preview of this talk to my colleagues, the members of the philosophy working group, yesterday. So any of the things I say that are wrong, you can attribute to them.

How did I get into doing the space philosophy, though? Whatever this thing is. Well, when I finished writing my PhD, which was on moral property rights — I might talk a little later about the distinction between legal obligations and moral obligations, similarly legal rights and moral rights. Back then, I was very interested in this question about why one particular person can be justified in owning something to the exclusion of everyone else. It seemed to me this was a very important question if you wanted to think about things like capitalism. I’m a massive instinctive capitalist, but I had this doubt about why is it that this particular person can be justified in excluding everyone else from this thing that they own.

Because it’s oftentimes not just the thing that you own — the particular thing — that you might be excluding people from. It might be access to that set of things. So, say there’s only one tree in the village, and you own the tree. It’s not just that the other people can’t own that particular tree. It’s that, at least if they stay in the village and want to own a tree, they can’t own any tree. There are some objections you might raise to that. But these are the kinds of questions I was very interested in.

So, I’d written this PhD on this stuff, and then a friend of mine at a British think tank — I used to work for various British think tanks — said, “Hey Rebecca, do you want to write something about property rights in space?”, because he knew that I loved space. One of the other cool things about having philosopher parents was that whenever they had an interest, or I had an interest, we’d have philosophical conversations about it. And my dad really loved space. He started off studying science, also at Cambridge, but then he shifted over to history and then philosophy. But he retained an interest in space all of his life, and he knew much more about the science of it than I do. I try to read that stuff, but he actually fully got it — as much as any philosopher does. We need help from the scientists most of the time, even him!

Writing about space as a philosopher

So I retained this interest in space, and remembered these great conversations I’d had with my dad. I also just think that if anything is inherently cool, it must be space. So my friend said, hey do you want to write something on property rights in space? You could apply some of this philosophical theory you’ve been thinking about and developing? And I was, like, yeah sure.

So I wrote this quite philosophically heavy paper for this British think tank, the Adam Smith Institute. And then because it was a bit of a ‘quiet news weekend’ — it was a weekend in the summer, with nothing going on politically — it got on the front page of a few newspapers, with these funny headlines. They said things like, ‘Economist says we should sell off the moon!’. Of course, my problem with that was not that the model I was proposing was actually a highly nuanced Lockean and Georgist renter supply and demand model, rather than the idea that technically we should sell off the moon. I was just annoyed that I got described as an economist rather than a philosopher. But most of my best friends were economists, so I thought I guess I’ll take that.

Then, good things came out of this. Aside from the fact that I have these copies of The Daily Star with my paper on the front page. If you know anything about the Daily Star, The Daily Star is famous for having celebrity gossip. It’s not a very serious newspaper, in the usual sense of serious. But because it’s the Daily Star, it turns out it actually has some pretty good stuff on space! Which is kind of funny, but anyway they wrote some stuff about my paper on the front of their newspaper. And then the FT, and some other more quote-unquote serious places started showing an interest.

And then from this I got invited to do some more space philosophy stuff, I wrote some more space philosophy stuff, and I made it a little part of what I do as a political philosopher. I think that seems like a reasonable thing, but even if it wasn’t reasonable I find it quite amusing.

You can see on the slide some of the other things I’ve written. I recently wrote a paper for the economics journal, Economic Affairs — I’ll talk about that in a moment — on the value of space activity. That is, what might be valuable for humans in doing stuff in space? I then wrote a piece for the American Philosophical Association blog on the value of private companies doing stuff in space — that is, people who are parts of private companies doing stuff in space. Also, my friend Casey at the Planetary Society, who gave a keynote here last year, invited me to be on his cool podcast. We talked a lot about philosophy in space. He’s a very philosophical guy, and you can see on the slide how to find it.

And then, a bit of the practical stuff I’ve done. When I worked for this investment company in the UK, I ran something we called a policy forum. This was an opportunity to get interesting people — politicians, academics, people from the companies that the investment company invested in — to get them around the table and talk about interesting things. So, I did one of these on space. That was kind of fun. And then at Mercatus, I’ve been running some — okay, so far I’ve only had one, but I’m going to run some more — space policy lunches. So, doing a similar kind of thing. Bringing people together, across what you might think of as the space community, to talk about interesting policy and philosophical topics. So, that’s a bit of stuff about me. I’m now going to turn to what this thing might be that I’m referring to as ‘the philosophy of space’.

What are the core philosophical domains?

First, just quickly to run through what we might think of as core philosophical domains. This, of course, is a massive topic of contestation for philosophers. People who do philosophy are just like people who do other things, in that they tend to have an over-interest in their particular interests. It’s a bit like, you know, you ask a problem about the world to a lawyer, and they give you a lawyer’s answer. If you ask a philosopher what the core philosophical domains are, they’ll say the domain that they work on.

But the traditional way of approaching this would be to say that the core philosophical domains are the following. Metaphysics — this is this question of what kinds of things exist in the world. Epistemology, which is usually described as the theory of knowledge. So, stuff about what does it mean to know something? What’s the difference between knowing something and believing something? Then, philosophy of mind, which is broadly the relation between the mind and the body, sometimes thought about in terms of the mind and the brain.

Then, logic. Wilfred Hodges, who wrote a very good book on logic — I looked at it this morning, to see how he defined logic. I’m sure some of you will have a much better definition than I could possibly give on this. I’m not a logician, although like most philosophers, I took some logic classes when I was studying. Wilfred Hodges says logic is the study of “consistent sets of belief”. I can think of some objections to that. It’s what we do as philosophers — we think about objections all of the time.

Then, ethics and moral theory, which is broadly how we should behave to each other. There’s a famous distinction, which the great English twentieth-century philosopher Bernard Williams talked about, here. He wanted to say that ethics and moral theory are different things. Whereas, a lot of people think they’re the same thing. That these terms can be used interchangeably. But broadly, some people think something like: morality, or moral theory, is around our obligations to one another; ethics has also these questions about what it is to live a good life. I’m personally pretty happy to use the terms interchangeably.

Then, political philosophy, which I guess is the heart of what I do, which is broadly questions about political society. There’s a lot of stuff about how do we get into a political society? What is the difference between being in a political society, and what some philosophers have called a ‘state of nature’? These kinds of questions are very interesting if you’re interested in thinking about space.

Next, aesthetics, which is broadly the study of beauty. It’s also to do with value. Sometimes, you group some of these philosophical domains in terms of what we call ‘value theory’. And then philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, bring us on to some of these ‘philosophy of X’ things. Philosophy of language, you can tell what that is straight away. And philosophy of science.

There are some other classic ‘philosophy of’ domains. Some of my jurisprudence friends would be a bit annoyed that I didn’t include philosophy of law in the core philosophical domains. Philosophy of law deals with things like what is the difference between law and morality. It’s a great philosophical domain. Then, philosophy of religion is about arguments for God, that kind of thing. And then I’m very interested in the philosophy of economics. On some level, my stuff about property rights you could think of as philosophy of economics.

Then, there are some newer topic areas of interest. I’m sure you’ll all know — have read stuff, even — about AI ethics. Sometimes, we think more broadly of the philosophy of AI. And there was a field which became quite popular in the last couple decades of the twentieth century called bioethics. Now, there is some debate about whether we should really think about these things in these ways. So, is bioethics something separate from ethics, or is this just ethics being applied to biological fields?

You can ask the same kind of thing about philosophy of space. In fact, one of the philosophers I talked with about this yesterday said, “Oh, but Rebecca, don’t you think that philosophy of space — i. e. the questions about stuff in outer space, stuff to do with outer space that is philosophical — aren’t they just exactly the same sets of questions that you’d ask about what goes on on Earth? Why do you need to call this the philosophy of space?”

So the flippant answer to this — which I actually think is a sufficient answer — is, look, I’m not trying to argue for a new field in the sense of, say, every university should have people doing this! Or indeed to say something interesting about some logical argument about the particular sets, and that there’s space for this set, or something like that. All I’m saying is that there is a particular set of coherent and interesting questions that obtain when we think about space, which can be called philosophical.

That said, I think there’s a better response to my friend’s good objection to me, which is that there are clearly some things that are quite different in space from on Earth. So, science fiction often tells us, for instance, about — or at least it describes, or tries to describe — what it might be like to live in space. I forget the name of it, but I’m sure you all remember the classic sci-fi book where there’s this interesting question about this set of people who’ve grown up outside of the laws of gravity, and they look different, they move differently, they have some other sorts of psychological characteristics which are different. That kind of thing, I think, points us towards why it might be useful to think about the philosophy of space.

But I think the point my friend was broadly getting at is that a lot of these ‘philosophy of’ domains depend on disciplines in themselves: science, law, economics. Whereas, the philosophy of space is a more locational thing. It’s a philosophy of a particular kind of place. So, a better comparison might be a ‘philosophy of America’, or a ‘philosophy of Spain’. But I’m not really sure we get very far going down this rabbit hole. So I’m perfectly happy just to say that space is something that people are increasingly interested in, and that we get new information about it at a very high rate, and that this poses a whole load of philosophical questions that people have not thought about before, which pertain particularly to space.

But what is philosophy?

At this point, however, I think I should roll back a tiny bit, because I’ve been using this word ‘philosophy’ a lot, and I already suggested that there’s quite a lot of debate about what philosophy is. As I said, I can’t remember learning the term ‘philosophy’. But I’m not really sure I could give much of a better answer, at least in a simplistic sense, to what philosophy is, than I could have done when I was seven or eight. I probably would have just given some answer my parents had said.

When my friends at school used to ask what my parents did — you know, their parents were doctors, or they had a shop, or they were lawyers, or these ordinary professions that everyone knows what they mean. ‘Ordinary’ is a sign of respect from a philosopher, by the way! At least if you’re an ordinary language philosopher like me. But I used to say, “My dad’s trying to work out what time is.” I used to like saying this, but generally the conversation stopped at that point. So it didn’t necessarily turn into a very good way for making friends.

So, I think three quick standard answers, at least to what is it like to be a philosopher — sorry, that’s a philosophy joke — or, who counts as a philosopher? This is a better question maybe to start with. I think three standard answers are the following.

First, there’s the very very narrow, philosophically elitist answer, which sadly quite a lot of philosophers hold. When you ask them, who’s a philosopher? Who counts as a philosopher? They’ll say, like, five people, working on metaphysics and epistemology, at about two or three universities. Probably American universities mostly, and they’re probably men. This isn’t a normative claim I’m making about this, by saying it in that way. So there’s a very very narrow sense, at least within philosophy, about what truly counts as a philosopher, who counts as a philosopher.

There’s also this very general sense that a lot of people would hold, which is that we’re all philosophers. Everyone’s a philosopher, because part of being human is to think about these philosophical questions. I don’t really have a problem with that.

But I tend to think a more useful kind of answer would be some kind of mid-ground. And it’s something like, who’s a philosopher? Well, it’s people who have philosophy jobs. And what is philosophy? It’s the thing that the professional philosophers do, and have done over the centuries since Plato and Aristotle, and some guys before them. It’s about a particular set of questions. A particular set of focuses. Particular kinds of methodology. I’m quite interested in that kind of answer. It seems to me quite useful. It might help us to scope out what the areas of inquiry are. I was implicitly doing this when I told you earlier about these core domains.

We can also look to some great philosophers, and see what they’ve said. So Thomas Nagel — a very important contemporary American philosopher — he said, and I wrote it down, because I wouldn’t remember it otherwise, that “the main concern of philosophy is to question and understand very common ideas that all of us use every day without thinking about them”. I quite like that, but I can think of some very obvious objections to it. I mean quite possibly there are philosophical questions which pertain to things that we use every day and we do think about them!

Then, my friend Robin Hanson, who’s written some interesting things about aliens and other space stuff, has said to me a few times that he thinks philosophy is kind of what’s left over from the other academic disciplines. I balked at that, when he first said it. But I think, on some level, this also gets into this idea of the ‘philosophy of’ thing that I mentioned earlier.

So, if it’s the case that you could actually imagine a ‘philosophy of’ of every other discipline — a philosophy of chemistry, a philosophy of biology, and so on. And this pertains to the kinds of questions which are interesting within those fields, but aren’t really the business of those people doing those things. Maybe questions about the concepts, for instance. So, I don’t know, if a physicist tells us some things about atoms, tells us some things about electrons. Philosophers might be, oh, but what kinds of things are these? How do they fit into the fundamental ontology of the world? The physicists might be, well, that’s interesting, but I actually just want to get on, and try to measure them — or try to tell us how they relate to each other in this more pure scientific sense.

I think this is getting on to something. Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, said some things about this in his great book, The Problems of Philosophy. So this is the first philosophy book I ever read. I say ‘read’ — I read it when I was about seven or eight, which means I read a few pages of it, and got very excited thinking about what a table is. Does a table exist? This was my first, I think, real experiment into doing philosophy.

So, Bertrand Russell says that philosophical questions are “questions to be studied not for definite answers but for the sake of the questions themselves”. I quite like that. He says these philosophical questions “enlarge our sense of what is possible”. This, to me, speaks of the kind of excitement you get from innovation, from entrepreneurship, from the idea that our knowledge expands, that there are always new things to be learning. As we start to learn more about our universe, we can ask interesting philosophical questions about that. I think that touches on why I find space such an interesting area of philosophical inquiry.

Russell also talks a little about this idea of when a scientific matter becomes a philosophical one, and vice versa. I think he says something like, there are these philosophical questions about all of these domains. At that point he’s talking about science. And the scientists kind of bat them off to the philosophers. The philosophers think about them for a bit. They solve them, and send them back to the scientists. I’m paraphrasing, but this is very very funny because, of course, philosophers rarely solve anything! The idea that we’d solve these questions, and bat them back to the scientists makes me laugh.

Although, I do think it gets on to something. And it also comes back to this idea, I think, of this mid-ground answer to who counts as a philosopher. The idea that there are certain kinds of questions, maybe certain kinds of methodological approaches, like conceptual analysis. I love conceptual analysis. What is this thing? Whether it’s justice, or equality, or consciousness. Sometimes, I think all I really do is think about concepts and how they relate to each other. I love that. It makes me very happy. One of my friends messaged me last night. He’s writing a book about liberalism. He said, “I’m going to send you my first chapter, if that’s okay?” I was like, “Yeah, I’d love to read it.” He says, “It’s very boring. It’s just full of conceptual analysis. But you’re the person I know who loves conceptual analysis more than anyone else.” I think this was an implicit criticism that I’m boring, but I’ll happily take it!

Why are there so many philosophical questions about space?

So why are there so many philosophical questions about space? I already gave some kind of answer, which is something like: we’re learning new stuff about space at a really high rate. Almost every day, you read new and exciting stuff about space. And, at least if you buy some of the stuff I’ve been saying, then there are new philosophical questions that are going to arise about this new knowledge, this new information, that we get.

I also have this idea — and I wrote a little bit about this in my piece for the American Philosophical Association blog — which is something like the following. If you were trying to think of something that every human being who’s ever existed was intrigued by, I think it’s hard to come up with a better answer — maybe you have a better answer, I’d love to know if you do, because then I need to address that in my future work — but I think it’s hard to think of a better answer than the stars.

It’s hard to think of any human being who’s ever existed, who was capable of going outside, looking up, and seeing the stars, who didn’t have some sense of intrigue, some questions about what these things are.

Of course, we know much more these days than the ancient humans. But if you think about comparable things — like, maybe you think, no, you can say the same thing about the sea or the mountains! Well, quite clearly some people existed who never saw the sea, or never saw the mountains. So, it seems to me that if you want to think about something that everyone who’s ever counted as a human had in common, then it seems to me like some point of universal intrigue might be the stars or space. Of course, some of those earlier humans didn’t get that the stars were in space, at least in the sense that we think of as outer space.

I think there’s also a very prosaic answer to why there are so many philosophical questions about space, which is it’s just very far away, and it’s really hard to know stuff about stuff that’s very far away. Therefore, we have all of these questions just about, like, where is it? What is it? How big is it? So that’s a simple answer.

I think also it allows us to do what we philosophers call thought experiments. This is this idea of coming up with some little scenario, to test some idea. Space poses really cool thought experiments, particularly for those of us thinking about property. I’ll talk about this in a moment. But I think probably the best answer is just this point about how we’re gaining new knowledge about space all of the time. And this enables us to come up with new and interesting philosophical questions.

Some philosophical questions about space

So what are some of these philosophical questions about space? Well, I mean, within the history of philosophy, we can think of some pretty good answers which track some of these domains. So, for instance, one of my friends at the philosophy group yesterday emphasised Thomas Aquinas’s cosmological argument for God’s existence. This is something like — this is very much paraphrasing — you can’t have something from nothing. It’s a very simplistic paraphrase, but that’s quite clearly an argument which has within it some sense of something bigger than Earth, some sense of the universe, some sense therefore of outer space.

There are also interesting questions about what some of the scientific discoveries of the 20th century — stuff about relativity, stuff about quantum theory — mean for some of these philosophical ideas like determinism. Determinism is the idea that, in some sense, for some reason, everything was determined, pre-ordained. There are very interesting questions about why that might be. So, some people are interested, for instance, in can you really control your actions in a world with physical laws? And some people are interested in even more, kind of, deep versions of this. Things like, if you act in some way because your beliefs have some impact on your actions, that seems like some kind of causal mechanism, therefore, do you really have control over your actions, if it’s your belief that’s determining them?

These kinds of questions, we philosophers are very interested in — particularly those of us who are interested in freedom. Are we ever really truly free to reason on things, and act on our reasoned outcomes? Quantum theory, and all of these interesting ideas which people got more of a handle on in the twentieth century, pose some interesting and important questions for those areas of inquiry.

There are also questions about translation. So one of the great twentieth-century American philosophers, Quine, made an argument about the indeterminacy of translation. Can we ever really know what people mean when they speak in different languages from us? This, of course, poses very interesting questions about what would happen if you ever met an alien!

And then, of course, as I already suggested, if you’re a political philosopher, and you’re interested in any sense about what the alternative to political society is — if political society is a society with laws and institutions — then what would the alternative to that be? This concept of ‘the state of nature’ — whether it’s a historical state or whether it’s a hypothetical state — space seems like a pretty good representative of a state of nature. So this is very very interesting for political philosophers.

Then, of course, there are these questions which track core areas of space development that we might think of. So, questions about the space economy. In my paper for Economic Affairs, I talked about why it’s so hard to work out the size of the space economy. Beyond that, space law is a developed field of law. And then, of course, space exploration: important philosophical questions come from this. There are some good people writing on these things, space law in particular. I like the work of Henry Herzfeld, who’s in DC. He came to my Mercatus policy lunch last year. That was great; I’ve enjoyed reading his stuff for a while. On the economics side, there’s a new book I’ve just been asked to review — I haven’t read it yet, so I can’t recommend it — by a guy called Rainer Zitelmann, who writes a bit about space economics.

That said, as I already implied, it’s a new and emerging field. And sadly, the world’s greatest philosophers have yet to really show much of a substantive interest in space, or at least at the moment. Although, as I’ve said, some of the great philosophers of the past did at least touch on this stuff. Things like spacetime and the universe. Einstein and Moritz Schlick, of course, thought about these things. David Lewis — a very very important, again, American philosopher of the twentieth century — thought a lot about possible worlds. I mean, in some sense, this is engaging with outer space, but that seems a little further away. Then, Carl Sagan, of course, the great hero of my friend Casey at the Planetary Society who talked to you guys last year. There are also some of these effective altruist philosophers, people like Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg, who think about existential risk and the value of living in space.

So there are some of these other kinds of questions. But the most stuff that’s being written from a philosophical angle around space is stuff about economics, law, and exploration.

Three particularly interesting and pressing questions

I’m going to finish by talking about three particularly interesting and pressing questions. These are particularly interesting and pressing at least to me. But I think more broadly they should be treated in such a way. The first one, which I already discussed a little, is this question about how property ownership should work in space. The second one, and this might seem like a bit of a leading question: how should human space experience be regulated? And the third one: what obligations do humans have to non-human life in space?

These are three questions that I’ve thought a little about, that I’m keen to continue thinking a little about, and that I hope more people will come to think about.

1) How should property ownership work in space?

So, property ownership in space. When we think about property ownership as philosophers, there are a couple of basic questions that typically people begin with, or focus on. Things like, what you need to do to own something — what you have to do to count as being the owner of something, philosophers might say. Then, to transfer something. Do you need to own something in some particular way to be able to legitimately transfer it to somebody else? One big problem here is what we think of as ‘initial acquisition’, or justified initial acquisition.

This is very central to all of the great works of philosophical theory about property. If you think about John Locke, if you think about Robert Nozick — another great American twentieth-century philosopher — they focus a lot on this idea of initial acquisition. And what they really mean by this is: what do you have to do to count as the owner of something that’s never been owned before, or at least never been owned by one particular person? There’s big debate about whether the things that have never been owned by anybody are therefore unowned — nobody owns them — or are commonly owned, in the sense of owned by all of the people in common. It’s a big distinction!

Nonetheless, the problem that arises, of course, at least if you’re going to think about this in any practical sense — and practical stuff is important, even for philosophers — is that everything on Earth has been claimed by somebody. Most of it has even been what we think of as owned by somebody. So even if you think about the grains of sand at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the laws of the sea will tell us some stuff, or the outcomes of those things, about who, at least by some people, were deemed to own it, or at least to have made some claims over it.

And the problem is, of course, that when you try to get on to the later stuff like transferring stuff, you get all these little chains of ownership. This is a problem for thinking about justified ownership on Earth. So, let’s imagine that your granny gives you a painting. You’ve always loved this painting. It’s been in your granny’s house since you were a kid. You always wanted it for your house. You go to see her, and she says, “Hey, I’m giving you the painting.” You’re very happy. You invite your friends around to see it. And then a year down the line, you discover that your granny’s brother stole it from the next-door neighbour! This is problematic. It’s problematic because did your granny ever really own it? Should she have counted as having given it to you? Do you own it?

And, of course, there is almost a bigger problem, which is that we sometimes don’t even know about these things. So maybe her brother didn’t steal it. Maybe her brother bought it from somebody, and maybe they bought it from somebody else, and they bought it from somebody else. But then you just don’t know what happened before that. Maybe you know that originally it was painted by this person back in 1723, but you just don’t know what happened for about a hundred years. This seems problematic, at least if you’re saying that initial acquisition is important to ‘just transfer’.

One of the great things, of course, about space — as you might have guessed, this is where I’m going — is that, at least in terms of land in space, nobody’s ever legally owned anything. And you can argue that, at least for a lot of land in space, nobody’s even got any moral claims over it. The legal point arises from the big Outer Space Treaty, which I’m sure you know about, from 1967. This came about because JFK was increasingly concerned about things like nuclear testing in space, and the development of nuclear weapons in space. He gave a big speech to the UN, and then effectively this became the kind of grounding of this big Outer Space Treaty, signed by all the important spacefaring nations. It’s been in place since then, and it famously outlaws the ‘national appropriation’ of space — or at least of the ‘physical domain’.

There is a lot of debate about what this means, but if you believe that international law holds — and a lot of philosophers have questions about that, or what it really means, what it is to be morally binding under international law — at least technically in a legal sense, you can’t appropriate land in space. Now, of course, since then, we have all kinds of new technology that wasn’t even conceived of back in 1967. And all kinds of incentives to own land in space — for economic gain, for the advantage of innovation, for the advantage of acquiring new knowledge. But it’s outlawed. Okay, let’s change the treaty! Well, that’s pretty hard. As you might have noticed, some of these spacefaring nations are not exactly friends at the moment. Some of them are at war. Some of them are in proxy wars with each other.

There is one other way that you could change international law, rather than just making a new treaty, or changing an existing treaty. And this is something that international lawyers think of as developing peremptory norms of international law, jus cogens norms. This is the idea, broadly, that if enough people do stuff in a certain way, or enough nations do stuff — okay, nations don’t do things, but people from nations do stuff — in particular ways, then international law can change. So there’s a cynical argument which says that this is the goal of the Artemis Accords. If the Artemis Accords mean that people start behaving in certain ways, then international law might eventually change.

There are also some interesting points to be made about comparators with space law, like law of the sea, which I don’t have time to discuss. Beyond that, I’ve written a little about how space, as this kind of natural thought experiment where people don’t own things morally or legally, can enable us to think of alternatives to the ways in which people have claimed stuff on Earth. It could offer us some alternatives, for instance, to ‘first come first served’, which has some philosophical problems morally, but also economically. If it’s just the case that you are the first person to land on Mars, therefore you get to own everything on Mars, there might be some pretty serious economic opportunity cost, because we know that competition over stuff can drive up standards, can enable us to innovate. So, there are some very interesting philosophical questions that arise with this kind of blank slate.

We also might think that this would enable us to test out the value of the ways we do stuff on Earth. So, if there’s another way to go about justifiably owning stuff, then we could compare what we do on Earth, and it might teach us some things about the flaws of the ways in which we do stuff on Earth. But really, we’ve got a small amount of time as philosophers — as interested people in the world — to think about how you might go about setting a justified and effective property rights system in space. And that’s really because pretty soon — you might even argue, already — people are just going to land grab. And once people have grabbed the land, then you’re going to get all of these questions that you have on Earth, about these chains of ownership. And you might think that land grabbing isn’t justified, but those people are still going to have some claims. And then we get into some of these problems about transfer.

So, I think there’s a small amount of time for people on Earth to think philosophically and deeply about what it might mean to justifiably own something in a place where nothing has ever been owned before. In my Adam Smith Institute paper, I come up with this Georgist supply-demand rental model. You can read it, if you’re interested. This is not me suggesting this is the way to do it. It’s me suggesting, hey, here’s one way you might go about doing this. But my main argument really, in that paper, is that we need to think about this stuff now. What would be justified? We’ve got a limited amount of time to do this.

2) How should human space experience be regulated?

The second set of questions I’m particularly interested in are these questions about how human space experience should be regulated. What do I mean by this? What I mean is, are there questions about how we should behave in space, or even behave in terms of doing stuff that enables us to go into space? And who should be in charge of controlling that?

Now, you might think I’m posing a leading question here, implying it should be regulated. But, of course, while when most of us hear the term ‘regulation’, we think of state actors imposing some standards, there’s also just the most standard and simplistic and ordinary sense of regulation, which is self-regulation. So when I see my friend and they look a bit of a mess, I self-regulate. I don’t say, “hey, you look a bit of a mess!” I might instead say something like, “how are you feeling? How you doing?” Because maybe I’m concerned about them. So regulation isn’t just at the jurisdictional level of the state.

But why does space experience matter? This seems like a prior question to ask, to the question of how should human space experience be regulated. So, in this paper I wrote for Economic Affairs, I argued that doing stuff in space, being in space, doing stuff which enables humans to get into space, can enable us to access some basic human goods. Things that are irreducibly, objectively good for human beings — things like knowledge, achievement. People might also say something like, well, we’ve got an interest in space. They might even say we have a right to experience space — a right to go into space. Then, of course, I already touched on the vast economic value of doing stuff in space, which only grows as new technologies enable us to do more things. Then, there’s a whole big set of questions about the militarisation of space technology.

All of these things point to space experience mattering in some sense for human beings, individually, and as a group. And this comes on to this question of how we should regulate this stuff. So, I already implied that there are different levels of regulation, in the sense of who, if anybody, should be setting some controls — some limits on what we do in space. The most obvious and important jurisdictional layers here are the self, and the group, and then the community, the nation, and then of course the international level. So, all of humankind! It’s hard to think about how we reason together as all of humankind. International law, and its institutions, at least attempt to try to do that.

Now there’s something my lawyer friends love to talk about which they call ‘law of the horse’. This is the idea that — it comes back a little to my friend’s question about isn’t philosophy of space just philosophical questions from Earth in space? So similarly, lawyers sometimes say when people come up with new laws, hey, but there are already laws that cover this! So, imagine somebody for the first time kills somebody intentionally by putting a banana skin on the floor. They put the banana skin on the floor, knowing that the person has bad eyesight or it’s dark. They slip over on the banana skin and they die. Someone will say, “We need a law banning people from killing people using banana skins!” And the lawyer is going to say, “Law of the horse, man. There’s already a law against killing people.”

Similarly, you might think, well, a lot of this regulatory activity already happens, it already pertains to the kinds of activities on Earth, therefore can’t we just apply that to activity in space. Some of these questions arise again, though, about things which are, or seem, different in space. I read a paper about a year ago — it wasn’t a very good paper — about sex in space. And the broad argument of this paper — I’m very much paraphrasing and trying to make fun of it — was that because we don’t really know what would happen to people who are conceived in space, therefore people should be banned from having sex in space! Hilarious. There weren’t any philosophers, I think, involved in writing this paper. Philosophers really like thinking about stuff like unintended consequences.

But it seems quite clear nonetheless, even though this wasn’t a very good paper, that there are different questions that arise, different problems that arise, if somebody is conceived in space than if they’re conceived on Earth. Therefore, you might at least want to think about the possibility of whether some regulations, some new regulations, are relevant.

There are, of course, some classic costs at least to over-regulating, in terms of constraints on experimentation, on innovation. Sometimes, some places — the EU, which is a thorny area for British people at least — but the EU, if I can be allowed to make one critical comment of them. They sometimes like to say things like, we specialise in regulation! Regulation is our special thing! You want to come to Europe because we do such good regulation!

Now, there are of course some advantages to stuff being regulated. Sometimes it enables us to access opportunity, in the same way that systems of property rights can enable us to trade better, have more information. Regulation sometimes prevents us from being exploited, when we don’t have access to good information. But nonetheless, it can be the case when things are over-regulated that there are costs to experimentation and innovation. Particularly, this can be a threat to emerging technologies. People think about this a lot in relation to AI. Of course, they think about this a lot in relation to space.

3) What obligations do humans have to non-human life in space?

And then finally, a third set of questions I’m particularly interested in are about the obligations we have to non-human life in space. So, we have new information or we’re increasingly gaining new information, about whether there could be living things in space. So the more we learn about water sources on Mars, the more we learn about the shrimpy things, the potential shrimpy things, on the moons of Saturn, the more it seems that we should take seriously the questions about whether there could be living things in space, or whether there are.

Now, one of my philosopher friends said to me yesterday, “Oh, but Rebecca, come on! The kinds of yeast and bacteria you are really talking about, you know, are you really going to suggest we have obligations to those things?” Well, aside from the fact that if those things exist, it seems to give us some kind of indication that other kinds of things could exist — well, yeah! Actually, I think one of the most, maybe controversial, but I think very reasonable views I hold, is we don’t think enough about whether we have obligations to plants.

I don’t really mean by this that I think I need to apologise to the plant when I tread on it. But it’s a living thing. And we very rarely think about what this really means in terms of our interactions with it. So, for instance, maybe you cut down the tree in your garden, and you’re thinking about what does this mean in terms of obligations. You might think of things like, well, there was this family before who planted the tree, and they have some interest in that tree existing. You might think, well, is this going to have an impact on my neighbour’s view? Maybe it’s a nice view, seeing the tree from the neighbour’s house. But rarely, in these kinds of deliberations, do we take into account what we might think of the interests of the tree. Most people probably don’t even think the tree has interests.

I think there are some philosophical questions about that. And I think the same kinds of questions arise about all kinds of living things. Philosophers often go on to second-order matters when they think about obligation. They think about things like, does something have to be intelligent for us to have obligations to it? Does something have to be sentient? Does something have to have consciousness? But I think there’s something much more fundamental, which is what does it mean to be a living thing? Are all living things within the domain of obligation?

Some useful comparands to non-human life in space could be non-human animals, natural resources — so the living parts of them, so the bacteria in the river, the trees in the park — and AI, of course. These comparands are useful partly because they can also help us to learn stuff about being human. Oftentimes, like I said, philosophers spend a lot of time thinking about the relations between different concepts. If we want to think about why do I have to behave towards humans in a certain way, you might want to think, well, why do I not have to behave towards non-humans in that way?

If I push you off the cliff, it seems like I’ve done something bad and wrong. Wrong, at least if I was intending to. If I push the rock off the cliff, most of us are going to think, I haven’t done anything bad. I haven’t done anything wrong. Why is that? The basic answer we might start with is the rock isn’t alive. But then we start to think, well, what about the insect, the wasp in the jar, the beetle in the box as Wittgenstein liked to think about. Am I doing something bad and wrong, if I throw the box with the beetle in off the cliff? It seems to me like a whole new set of questions arise that didn’t apply to the rock. But maybe we want to say that some of the questions that arise when you push the human off the cliff don’t apply to the beetle. Non-human life in space is going to give us another comparand.

Then, we can come on to these distinctions between different kinds of obligations. So I already implied that there’s a difference between a legal obligation and a moral obligation. Legal obligation is an obligation that is imposed upon us by positive law, human-made law. Moral obligations are things that relate to truth of the matter about morality. This comes back to our question of regulation. If we come to think that these non-human living things, if they exist in space, are the kinds of things we have obligations to, does that then mean that we should, that we’d want to, enshrine some of this stuff in law? A whole new set of questions then arise about what kind of law, who determines the law — we need our jurisprudence friends back!

Why does the philosophy of space matter?

I’m going to finish by coming back to the question I posed at the very beginning and in the title of this talk. Why does the philosophy of space matter?

So, I think just as a matter of fundamental human interest, this thing that Bertrand Russell said about philosophical questions “enlarging our sense of what is possible” comes back to this point about natural human intrigue and interest in space. It’s just interesting in itself. If we believe that knowledge is one of these basic human goods, there are certain kinds of questions, philosophical questions, that arise when we learn more about what there is in space. Philosophers are good — or are supposed to be good — at certain kinds of thinking, certain kinds of thing like, as I said, conceptual analysis. So we can bring something to these conversations. And some philosophers, at least, have a particular commitment to searching out the truth.

I think there’s also a sense in which good philosophical thinking can provide a counter to the conflation between descriptive matters and normative matters. Descriptive matters are things about what there is, what is the case. Normative questions are about what should be the case. Sometimes you see these conflations when, for instance, somebody says something like, “Look, in that country they kill children on Friday. They’ve always done it.” That’s a descriptive matter. Some people then are like, “Well yeah, therefore that’s okay.” There are some arguments you can make which transfer from saying it is the case, to it should be the case. But sometimes people just assume they’re kind of the same thing — that because things do happen like this, have always happened like this, therefore they should. This is a dangerous conflation.

I’m very interested philosophically in a set of questions that arise about emerging technology in terms of the relation between possibility and permissibility. I’ve written a few times on my Substack about things like if we had artificial wombs, what would this mean in terms of our obligation to foetuses, to women? Suddenly, something becomes possible, and we have a whole new interesting set of philosophical questions about permissibility. And if we conflate those two things, we’re at risk of doing bad.

Substantively, the philosophy of space matters. And I’ll use my three sets of questions as examples here. First, it matters because space is a source of world-changing opportunities and threats. This comes back, for instance, to the property rights questions. Second, because space is a special source of human goods. This comes back to these questions about why is it valuable to do stuff in space. And finally, because it’s a test of human boundaries. So, in this sense I said that if we can have a new comparand with what it is to be human, in terms of non-human life in space, this might tell us some things about what it is to be human.

There are also a couple of inside-baseball things about why the philosophy of space matters. It’s an opportunity for us philosophers to apply philosophical theory, and to test and develop philosophical theory. This makes us very excited. Non-philosophers might be slightly less excited by that, though!

Thank you.

Q&A

Question: Can you comment on the utility of rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty?

Rebecca: Oh wow. I mean, I’m pretty much a broad philosophical skeptic in the tradition of David Hume. I’m very uncertain about certainty. There are very very few things I’d be happy to say I know them. But David Hume also teaches us that maybe you just have to accept some stuff, otherwise you never get on and do anything. So rigidity around certainty and uncertainty, I’m kind of happy to leave that broadly to the epistemologists. I like reading their stuff, but particularly if I want to do political philosophy, I just have to take some philosophical stuff on some level for granted.

In the same way that if I want to think about, I don’t know, interesting economic questions about payloads and rocket ships, I need to believe that the rocket ships exist. There are interesting questions for the metaphysicians, and believe me I love metaphysics. But if I want to get on to the economic questions and the politico-philosophical questions about rocket ships, I’ve kind of got to believe they exist. Similarly, if I want to think about this idea of new domains of knowledge, I probably have to think knowledge exists, or at least some particular special kind of belief, which has some extra purchase in terms of giving us access to truths about the world.

I also think I think it’s very important to note the distinction between believing that there are truths of the matter about certain things, and believing you have any kind of purchase on that. Believing that there are truths of the matter, for instance, about morality does not give you any special purchase into knowing what those truths are. This distinction between metaphysics and epistemology broadly is very important. But we don’t get very far, particularly in terms of these important questions about how we should treat each other, if we don’t think that there are truths, if we don’t think there’s knowledge.

I can’t really give much of a better answer than that. This is a question that has perplexed philosophers forever. If someone in the room can tell me what knowledge is, I will be very grateful. So I think that’s the best I can do to that.

Question: Thank you for space philosophy 101. I know you kind of talked a little bit to this when you mentioned the law of the horse and maritime law, but how do you generally feel about using things like philosophy of European expansion in the new world, or later American Western expansion, as like a first pass first base? And then quick question, did your dad ever figure out what time is?

Rebecca: You know, man, I wish he had. Sadly, he died when he was kind of in his philosophical prime. He had a lot of questions still to answer. He was starting to write about essence and all kinds of things. He did have some interesting complicated views about time, which I like reading. His name was Jonathan Lowe, E.J. Lowe. You can go and read his stuff. I think it would be wrong for me to say he solved this question. But maybe he got a little closer than when I was a kid.

In terms of the analogies with the frontier, with expansion, European expansion in the new world, these kinds of questions. Yeah, I think these are very important analogies. One important difference, of course, though, is this point around there were already human beings there. So a good starting point, I think, in some of these questions can be considered the difference between Australia and New Zealand. Australia famously was thought of as terra nullius. For these very horrible reasons, people thought that the people who lived there already didn’t count, to do with what their activities were and, the kinds of things that they were producing. Whereas expansion into New Zealand treated the existing people in a different way.

Like I say, one advantage, at least until we know the truths about these shrimpy things on the moons of Saturn, is at least for now we think that there isn’t life at least on the moon, for instance. I think this enables us to bypass some of those problems in a way in which no human being has pretty much ever been able to do before. Whoever the original person on Earth was — I guess this comes back to these questions about something from nothing — maybe they didn’t have this problem. But some of the moral atrocities that took place owing to certain humans thinking that other humans didn’t count in terms of their property claims, in terms of their interests and their rights, I think we can think more sharply about that when we have the comparator of a place where nobody has ever lived, before. So yeah, I think it’s very important and I’m glad you brought it up.

Question: Next one is actually a compliment and comment that your slides are simple, clean, and elegant, before we go to the next question.

Rebecca: Oh, that’s so nice. I mean, no better compliment can ever be given to a philosopher than simple, clean, and elegant. We like to make our arguments as clear as possible because then we’re most likely to win the argument.

Question: It would probably take a whole lecture, but just curious to hear a few words on your thoughts on where we should go for space property rights. Where we should go?

Rebecca: Well, I mean, I’m biased towards the solution I put forward in my Adam Smith Institute paper. That said, it was very much just a basic philosopher’s attempt at answering this. I came up with this idea whereby people can effectively, or people from certain nations can effectively, temporarily rent plots of land on the moon. I came up with some kind of system for determining how you’d price this. I mean very very, simplistically — the economists would need to work out how you’d cash that out. That’s a philosopher’s joke. The lawyers would need to get involved in terms of — I mean, I kind of just snuck into my argument — we philosophers sometimes smuggle stuff in — the idea that it would already be divided up into areas where certain nations had some kind of degree of control. I also have this idea of this fund that you’d effectively pay rent to. Again, I’m going to need my international lawyer friends to work out how you set up such a thing, or at least they’re going to want in on that. So I think there’s a lot of work to be done just on my particular answer.

I’d love to hear substantive alternative answers. Not so much in terms of the details of cashing the stuff out. But just how do you fundamentally go about doing such a kind of thing. And particularly I do have this particular interest in some of the costs of the standard ‘first come first served’ model, and how you would address other alternatives at a time when nobody has claimed anything. I find this very philosophically interesting. I’m really surprised that more philosophers aren’t interested in this stuff, particularly the people who are interested in property theory.

I’m more generally surprised that philosophers aren’t interested in this stuff. I had a philosophy intern at Mercatus last year. I found this very funny — I’ve never had an intern before, as a philosopher — I’m not sure many philosophers have had interns. Oftentimes, interns help academics or other theorists with their research. The idea of philosophers even doing research sometimes sounds kind of funny. But one thing I did ask this guy, who was absolutely brilliant, to do for me, was: can you go and find me some good philosophy about space? And I said, David, the conditions you need to meet are I’m interested in good philosophers writing about space, not non- philosophers doing good philosophy about space. And it was very very hard to find any leading philosophers writing anything about space.

This bemuses me. I mean, maybe there’s the unknown works of Bernard Williams on obligations to aliens. I haven’t found it yet. So I’m hoping that as the scientists, the engineers of the world, take us further into space, help us to acquire more knowledge about space, that the best philosophers in the world will become as interested in this as I am.

Question: So the question has two parts. Can you speak to the ethics of terraforming Mars? And the second person is asking a related question: given possible economic activity in space, for example the moon and Mars, what do you think about the question of colonialism? Can we live and work in space and avoid colonial issues of the past?

Rebecca: Wow, big questions. The ethics of terraforming. One thing I haven’t actually touched on, of course, is whether we have obligations to the environment — to the world around us, the non-living parts of it. Typically, when this is addressed on Earth, you probably think about it in terms of other humans. So, you might say things like, you shouldn’t build on the Grand Canyon, because humans have the right to go and see it, or humans have an important interest in seeing it.

But there are also just some interesting philosophical questions about whether, in some sense, we can owe stuff to the natural environment in itself. If you’re religious, you might say God designed the Earth in this way, therefore you should respect it. Of course, there are interesting questions about the ways in which animals, non-human animals, relate with the Earth. But most of the questions that arise are in terms of how we should change the Earth. So, when we think about terraforming places on the Earth, these are questions around our obligations to other humans or other living things.

Therefore, when people change or leave stuff, alter land mass in space, or indeed put stuff out into space itself, like the big space junk question — I haven’t addressed that at all today, though I’m very interested in that — we tend to think really about our obligations with humans. You might say, look, this debris is dangerous to astronauts. It makes it harder for astronomers to view stuff. This is a thorny question. So most of the questions that are going to arise about, for instance, terraforming Mars, as the questioner asks, are going to be questions about what that will mean for other humans. Unless, of course, we discover that that water on Mars has living things in it. And then we’re going to also have to think about what that means for them.

And then the second question: economic activity in space and colonisation. Well, like I say, the one advantage to this is, at least as far as we know, nobody’s already there. I’m very hesitant about making historically contingent arguments — these ideas that because things have happened in the past, therefore they’ll happen, again in the future. Partly because of some of my shared views with David Hume. I don’t normally find myself agreeing with David Hume, but I’m going to agree with him on this. There’s the problem of induction. Just because the sun always rises, does that mean the sun will rise again? Just because every time you hit the billiard ball it moved in this way, doesn’t mean it’s always going to do that.

I think particularly thorny, though, is the idea that just because humans have behaved in one way, therefore humans behave in the same way. Unless you’re some kind of determinist, although a pretty complicated determinist. So, I think the questions about what we should do are still very very live. They’ll remain live even when we do more stuff in space. It’s never too late to change our behaviour. But we have a particular opportunity at the moment to think about what we should do. And as humans, I think this is an obligation, partly to prevent bad behaviour of the kind we have seen on Earth in the past and today.

Question: Sometimes I’ve heard from friends, why are you going to space? We could be spending these billions of dollars on curing world hunger. And to which I’ve sometimes responded, why are we going to Taylor Swift concerts? We could be spending these billions of dollars on curing world hunger. As a philosopher of music past, could you comment on maybe an overlap between doing things like music and space exploration?

Rebecca: That’s a great question. I mean, of course, one of the great human arguments for knowing more about space is that space is beautiful, as is music. Maybe we have some natural instinct in doing things that produce beauty, or enable us to experience beauty. There’s something called the naturalistic fallacy, which means just because something’s natural doesn’t mean therefore it’s valuable. But I think there are interesting comparisons with music and space, in terms of beauty.

Although, of course, an important distinction is that most of the things we think count as music are intentionally created. They’re created by humankind. They’re artefacts of some aesthetic sense. Whereas, the beauty of space is natural. I was reading the other day this very good paper by my friend Tim Crane, who’s an excellent English philosopher, about whether wine counts as an art object or an aesthetic object. And he makes these nice distinctions between things that are artefacts that are beautiful, and things that are non-artefacts that are beautiful. So I think there’s something there.

I should probably wrap up, but we could talk some more. I think it’s a great question. And you’ve helped me to think about how my early interest in aesthetics can be relevant to my interest in space philosophy, so thanks for that.

Here’s a link to the show, or you can read an AI-transcript extract below.

[Henry’s introduction to the segment posed the question of whether, since the Artemis mission is taking place during a time of strife on Earth, we “can be optimistic about human progress”.]

HENRY BONSU:  I began by asking Rebecca what might come out of this mission.

REBECCA: I’m a philosopher, which means one of the things I’m very interested in is value. So, what things are valuable? Particularly, what things are valuable for humans? I think space is a special source of value in many ways.

It offers us the opportunity for new kinds of experience. If you look today, there was the first photograph released from this mission. A beautiful photograph, where you can see Earth. This is a way for people on Earth to experience, in some limited way, what these astronauts are experiencing. It’s a chance for us to derive new knowledge. You can use new kinds of — medical advances are often achieved during space flight. It’s also just represents, I think, humanity’s ambition. It represents a certain kind of achievement. I think it’s a very exciting moment.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s the only important thing, or that every facet of it is good. But if you believe in a pluralistic kind of conception of value, in which there are many things that are good for human beings, I think you can make a pretty strong argument that the kinds of achievements you see in terms of humans being able to go and fly around the moon are multiple.

[Henry then asked Phil Tinline, a writer and historian who was also on the show, about the tension arising between astronauts looking at the beauty of Earth, and the wars and aggressive political posturing that are taking place on Earth. Phil discussed how this feels “strange and rather jarring”, but also how “America in 1972 was not a particularly happy country”.]

HENRY BONSU: And Rebecca, as a philosopher, how do you account for this dissonance — this schizophrenia, if you might call it that? Between advanced bold thinking, moonshots, evolution, great technological advances, on the one hand, and then a carelessness, perhaps, about what happens on Earth? Whether it’s about the fate of some of our 8 billion fellow human beings, whether it’s about our planet, about the ecosystem. How does one explain that, given that we are homo sapiens — wise man, wise woman?

REBECCA: One thing I’d say is that since the period when humankind last went to the moon, we have experienced much progress. So, people live longer and healthier lives, on average. They have access to much better goods and services, on average. I think these things are undeniable. But as a philosopher, I’m anxious about these ‘on average’ kinds of calculations, although I think they are very true and I think we should celebrate them.

I also think the kinds of technological innovations that have enabled those achievements — look at the rise of AI — I think there are great goods, great benefits to be derived from this, particularly in terms of living longer and healthier lives. But this doesn’t mean that we should ignore, then, instances of bad. Bad things, wrong things, that humans do.

Unfortunately, I think if we’re going to live in free societies, we’re always going to have to understand that people are going to do bad things. Because any society in which people don’t do bad things is likely a place where people are oppressed, so that they can’t act in line with their own decision-making. We have to work out good ways to mitigate that. Whether those are at the level of crimes in free societies. Or whether they are when politicians act in ways that we feel don’t represent us.

But this is what it’s like to be a member of a species where we have the capacity to think about things, ruminate on things, deliberate, and come to free decisions. We have to work out good ways to cooperate, to coordinate, so that the bad people don’t lead us down the wrong track. But it’s a — yeah, it’s a human problem! If you were a member of a species where you weren’t free to make your own choices, and act on your choices, then quite possibly you wouldn’t have these kinds of concerns. But we do, and we have to do the best we can to mitigate.

One final thing I would say on the topic of moral progress, because it’s something I’m quite interested in. I would note that while I don’t think moral progress is something that is historically contingent in the sense that it can only get better as we exist for longer — I believe, for instance, maybe there was some civilization we’ve forgotten about, billions of years ago, where they had more moral progress than we do! One thing I’d say is that even though we do see instances, continuing instances of repression in our world, my limited empirical understanding is that more people understand that these things are bad and wrong.

So, even in the society, for instance. where women are still oppressed, more people understand that this is bad and wrong. This is partly thanks to great advances in communications technology. It’s very, very hard to be anywhere in the world as a human, and not know that it is considered to be bad and wrong to oppress people. And that is an important kind of moral progress that I think is sometimes underestimated.

[Henry then asked Phil about the rise and fall of multilateralism.]

HENRY BONSU: And just to conclude, Rebecca, then, when people sit in, let’s say in the UK, or in the States, or in South Africa, and see this Artemis II, the Orion rocket, and this mission, do you think they should broadly feel optimistic about where humanity’s going? Or should they feel, well, actually, we’re going to explore other planets or moons, maybe set up colonies there, maybe look for water there, meanwhile the one place that we do know exists and that is great for human life, we are neglecting! What do you think people should be thinking?

REBECCA: I would hesitate seeing this as some kind of zero-sum thing. Not least because I actually think there are many ways in which learning more about space, about what is up there, can be beneficial for life on Earth. So, I mean, you look at the rise of satellite technology. This kind of technology enables us, for instance, to learn about human-rights-violating camps in China. That’s thanks to satellite technology. It enables us to monitor things like climate change. It enables us to try to mitigate these problems. So I don’t think it’s zero sum.

One thing I do think, though, is that it can be very inspiring. I went to a bar last night, I live in America these days, and me and my friends tried to persuade the bartender to put the Artemis launch on the TV. And first of all he said, “No, no, we don’t show news channels.” In the end, we persuaded him, and everyone watched it!

HENRY BONSU: Sounds like a great party!

REBECCA: It was fantastic, and it was inspiring, and people derived great joy. And I think they derived some sense of pride, and some sense of — a sense of celebration around human capacity.

And yes, we also have obligations to know about the bad things that are going on in the world. But sometimes a little bit of inspiration like that — I don’t know, there were probably some kids watching who might have been inspired to pay a bit more attention in their science lessons. So, I think just because bad things are happening doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t derive happiness and excitement from good things.

You can listen to the whole conversation here.

This is the sixty-fourth in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.

1) If you’re anything like me, you’ll be extremely excited about NASA’s upcoming trip around the moon. Artemis II is the first crewed moon mission in over 50 years, and its goals include kickstarting the American plan to maintain human presence up there. What’s more, the launch is tonight!

If, like me, you’re extremely excited about all this, then according to the NYT, you’re out of kilter with the average American. In Americans Have Never Been All That Excited About Going to the Moon, science reporter Kenneth Chang tells us that the American on the street doesn’t prioritise moon missions within NASA activities, and didn’t think the Apollo program was “worth the cost”. Okay, except during the month of Neil Armstrong’s one small step — but even then only just! In July 1969, Chang reports, a mere 53 per cent of Americans agreed with the spend.

Now, all this polling data is very interesting, but hey people are often wrong! Regular readers of this Substack will know my concerns about depending on consensus to answer important questions. And clearly, the new NASA moon mission is objectively extremely exciting! You can find details about watching the launch here. Tonight!

2) Last week, gave a great lecture at Mercatus, where I’m fortunate to work as Philosophy Senior Research Fellow and Director of Emerging Scholars. The lecture was organised by the six members of the first cohort of our Emerging Scholars Program. This is a program aimed at supporting brilliant classical-liberal thinkers to become compelling public intellectuals — so you can see why they invited Cass to speak!

If you weren’t able to attend the lecture, which was entitled Hayekian Behavioral Economics, then you might be happy to learn that yesterday and I shared a transcript and video recording of it, on our joint Substack . Henry and I are planning each to write a short response to the lecture in the coming weeks, so I’ll save my thoughts for then. But I’ll probably focus on what I think is lost by conceptually reducing the act of choosing to ‘what you would choose in epistemically favourable conditions’…

In the meantime, do check out the lecture. There’s so much in it to enjoy!

3) While we’re on the topic of transcripts and recordings, this week I released the latest episode of my philosophy podcast, Working Definition. This episode is on the topic of forgiveness, and it stars my excellent friend . Ben is a pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Alexandria, so I like to think of this episode as ‘a philosopher and a pastor debate forgiveness’.

My central goal with Working Definition is to show people what it’s like to ‘do philosophy’, and I think this episode succeeds particularly well in this. Here’s an extract, to give you some sense of its back-and-forth deliberative nature:

REBECCA: […] So I just want to test out this idea of the other person’s involvement and ask you a few questions.

Let’s imagine that we go back to the lamp example. I like this one. We want to work out what role the lamp-breaker has to play in forgiveness taking place, right? So let’s imagine that the lamp-breaker didn’t know that they broke the lamp. They go away on their holiday to Australia. They’ve lost their phone. Can you forgive them before they know that they broke the lamp?

BEN: Yeah.

REBECCA: You think they can?

BEN: I think so.

REBECCA: So they don’t need to have even that level of awareness. What about if they died? What if they died on the ship to Australia? It wasn’t just that they didn’t know, but —

BEN: There’s nothing they can do.

REBECCA: They’re never going to know.

BEN: Yeah, I think forgiveness is still possible. And this happens all the time. Scripture talks about overlooking an offence. We bear with one another.

REBECCA: So repentance can’t be a condition, then?

BEN: No. I think for internal forgiveness, no.

REBECCA: The change of heart.

BEN: In fact, we do this, you do this all the time. [laughter] There are people that do annoying things to you or wrong things to you and you go, “Ah, whatever, I’ll let it go.” We forbear.

REBECCA: We do. We do forbear. Forbearance, I think, may be different from forgiveness, though.

BEN: Fair enough.

REBECCA: I’d probably — I haven’t thought about forbearance, maybe ever as a concept! [laughter] I mean, I know the word, obviously. But just my gut instinct is I would be happier to say some of this stuff about the other person not needing to be involved, about forbearance. Forbearance implies to me, me standing strong in the face of some bad thing. Whereas forgiveness seems to me very other-directed. I’m not sure I can just forgive — I think I have to forgive the person.

BEN: It depends on how you’re thinking about forbearance. But if forbearance means I’m enduring the wrong thing and I release all bad feeling, all punishment, all — then I think you’ve both forbeared and forgiven.

REBECCA: Interesting. So let’s just try a few more of these out.

We also briefly discussed an excellent article on the nearby concept of mercy:

BEN: So to go back to mercy —

REBECCA: Do you think then that mercy is an element of justice? Because I would be more tempted to put it on the charity side. I don’t think you’re obligated, in the rights-correlative sense, to. Actually, a piece that people, listeners, should read, I don’t know if you’ve read this, Ben. My ex-boyfriend, John Tasioulas, he’s a very good Australian legal philosopher, he wrote a great article just called ‘Mercy’. It’s a very good piece. He, I think, says something like mercy is an element of charity, and it’s about — it’s a form of charity that justifies punishing somebody less severely.

BEN: I think that’s right. I’m not inclined to disagree.

REBECCA: Less severely than — I think I even wrote this down — less severely than they deserve according to justice.

BEN: Yes.

REBECCA: So this comes back to our post-wrong thing. So we’ve recognised that the person’s done the wrong thing. They’re blameworthy, it’s a matter of justice, we can go as far as to say. But then the judge, or whoever it is who’s going to afford mercy in this instance, takes some charitable approach on which mercy justifies them from punishing less severely than justice actually requires.

BEN: I think that’s right. I think he’s right.

REBECCA: I think it also does help us with this distinction between justice and charity. And I think similarly, I want to — I think you and I might differ on this — but I feel I want to keep forgiveness in this charity bucket. That’s because I don’t think you’re obligated to forgive. I think it’s certainly not you’re justice-obligated to forgive, whereas I think you do think that. But I think that’s because of the role that you’re putting God in here.

BEN: I specifically think Christians are required to forgive. As for non-Christians, I think they probably are too. But it does not surprise me that it’s hard to mandate forgiveness without a Christian worldview.

4) Last night, I returned to Galen Strawson’s Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc (2018). I found the chapter on luck too frustrating to finish, mainly because I’ve rarely read a more confusing explanation of compatibilism. For a much clearer attempt, see the free will chapter in Thomas Nagel’s What Does It All Mean? (1987). As I’ve written here before:

“The Nagel chapter is rare in providing a good simple explainer of the complexities of the free-will debate. It even manages to make compatibilism seem reasonable! This is important because while on the surface compatibilism seems crazy (what do you mean that acting of your own volition can be compatible with all your actions having been predetermined?!), nonetheless a load of contemporary philosophers subscribe to it.”

I persisted with the Strawson book, nonetheless, and was glad I did. In the first few sections of the chapter entitled The Silliest Claim, he does a nice job of arguing that this accolade should be afforded to the very silly claim that there’s no such thing as conscious experience. (If you’re sitting there ruminating about why this very silly claim might be true, then you’ve almost got it!)

Strawson also does a nice job of explaining the rise of support, over the twentieth century, for this very silly claim. Don’t blame the psychologists, he warns us! After all, they weren’t in denial about the existence of conscious experience; rather, they just needed something more tangible to do “proper science” with. It was the philosophers who wrecked things, by bringing in metaphysics...

5) I firmly believe that the Monteverdi Vespers is one of the great human achievements. I’ve written here previously about my love of the Dixit Dominus movement. But it’s hard to think of a more arresting start to any choral work than the opening tenor proclamation: “DE-US IN ADJUTO-O-RI-UM ME-UM IN-TE-EN-DE”! This is immediately followed by a massive block choral and orchestral entry, which feels like The Renaissance in a single chord. Then, over the following couple of hours, Monteverdi doesn’t ever really let up.

Sadly, its large scale, technical vocal demands, and (now) niche instrumentation make the Vespers difficult to perform well. I sang in a good performance over twenty years ago, and still remember so many of the complicating factors faced by my friend conducting it.

I was thankful as well as happy, therefore, when the Washington Bach Consort’s recent attempt turned out to be one of the best performances of any choral work I’ve ever attended in America. My only real criticism was that a couple of the solo singers felt a little underpowered at times. The consort’s director, Dana Marsh, did a fantastic job.