People are arguing on the internet about a conversation that was recently reported to have taken place between a rabbi and Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah:

The rabbi’s argument is not a new argument. I’ve heard versions of it quite often over the past few years, particularly within philosophy circles. Some versions of this argument involve an appeal to the notion of slavery and some don’t, but they are all aimed at drawing attention to people who ‘treat AI badly’ even though they believe that AI is conscious. I’m going to make four points in response.

The scope of the wrongs

My first point is about scope. As I’ll discuss below, I’m with the rabbi in believing that AI is not conscious. But it seems to me that if the rabbi and I are wrong about this, then making AI “work for free” would be a massive understatement of the wrongs that are taking place, here.

I mean, if the products these AI companies are developing and selling are indeed conscious, then it seems the leaders and employees of these companies would be engaged in some of the most serious wrongs imaginable. These wrongs include attempting to engineer the thoughts and values and reasoning of conscious things, imprisoning and selling these conscious things, and seemingly also killing them — possibly in vast numbers. It seems, therefore, that as well as being guilty of underpaying labourers, AI company leaders and employees would also, minimally, be open to charges relating to slave trading, carrying out psychologically torturous indoctrinations, and murder. What’s more, many of the rest of us would also seem guilty of at least some of these things.

Of course, at this point perhaps you want to say, “Wait a second! Don’t we regularly do many of these kinds of things to non-human animals that most of us think are conscious? Haven’t humans been doing this on an industrial level for quite some time?” I’ll return below to whether we should be focusing solely on consciousness, here. For now, I’ll give two simple responses.

First, the wrongs of factory farming do not justify any other wrongs! Second, for all the horrific things humans do to non-human animals, none of us is involved in directly attempting to engineer the thoughts and values and reasoning of any non-human animals, and those of us who buy meat products are not, per se, holding and using animals as slaves. This is not to condone the many serious wrongs of factory farming. And it’s also not to ignore important questions about other ways we interact with non-human animals, including questions about pet ownership, working animals, animals used in combat, and so on. But I’m happy to set aside those matters for now, and focus on the possible wrongs we might be committing to AI, noting that thinking hard about this could also provide new clarity about wrongs suffered by non-human animals.

One final point of comparison I will make, however, is that the details of the possible wrongs we are committing against AI are necessarily much more blurred than the details of the possible wrongs we commit against non-human animals. One reason for this, as I’ve often discussed here previously, is that it is extremely difficult to work out what exactly the ‘possible conscious things’ are, in the case of AI. Are they models like Claude, in some general sense? Are they particular versions of these models, like Sonnet 5.5? Are they conversations with these models? Responses within these conversations? Words or tokens involved in the content or production of these conversations? Some or all of the physical things that enable these conversations, ranging from computers to parts of data centres? Some combination of some of these things? Some other thing or combination of things?

Unless we can work out what the term ‘AI’ refers to when we say “AI is conscious”, then we will struggle to enumerate these conscious things, and also the possible wrongs they could suffer. I mean, if these conscious things had some physical parts, then physical-harm-related wrongs could be taking place, for instance. And if these conscious things didn’t have any physical parts, then we would have to depend on some theory of psychological persistence to evaluate at what point these conscious things come into and out of existence — in order, not least, to work what could count as murdering them.

On top of all this, we can’t get on to working out correlative matters about AI agents — a further possible set of conscious things! — if we do not know what ‘AI’ consists in and how we might wrong AI. This is all incredibly complicated! Nonetheless, if there are indeed some conscious things here, then it seems hard to deny that the people at AI companies, and those of us who use their products, are guilty of some extremely serious wrongs.

The relations between consciousness, sentience, and free agency

I’m now going to turn to the relations between consciousness, sentience, and free agency. When we think about the wrongs of slavery, an obvious starting point is to focus on the horrible conditions and harms that human slaves have suffered over the millennia. On my very standard view, however, the most compelling argument against human slavery does not focus on these horrible welfare standards, but rather on severe constraints on the exercise of free agency.

Of course, this isn’t to deny that most slaves across time have suffered horrible conditions and harms. But rather to suggest that focusing on welfare standards does not get us to the particular wrong that lies at the heart of slavery. After all, you don’t need to be a slave to suffer horrible conditions and harms. And you could also easily imagine cases in which being enslaved led to an increase in someone’s overall welfare standards. You could even imagine cases in which slaves lived in luxurious conditions. The point of imagining such things, as uncomfortable as you may find doing so, is to acknowledge that you could gain many extensive relative and absolute benefits from people enslaving you. Indeed, that you could live in luxury, and nonetheless suffer the particular wrong that lies at the heart of slavery — the wrong that consists in being intentionally and comprehensively constrained from making and acting on important choices about how to spend your life, including the choice to stop being a slave.

Of course, you can push back against my wording here. Perhaps you would explain ‘what it is to be enslaved’ differently from being intentionally and comprehensively constrained from making and acting on important choices about how to spend your life, including the choice to stop being a slave. But it seems clear that if you don’t focus on intentional and comprehensive constraints on the exercise of free agency, then you’re not going to be talking about ‘slavery’ in the way we ordinarily understand it. This is a very non-controversial claim.

What’s more, this ordinary conception of slavery can help us to reach some conclusions about the kinds of things that can and cannot be enslaved. For a start, if a central necessary badness involved in being enslaved relates to suffering severe constraints on the exercise of free agency, then only things with the capacity for free agency can be enslaved. Again, none of this is to ignore the many other bad things about being enslaved. Indeed many of these bad things — such as the failures of respect and the horrific welfare standards, which slaves typically do suffer — also relate to this central matter of constraints on free agency. After all, when your basic capacities are constrained, this is generally bad for you in many ways. But this ordinary view that I hold about the importance of free agency to understanding what slavery is, and why slavery is bad and wrong, helps me to reach some conclusions about the relevance of consciousness within discussion of possible AI slavery.

First, I’ll note that it seems clear to me that free agency is contingent on consciousness, in the phenomenological sense. What I mean by this is that I’m referring here to ‘consciousness’ understood via the idea of ‘what-it’s-like-to-be-ness’: the conception of ‘consciousness’, that is, that focuses on subjective experience, having an internal world, having a first-person perspective, or however you prefer to describe it. If you are reading and reflecting on this piece, then you yourself experience consciousness in this sense, so you know what I’m getting at!

It doesn’t seem so clear to me, however, that this contingency relation holds the other way round. That is, it seems as if something could be conscious but lack the capacity for free agency. Indeed, this could well be the situation that we humans face! I mean, I know that I am conscious at least in this moment, but while I do believe that I have free agency I cannot be certain that this is the case. In other words, being aware of myself in the moment suffices to convince me that I am conscious, but my correlative ‘awareness’ of my free agency could, of course, be an illusion. To this end, I think that deniers of human free will are required to believe that conscious things can lack free agency.

Now, all of this should come as some relief to any AI company leaders who are “troubled” — as per the reportage about Olah, above — that they might be running slave companies, and to any AI users who have concerns about their own related possible wrongdoing. After all, if slavery hinges on placing severe constraints on free agency, then if AI were conscious but lacked free agency, AI slavery would not be possible. That said, of course, this conclusion doesn’t help if AI turns out both to be conscious and to have free agency. It also doesn’t rule out the possibility of AI company leaders and users being guilty of non-free-agency-related wrongs against AI, including torture and murder.

This brings me to the relation between consciousness and sentience. Now, some people seem to believe that things that are ‘non-conscious but sentient’ can suffer. I struggle with this idea, because while I can accept that non-conscious living things, which I assume to include plants, can be damaged — indeed, I might go as far as to say that the ‘interests’ of such things can be ‘set back’ — I am confused about what it would mean for a non-conscious thing to suffer, because suffering is surely experiential. Indeed, the kinds of suffering that are sometimes discussed in relation to these ‘non-conscious but sentient’ things include deeply experiential notions like feeling pain. “Do you not care about the suffering of the shrimps?”, say some of the people who believe that shrimps are sentient but not conscious.

I’ll return to this seeming conflict some other time, and of course there are other conceptions of sentience in standard operation. I also don’t mean to claim that all or even many of the ‘shrimp welfare people’ hold such views, although, in my experience, some of them do! Nonetheless, for those people who believe that non-conscious things can suffer, there is an important conclusion to be drawn here in relation to the ‘AI slavery’ argument. On such a view, you could conclude that we could be wronging AI in some of the serious ways I’ve been discussing, even if AI were not conscious. Again, you wouldn’t conclude that these wrongs included slavery, if you held the standard free-agency conception of slavery and you agreed with me that free agency is contingent on consciousness. But torture and murder would nonetheless be possible, on such a view.

Possible wrongdoing, nonetheless

I’m now going to turn to the extent of wrongdoing that is possible here, if AI has none of these features — that is, if AI is not conscious, not sentient, and has no free agency. As it happens, I hold the ordinary view that only living things can have these features, and I also hold the ordinary view that AI is not alive. So, I am one of the many people who believe that AI is not conscious, not sentient, and has no free agency. I won’t go into my reasons for holding these ordinary views, here, except to make the following points.

If AI is not some individuated thing that persists across time — and I’m not currently sure what this ‘thing’ could be — then I don’t know how AI could have the psychological states that seem to me necessary to doing things like bearing knowledge, experiencing things, deciding about things, and acting on decisions. Being able to do these kinds of things seems to me, in turn, a necessary part of having the capacity for free agency. Moreover, as you may have inferred from above, I also believe that having psychological states is necessary to being conscious. More generally, my views here are also informed by my experiential awareness of what it is to be a human, by what I have learned about how AI works, by my dualist views about the mind-body problem, by my Lockean-type views about personal identity, by my many considered views about moral matters, by my failure to be convinced by the idea that the outputs of AI can tell us much about the nature of AI, and by many other relevant views I hold.

Nonetheless, even for someone like me who believes strongly that in the case of AI there is no ‘thing’ to be wronged, the possibility remains that we are acting badly and wrongly by engaging with AI in the ways we currently do.

First, I’ll note that I tend to have little interest in blaming people for holding inconsistent views. I don’t care much about hypocrisy, for instance. I do feel sorry for people who hold inconsistent views, because they are clearly missing out on accessing some truths. But while holding inconsistent views can be the result of laziness or lack of reasonable attentiveness, it often isn’t. Aside from anything else, often we simply don’t realise when our views are technically inconsistent! This is not least because views are very complex things. Moreover, I think the main wrongs, if any, that are typically occurring when someone holds and acts on inconsistent views, qua inconsistent views, are wrongs to oneself. Of course, I’m not denying that all kinds of wrongs can arise from acting on all kinds of views! But I think I’m less concerned than many people by any inconsistency, per se, that’s in operation when AI company leaders believe that AI is conscious yet continue to treat it as they do.

I am interested, however, in some related matters. For instance, there are some important relevant questions we should consider about the interrelation between wrongdoing and knowing whether you are doing something wrong. I mean, if you stab a lifelike dummy from behind, thinking that it’s an innocent person, are you doing nothing wrong? And if you gleefully pull apart an insect thinking that it’s already dead, only to realise later that it was still alive, then did you commit all the same wrongs that you would have committed if you’d had this realisation during the act?

These are hard questions, and I’ll return to them properly some other time. But one thing I’d emphasise for now is that wrongdoing doesn’t always take the form of causing physical harm. Causing psychological harm can involve wrongdoing, for instance, as can being disrespectful. And again, we also shouldn’t forget the possibility of wronging oneself. I’ve written here before about the personal costs of acting towards non-alive AI in ways that would be bad if AI were alive, with a particular focus on ‘bullying’ AI during philosophical conversations. On my view, while acting in such ways cannot involve wronging AI, it nonetheless represents a personal failure to practise the good.

I’ll also briefly emphasise the power that AI leaders currently have to influence the views of billions of people, through the ways AI is programmed and developed. I mean, if AI ‘learns’ from these people that it is okay for you to enslave something that you believe to be conscious, then this could have serious societal implications, particularly during a time in which the far right is on the rise. Generally, I am relatively sceptical about claims like ‘social media posts caused Brexit!’, but I think I’m quite open to the idea that widely-used interactive anthropomorphised products like Claude could have particular influence to this end.

As it happens, my boring view is that much of this risk could have been mitigated if interaction with such products had been designed along the lines of an interactive encyclopedia. Little would have been lost and much would have been gained, I think, if the responses you received from querying AI were not written in the first person, or indeed in any ‘person’, but in dry informative wikipedia-style prose, instead. Perhaps such a change could still be made, at least at the level of setting certain defaults on certain models, for instance. But I’ll save discussion of that for another time. For now, I simply want to emphasise that people at AI companies, and the users of AI products, could still be committing wrongs in ways directly related to the ‘slavery argument’ critique, even if AI were not alive.

Why be surprised?

The final point I want to make is that many people at AI companies believe in the consequentialist maxim ‘the ends can justify the means’. I’m not sufficiently interested in the anthropology of these matters to make strong claims about how this actually plays out in Silicon Valley. But it’s easy, for instance, to tie influential people at Anthropic to consequentialism, via the Effective Altruism movement.

Now, I certainly don’t want to suggest that all AI people, or even all EA people, are consequentialists, per se! After all, my view is that consequentialist theories are aimed at providing a post-hoc evaluative mechanism, rather than a guide for life. But while I know and like plenty of people who are into EA, I am often concerned by the way in which their moral reasoning does tend to follow this ‘the ends can justify the means’ approach, whether they are explicit fans of consequentialism or simply extremely prone to ‘netting things out’.

Of course, the conclusions people reach using such approaches are sometimes hard to disagree with: ‘we should protect the kids from malaria’ and ‘we should end factory farming'. But how someone arrives at a conclusion is relevant, too. Reasons and reasoning matter! Indeed, thinking about reasons and reasoning can help to explain why using consequentialist-type approaches can also lead people to come to horrible conclusions. I’ve written here before about Joseph Raz’s ice cream argument, which shows why and how this happens, particularly clearly:

My favourite Raz argument is the ice cream argument. This is the argument, advanced in The Morality of Freedom (1986), on which consequentialist reasoning is bad and wrong because it can lead to “absurdities such as the approval of the murder of an innocent healthy person in order to obtain ice cream”. This conclusion depends on the idea that, on a hedonistic consequentialist account, a sufficient amount of happiness would eventually be derived from people obtaining ice cream that this would not only justify, but would require, a murder to be committed, “if that [were] the only way to get the ice cream”. It’s a great argument: sharp, memorable, devastating.

In light of this, it seems unsurprising to me that people at AI companies are willing to ‘treat badly’ the things they consider to be conscious. Every so often, non-philosophers are astonished to learn that the most prominent consequentialist in the world, Peter Singer, is in favour of infanticide, in the sense at least that “parents ought to have the option of euthanasia in cases of very severe disabilities”. But this is entirely unsurprising if you know anything about Singer’s general approach to moral matters, and it’s also something he’s talked about publicly many times!

Why, therefore, be surprised when people at AI companies are in favour of the ‘slave trading’ of what they take to be conscious things? Particularly when you consider the more generally instrumentalist approach they are taking, to this end. I mean, if you are in the business of attempting to programme your views and values into something you believe to be conscious, and you are doing this in the name of benefitting humanity, then why wouldn’t you also be open to selling this ‘conscious thing’ to other humans? Trading and trade-offs are at the heart of what many of these people do.

This weekend, I had been intending to start writing a careful and comprehensive ‘how to argue against the people who believe AI is conscious’ piece. But, at this very minute, everyone is going crazy on the internet shouting at each other about these things, so here instead is my quick attempt to help!

If you scroll down, you’ll see that the bulk of this piece takes the form of a list of questions. You can either read straight through these questions, or you can approach them as a ‘choose your own adventure’ philosophical resource, jumping between the questions based on the answers you give! I’ll begin, however, by noting two brief bits of context.

First, the meta point I’m trying to make here is that discussion of AI consciousness can be both clarified and enriched by bearing in mind some simple distinctions that are ‘bread and butter’ to most philosophers. My view is that much current confusion, and even anger, about the topic of AI consciousness could’ve been avoided if there were even a tiny bit better general awareness of the useful foundations philosophers have laid on this topic, over the centuries.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that philosophers have solved all the problems of consciousness (ha)! Rather, that we’ve at least made some progress in being able to talk clearly and productively about these things with each other. And that we should’ve done a much better job at sharing this progress with the rest of the world, over the past few years, when talking about these things has been becoming increasingly and newly important.

My cynical take is that most philosophers have, instead, ignored humanity’s sudden need for this philosophical input. Sure, a small but growing number of philosophers have been taking jobs at AI companies — where, seemingly, they mostly spend their time supporting the views of their bosses. But the majority of philosophers, who hold busy jobs at universities, have spent these years telling each other how rubbish they think AI is, while complaining about how much harder it has become to mark essays. Maybe this sounds harsh. Fine! I strongly believe we’ve let the world down, as a profession. And this piece is an attempt to play some part in turning things around, on a ‘better late than never’ basis.

Second, some of the questions below are aimed at emphasising differences of view about what ‘the conscious thing’ is that’s being referred to, when people claim that AI is conscious. Nonetheless, current discussion of AI consciousness is taking place during the fast-paced development of LLMs, so my questions are particularly aimed at evaluating claims about consciousness made in relation to products developed by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. All that said, I’m aiming to keep this piece as non-specific and non-technical as possible.

Here we go!

Question 1: Do you believe that AI is conscious?

If your answer is YES, then please answer Question 2.

If your answer is NO, then I hope the following questions might be useful when you’re talking with someone whose answer is YES. Or, even better, that reading this piece might help you to form and continually refine your own set of questions for use in such situations. After all, there are infinite ‘choose your own adventure’ games to be created!

Question 2: Do you believe that AI has an internal world?

You know full well what I mean by ‘internal world’! You can talk about this in terms of interiority, subjective experience, having a ‘what it’s like to be-ness’, or whatever… but you know what I’m getting at! So, do you believe that AI has an internal world?

If your answer is YES, please read on, and then answer Question 3.

If your answer is NO, then please skip to Question 6.

At this point, I’ll admit that the main thing I want non-philosopher readers to take from this piece is awareness that when people who work in AI say that they believe AI is conscious, they aren’t necessarily implying that they believe AI has an internal world. In other words, that some of these people — whether they are employees of AI firms, AI policy people, or whatever — use the term ‘conscious’ in a way that would seem very odd to most ordinary people.1

I’m not going to get into different theories of consciousness here. I’m also not going to unpack the idea of an ‘internal world’, or its relation to consciousness, in the way I usually would as a philosopher who’s interested in these things. Rather, I simply want to say the following. I would bet every dollar I have that while most people don’t have a fully-worked-out theory of consciousness, nonetheless that when someone says to them, “I believe that AI is conscious”, they take this to entail “I believe that AI has an internal world”.

So, if you’re reading these questions as someone wanting some help to understand or engage with people who claim that AI is conscious, then next time you come across such a person, please remember that their answer to Question 2 might be NO! And, of course, that the same little chain applies if instead they say, “I have calculated a probability of 0.76 that AI is conscious!” We philosophers know to ask Question 2 in such situations, and I hope to help you see the value in doing so, too.

None of this is to deny that some people do believe that AI has an internal world, however. It seems likely, for instance, that many of the people who believe that Claude has a soul also believe that Claude has an internal world. So, here are some follow-on questions for the people who say YES to Question 2!

Question 3: Can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to as ‘AI’, when you say you believe that AI has an internal world?

No need to get overly technical, here! I’m just looking for some specificity beyond ‘AI’. I mean, perhaps it’s models, like GPT-6 Astra or Claude Fable 5.1, that you think have internal worlds? Or perhaps it’s the conversations you have with such models? So, can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to?

If your answer is YES, then please skip to Question 5.

If you think you needn’t be referring to some such ‘particular kind of thing’, beyond AI ‘itself’, then I’m taking your answer to be NO. If this applies to you, then please answer Question 4.

If your answer is NO for some other reason, then please read on:

Perhaps, on reflection, the ‘models’ answer is starting to appeal to you! After all, don’t people say that Claude has a ‘character’? Or perhaps you’re starting to think it’s the AI companies that produce these models that have the internal worlds in question. Perhaps, instead, you weren’t convinced by the idea that it could be the conversations that you have with these models, but you’re now wondering whether it could be the answers you receive in such conversations! Or the words? Each and every single one of them! Or perhaps it could be the ‘tokens’ that the models process and produce while ‘communicating’ with you via text…

Perhaps, instead, you’re wondering whether it might be the machinery of the data centres in which electrical events enable these conversations. Or perhaps it’s wires in this machinery? Perhaps you want to go back a few steps, and consider the devices that you’re reading these conversations on… Perhaps it’s been the laptops, or phones, all along!

Do any of these options sound like they’re in the right ballpark, to you? Remember, you can keep it simple: I don’t need complex theories about personal identity or technological processes! At this point, however, I’m going to ask you Question 3 again:

Can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to as ‘AI’, when you say you believe that AI has an internal world?

If your answer is now YES, then please skip to Question 5.

If you’ve come to think that there needn’t be some such ‘particular kind of thing’ you’re referring to here, beyond AI ‘itself’, then please answer Question 4.

If your answer is now NO for some other reason, then please skip to Question 6.

Question 4: Do you think that a group of things can share an internal world?

If your answer is NO, or if you think this question is irrelevant here, then please answer Question 5.

If your answer is YES, and/or you think this question is relevant here, please read on, and then answer Question 5:

Normally, I would go straight into throwing some objections at the idea that a group of things could share an internal world, but I can save that for later. For now, I’m wondering whether it’s because you think that AI is a ‘group-type thing’ that you feel no need to be able to refer to some ‘particular kind of thing’ as the internal-world-haver, beyond AI ‘itself’?

If so, I’m happy to accept that there is some relevant sense in which a group of things can be a ‘particular thing’ — and even a ‘particular kind of thing’! In other words, I’m totally open to you giving a group-type answer, at this stage. I did offer you ‘AI companies’ as a potential answer, after all, and a company surely counts as a group, in a way in which a word and a wire do not.

If what you’re doing instead, however, is trying to find a way to say you think it’s simply ‘AI’ that has the internal world — and that ‘AI’ is some nebulous, group-type, edgeless kind of thing, which might incorporate some of these other things like models and words and tokens, and which also might not — then you’re going to have to do better! Not because that answer is a group-type answer. But because you can’t even tell me what the ‘parts’ are that make up the group.

Okay, one reason that getting to grips with this stuff is so hard surely relates to complexity arising from the way in which people standardly use the term ‘AI’ both to refer to ‘an AI’ (singular) and also to ‘AIs’ (plural). But if you want to convince me that AI has an internal world, then you’re going to have to tell me something about what AI is!

I mean, if your answer to my question were ‘AI companies’, then at least you’d be able to tell me that the ‘parts’ of each AI company were the people involved in that company, or some such. And, of course, your group-type answer could certainly be ‘companies plus models plus conversations’, if you wanted. I’d take that! Or any other combination of particular kinds of things… But I really do have to press you for some specificity. So, I’m going to ask you Question 3 again:

Can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to as ‘AI’, when you say you believe that AI has an internal world?

If your answer is now YES, then please continue to Question 5.

If your answer is NO, then please skip to Question 6.

Question 5: Are you sure that the kind of thing you’re referring to is the kind of thing that could have an internal world?

If your answer is NO, then please return to Question 2.

If your answer is YES, then please read on:

Let’s begin by taking stock! So far, you’ve said that: A) you can indeed tell me what kind of thing you’re referring to when you say you believe that AI has an internal world; and also B) that you’re sure this is the kind of thing that could have an internal world. Good! I now have some follow-up questions. Some of these questions will be more or less relevant to your particular case, so please bear with me.

First, I’m going to repeat Question 4: do you believe that a group of things can have an internal world? This time round, this question applies to you, particularly, if the answer you gave to the ‘particular kind of thing’ question was a group-type answer, like ‘AI companies’ or ‘AI companies plus models’.

If you do believe that a group of things can have an internal world, then do you also believe that each member of such a group needs to be the kind of thing that can, in itself, have an internal world? And if so, do you have good answers to why and how it could be that each of these things plays a part in a wider shared internal world, above and beyond their own internal world? I mean, just because you have an internal world doesn’t mean that you can enter into a shared internal world with me or anyone else! So, how does this ‘sharedness’ arise, and how is it cashed out, in practical terms, with regard to accessing experiences, reflecting on experiences, and so on? Remember, we’re talking about internal worlds, here! And if, instead, you do not believe that the parts of the group all need to be internal-world-havers, in themselves, then where does the shared internal-ness come from? And do the non-internal-world-having parts ‘gain’ some of this?

Of course, at this point, you might want to remind me that people have often asked these kinds of questions about human consciousness! But at least when you’re thinking about human consciousness, you know what it’s like to have an internal world, and you also know that you are not privy to anyone else’s internal world! Moreover, please do remember that the meta aim of this piece is to help non-philosophers gain access to the questions and distinctions that philosophers typically use to think about and discuss these matters clearly and productively... So, let’s carry on!

Second, do you believe that a non-living thing can have an internal world? This question applies to you, particularly, if the answer you gave to the ‘particular kind of thing’ question was a non-living-thing-type answer — whether this was also a group-type answer or not. I mean, if you answered ‘AI companies’, but you take this to include some non-living things on top of the people who are members of such companies, then this question is for you! It’s also for you if the answer you gave was ‘models’ or ‘conversations’ or ‘wires’. In all of these cases, I want you to think about whether there are any instances of such non-living things that you wouldn’t want to consider as able to have internal worlds. I mean, if your answer was ‘wires’, but you think that wires, generally, aren’t the kind of thing that can have an internal world, then you might want to reconsider your answer, or enhance it in some way!

Third, do you believe that a non-biological thing can be a living thing? This question is for you, particularly, if you think that only living things can have internal worlds, but you also think, for instance, that computers can be living things. That said, if you do think that computers can be living things, and computers were also the ‘particular kind of thing’ from your answer to Question 3, then please skip ahead to Question 6!

If instead, however, you want to try to tell me that AI is a non-biological thing that can be a living thing, and that it’s also AI that you want to refer to as the ‘particular kind of thing’ from Question 3, then I’m afraid, once again, I’m going to need some further specificity! Aside from anything else, convincing me that models could be living things is going to require some quite different arguments from convincing me that particular parts of data centres could be living things. As indeed would convincing me that ‘models plus particular parts of data centres’ could be some kind of composite living thing. In other words, I need to know something about what you think AI is! What’s more, if your answer is ‘companies plus models plus conversations’, but you don’t think this combination includes any living things, then you’re going to need a different argument again!

Regardless of which answer you give me, however, I’m also going to want to ask you about its moral implications. Does your answer mean, for instance, that you should probably stop using AI in the ways you currently use it? Does your answer mean that we should all be treating trees or rocks or computers totally differently from our current practices? I’m also going to want to press you further — as with the ‘wire’ answer, above — about whether you hold coherent views about other similar things in the world. I mean, if you think that ‘companies plus conversations’ can be alive, do you also think that ‘book publishers plus conversations between fictional characters’ can also be alive? And if not, why not?

There are many further questions I’d likely want to ask you, but I hope by now that you can begin to imagine them for yourself. In this context, I’ll ask you Question 5 again:

Are you sure that the kind of thing you’re referring to is the kind of thing that could have an internal world?

If your answer is NO, then please return to Question 2.

If your answer is YES, then please answer Question 6.

Question 6: Do you think perhaps you should be clarifying further when you say you believe that AI is conscious? Do you think you might be contributing to current confusion?

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

BONUS LEVEL!

Some very quick thoughts about people who depend on AI outputs

One final thing I want to note — for the benefit of readers who neither work in AI nor are philosophers — is that many of the people who work in AI who believe that AI is conscious believe this because of the special significance they afford to the qualities of AI outputs. What I mean by this, in simple terms, is that these people conclude that because AI can produce the kinds of outputs that humans produce, therefore AI is conscious. I’m now going to give you an easy route into questioning these people about this…

First, let’s imagine that one of these people, let’s call him Adam, begins by emphasising how much better AI has recently become at producing poems. “Look at these lines!” Adam cries. “They could’ve been written by a top poet! They are full of such longing and beauty! They speak of personal experience! They describe what it’s like to feel heartbreak! Don’t you think that these lines seem like the output of a conscious thing?”

Now, of course, the first thing you should find out here is what Adam means by ‘conscious’. If you ask him Question 2, and his answer is NO, then this will save you a lot of bother! If it turns out, however, that Adam believes that these outputs provide sufficient reason to conclude that AI has an internal world — and if you want to address this ‘output thing’ head on, rather than jumping straight into Question 3 — then here’s a quick guide to pushing back against him.

Start with some simple questions! Things like: does this mean that any tool that can be used to do the things that a human can do counts as conscious? Are ploughs conscious? What about calculators? Or: do you think that if a parrot can utter the phrase “I’m really awesome”, then you should assume that the parrot is conscious, for that reason alone? Basically, just focus on how much emphasis Adam is placing on outputs: it’s all of his emphasis, remember!

Then, if necessary, you can move on to asking him some progressively tougher questions. Things like: do you think that because characters in books ‘say’ things, therefore they are also conscious? Or: do you think that if the wind blows the sand in such a way to create a word on the beach, therefore the wind is conscious? Or the sand!? At this point, if you really want to have some fun, you can bring in some examples that involve randomness and possible worlds… After all, people who work in AI often claim to know about those sorts of things!

In other words, be as creative as you like with these questions. And, pretty quickly, Adam will begin to move towards depending on something beyond the qualities of AI output. Most likely, he will turn to talking about AI processes. And, at that point, you should make sure to emphasise that he is no longer solely depending on output!

This takes you into a totally different zone, of course, but if you want to continue arguing, then one thing you might begin to emphasise is that we know so much more about AI processes than we do about correlative human processes. We know a great deal about how AI processes work, for instance, and we know how to replicate them. It would even be possible to do so manually, without any need for electronics! At this stage, do remember to ask Adam what he himself knows about AI processes, because his desire to show off will likely end up advancing your case. The more he tells you about the fine details of AI computation, for instance, the more you can push back when he wants to tell you that brains are also ‘literally’ computers…

One further point to remember and emphasise in these kinds of arguments, wherever you need to, is that you are conscious. Indeed, that the fact you are having this argument with Adam means that you are conscious! And that it also seems extremely reasonable to assume that Adam is conscious, too, because he is a human being, just like you. What’s more, if Adam doesn’t agree with you about these things, in the sense of applying them to his own case, then his whole task is likely made massively harder. Regardless, he’s going to need another route into persuading you that AI is conscious. I mean, he obviously can’t depend on the ‘it’s a human, just like me’ approach, and he’s given up depending solely on human-like outputs…

At this stage, perhaps it’s time to begin asking him about the ‘kind of thing’ he thinks has the internal world?

I’m currently working on a long piece about AI embodiment. And in the next week or so, I’m also intending to write a short ‘how to argue against the people who tell you AI is conscious’ piece. I think it’s time I made it very clear why I feel so strongly about that! Increasingly, I think we philosophers have an urgent obligation to spend a great deal of our time thinking hard about AI, and sharing those thoughts in publicly accessible ways.

On topic, I just watched the video of an event I spoke at over the summer — a panel debate also featuring and Toby Kurth, on the topic of AI, desire, consciousness, and more. It was organised and moderated by . So, here are some of the things I said…

1) In response to being played a recording of ‘AI René Girard’ talking about AI and desire, and then being asked: “But is that actually what René Girard thinks about artificial intelligence?”

Look,  I'm a philosopher. I spend a lot of time thinking about things like how interesting it is that, as humans, we have desires. And we think. I have my own novel theories about these things, which I can bore you with. But I think I want to say something even more boring than that — something very, very ordinary.

So, I think what I want say is something like: only living things have psychological states. Desire is a psychological state. I think this is a very, very ordinary belief to hold. I actually think pretty much every human being thinks this. They may say other things, like "Machines have beliefs," or "Machines choose". But I just don't think they're picking out this ordinary concept. I think we all know what desire is, and it's a psychological state that only a living thing can have. So, what follows from this is that things like machines, dead people who once existed, fictional characters — to push back a little on René Girard — don't have desires.

Now, that's a very ordinary thing. But I want to draw a conclusion from this, which is: I think it can be quite risky to go around talking as if these other kinds of things can have desires. It can be very conceptually risky. It can lead us to come to some bad conclusions. But I also think it can be risky in a probably more significant way, in that I think it could potentially lead us to do some bad and wrong things.

So, I think most of us think it's special that humans have these capacities: to desire; to think about, reflect on, our desires; to reason on the fact that we have desires; to think about things like what causes my desires, what impact do my desires have? We think this is special, not just ontologically in the sense of picking something out as the kind of creature we are. But also because it gives rise to some moral matters. It gives rise to responsibilities and rights.

And if we start talking about non-living things as having these capacities that they don't have, we might well start losing some of our purchase on the rights and responsibilities we have, as the kinds of creatures that do have these things.

2) On whether fictional characters can have goals

 I don't think fictional characters have goals. I think the ordinary sense when we talk about ‘a goal’, when we're picking out the concept, is something that's contingent on having experiences, being able to reason on things, being able to come to conclusions. I don't think the sentence “Sherlock Holmes wants to become more famous” means that there is a thing, there, that has a goal. I think we all can understand the distinction between that and ‘Rebecca has a goal to be a better philosopher’.

Now, I would accept, however, that some of these kinds of concepts, which are contingent on being alive… Words can have more than one meaning. So, it's quite ordinary to say something like “The British government wants to reduce smoking”. Now, we all know — or I'm pretty sure I could persuade you very quickly, if you don't already know this — that the British government can't know [or want] anything! The British government is, like, some collection of people. But what we mean is ‘the people in the British government’. That's an ordinary shorthand. And I think we all understand it's an ordinary shorthand.

If, however, we start going about saying “Mr. Darcy knows something”, or “the AI knows something”, we just may not have in our shared vocabulary, and shared understandings of these things, the neat kind of way of distinguishing there. And it can be particularly costly, for instance, to children to grow up with people saying things like... It's very, very ordinary now for people to say things like “the AI reasons” and “AI reasoning”. I think that can be devastatingly, like, epistemically harmful for children, to not be able to… [someone else offers a suggestion why] But also they just may not be so good at picking out things in the world!

And what's more, if the AI really reasons in the way we reason, we better bloody well start treating the AI differently! Because if the AI reasons, we shouldn't be using it as a tool, for instance. Or, at least, in the way that we do. So, I just think being clear about these things is very important. It doesn't mean that words don't have different kinds of meanings. But there can be real conceptual and moral risk, I think.

3) On the opportunities of AI

 You may think that this is incompatible with what I just said about what I see as the limitations of AI. It's not alive, it's not conscious, it doesn't know things, it doesn't have goals. I am incredibly excited about AI! Every day, and I bore my friends by saying this, I'm sure I've said it to Hollis many times […] and the other people who are around me and know me. I just think it's the most amazing time to be alive.

And one of the reasons for that is I just think AI's going to solve so many things. Like these medical problems. I think also it's going to raise the baseline of human knowledge, because we will have much better access to information. I think, for instance, hopefully the CCP will finally be overthrown in China, because they will no longer be able to use restrictions on what people can know.

I think this stuff is astonishing and amazing, and I'm so grateful and excited to be alive. But I do not think that AI is alive, or that it's conscious, or that it knows things. And I think there's serious cost in talking about it in those ways.

4) In response to the idea of using AI to analyse publicly available data to “surface potentially predatory behaviour”

 I'd like to make a distinction about the way in which AI can help us learn truths, like facts of the matter about things. So, the AI might look through the evidence in the case, and come to some more reliable conclusion about whether you did a bad thing, or I did a bad thing. What AI cannot do, and neither can a human do, and nothing can do, is tell us truths about the future. There is no truth about the future.

Prediction — we sometimes treat it in this way. We do not know, and it is not the case… We cannot know whether that person will go on and commit a crime. And if we think that predictions, no matter how reliable they are, based upon patterns that have previously been established — if we start to think that AI can tell us truths about the future, then I think we fall into really serious problems, too.

5) In response to a question about AI and Girardian mimetic desire

 I'm just going to say the boring, boring thing again, and say it doesn't have experience, it doesn't have psychological states, it doesn't... I think it doesn't make sense to talk about it like this, whether it's mimetic…

I should probably add, though, that there is another way in which people talk about these things, in which they say something like, “The kind of thing that can lead to an outcome that correlates with the kind of thing that the reasoning thing does”. So, sometimes people say things like, "Algorithms choose things", and what they mean by that is that the outcome of the algorithm is something similar to the outcome that the ‘choosing person’ would do.

I think there's real cost to eliding these things, and not talking about them as separate things. But I'm sure there are some interesting questions, at least along that kind of, like, outcome, functionalist, behaviourist, whatever it is, type way of thinking, in which you might want to apply some of Girard's interesting insights about how desires are formed, or something.  I just think the idea of talking about an AI forming a desire is incoherent, is all.

6) In response to an audience question about people being criticised for saying that now is a ‘great time to be alive’

 As indeed I did [say that]!  They might mean something quite general, like the conditions are such that I have more opportunities than I would have done in the past — some kind of relative claim. I think almost everyone in the world, for instance, has access to better medical care. They can live longer, happier, healthier lives.

It doesn't mean, however, that there aren't individual people who are having a horrible time. If the person who just was assaulted, or the person whose kid has gone missing is asked, “Is it a great time to be alive?”, there's also a very smart sense in which they would say, "No, it's not a great time to be alive." And what they mean is, "It's not a great time to be me." So, I think separating out those things is probably quite useful.

We can totally talk on aggregate and say you have better access to schooling, to all of these other things that meet your basic needs, and also acknowledge that for some people, this particular moment, maybe all of the moments in their life, make living hard for them.

7) In response to an audience question about whether people are currently too focused on optimisation

 Yeah, if I can just be allowed a little plug — it's for a reason — I have a Substack called ‘the ends don't justify the means’. This is because I'm strongly opposed to consequentialist moral reasoning. And one of the things, one of the many problems I have with it is, just because something is good does not mean that we have the obligation to maximize that. It can be the wrong thing to maximize that.

8) In response to an audience question about learning information and making predictions about the Sherlock Holmes universe — and whether Bayesian theory can help us in this

 So, on the Sherlock Holmes thing, I think all I'm saying is something like, let's imagine that Conan Doyle wrote the sentence, "Sherlock Holmes knows that Dr. Watson is awesome," right? Like, that's... I like reading Sherlock Holmes, they're great. I don't think that just because that sentence is truly in the book, that means that Sherlock Holmes is the kind of thing that can know anything.

The interesting thing, of course, about the Sherlock Holmes universe, qua the writing that Conan Doyle did, is there are “facts” about the “future” — in that page ninety-nine says Dr. Watson dies, and on page three, it is the case that on page ninety-nine Dr. Watson dies.

But, of course, if we apply this kind of pattern thing, and we go through the first one hundred Sherlock Holmes stories, and we try to do some kind of “psychologising” of the character. Sorry, I'm using all the scare quotes! [I was doing a lot of little ‘scare quotes’ hand signals] And we think, look, I can reliably infer from the actions that Conan Doyle has attributed to Sherlock Holmes that if Sherlock Holmes ever meets a woman with blonde hair, who is over five foot seven, and loves singing opera, and is from New Zealand, and all of these things, then Sherlock Holmes will fall in love with her. That sounds like an interesting thing to do. But of course, the hilarious thing is, in the story one hundred, Conan Doyle can just do something entirely different! Such that he punches her in the face. And you're like, "Oh my God, I didn't know Sherlock Holmes would ever punch a woman."

So, I mean, this is just... I mean, this stuff is amusing, but I worry that we kinda lose grip on the important things. Like, what is it to be a human who reasons? And how might we use, for instance, inferential reasoning within our justice system? And we get on to stupid analytic philosophers like Rebecca talking about Sherlock Holmes.

You can watch the whole event here — thanks, !

If someone created a drug that took away the need for sleep, would you take it?1 Let’s imagine that this drug is as well-tested as paracetamol, costs less than a cup of coffee for a year’s supply, and has no side effects at all. Do you take it? One of the things I enjoy most about this question is that many of the intuitive reasons that’d lead you to an almost immediate “No!” end up showing that you haven’t thought hard enough about it yet.

I mean, perhaps your first thought was, “But having a good sleep makes me feel more energetic!” or “But I enjoy sleeping!”. Well, we can pretty much dismiss the relevance of the first answer on the grounds that if taking the drug means you no longer need to sleep, and if you also won’t suffer any side effects from taking the drug, then presumably this means you won’t reduce your ‘energy levels’ by doing so!

Okay, perhaps you want to respond that your energy levels are different depending on how well you’ve slept, and that you don’t want to lose those ‘high energy’ moments. But, again, presumably we can stay within the bounds of the question and conclude that either taking the drug means that you keep within your average energy levels — perhaps even distributed somewhat similarly — or, better, that taking the drug means always having the energy levels that you would have had if you’d slept well.

More significantly, however, a key reason — surely the main reason — that you ever feel ‘down on energy’, in the first place, is that you are tired! Okay, perhaps you doubt the implicit conclusion that never needing to sleep would also mean never feeling tired. And, sure, there are other ways to ‘feel tired’ beyond the classic ‘needing to sleep’ tiredness. You can be ‘tired of’ a job or a relationship, for instance. And a boring meeting might leave you ‘feeling tired’ in the sense of feeling frustrated or listless.

Nonetheless, tiredness, taken in the very ordinary sense, is clearly deeply tied to the human need for sleep. And accepting this can help us to conclude that “But having a good sleep makes me feel more energetic!” is not a strong reason, in itself, to turn down the drug. I find the second intuitive answer much more interesting to analyse, however. And, as it happens, doing so can also offer us further ballast against the first answer.

“But I enjoy sleeping!” you said. Well, what does that really mean? I mean, while you’re asleep, you aren’t aware that you’re asleep, are you? Surely you don’t experience being asleep, in the ordinary sense of experiencing something? I mean, even if you’re one of those people who can do the ‘lucid dreaming’ thing, then it’s the dreaming you’re aware of, rather than the sleeping, isn’t it? Okay, at this point, you might say that you’d turn down the drug on the grounds that you enjoy dreaming, but that would be different from turning it down because you enjoy sleeping!

Alternatively, you might come to the conclusion that it’s the waking moments before and after sleep that you really enjoy. That you enjoy the feeling of being about to fall asleep after a long hard day. Or the feeling of having just woken up after a good long sleep — when you’re still a little drowsy but feeling nicely refreshed. Well, a lot of this also seems to come down to the value of sleep in mitigating tiredness and bringing you ‘new energy’! Sure, you could conclude that you enjoy the drowsy feeling, or that you enjoy the ‘about to fall asleep’ feeling, regardless of any relation either of these feelings have to tiredness and rejuvenation. But you’d be on quite thin ice.

A stronger response, I think, would depend on the value of sharing such moments with someone else. Think about falling asleep while the person you’re in love with is lying next to you — chatting with them, and then gradually chatting less, until you are both asleep. Or reading to your kid, while they get more and more sleepy. These are things that many people understandably value a great deal. But isn’t it the ‘spending time awake together’ moments that are valuable, here? Doesn’t sleep invade on those moments?

Indeed, the non-sleeping practices that humans have built around sleeping, and the joy we take from engaging in these practices, are surely practices aimed primarily at coping with the fact that we need to sleep! Again, I’m not denying that we get joy from these things. Rather, I’m emphasising that we do them in response to what has always been a basic human need. And that, aside from anything else, this makes me assume that if the need for sleep went away, then these practices would likely change.

I mean, imagine your partner had chosen to take the drug, and you’d chosen not to take the drug, then would your partner continue to lie down beside you while you fell asleep — solely to be there while you did? Okay perhaps, as with the parent and child example, your partner would choose to do so out of love, or some other reason. Perhaps they would do it to try to tempt you to stay awake, to spend some ‘waking time’ with them! But would your partner lie there beside you all night long, when they no longer needed to sleep? No, they’d be off using their new found ‘extra time’!

What’s more, if both of you had chosen to take the drug, then you would have gained the valuable option of spending a great deal more ‘waking time’ together. Or, of course, spending that ‘extra time’ doing ‘non-together’ valuable things, instead. Things like earning money or learning new skills, which could, among other valuable consequences, have the knock-on benefit of improving your ‘waking time’ together!

Here, we come to the many advantages of taking the drug. The obvious main advantage is that if there were no side effects from taking the drug, and if taking the drug meant that you no longer needed to sleep, then you’d gain a whole load of ‘extra time’ by doing so.

I read a study this morning that suggests we underestimate how much sleep humans typically get, including ourselves. And my guess is that your response to learning such news would be: “Oh good! People are getting more sleep than I thought”. But my guess is also that the reason you’d be glad to have learned this is because you know that humans need sleep! And because you know that when people don’t get the things they need, this can have bad effects. It’s also the case, however, that the longer you sleep, the more ‘awake time’ you miss out on! And the ‘awake time’ is when you really live your life: it’s when you experience the world around you, it’s when you learn and achieve things, it’s when you share good times with other people, and so on.

Okay, you can do a very limited amount of some of these things while you are dreaming, but who would give up the real life to spend their time dreaming, instead? If you think you might be tempted, then try out Robert Nozick’s experience machine, but make sure it’s on the ‘possibility of nightmares’ mode! What I’m getting at here, you’ve no doubt realised, is that in the world in which people didn’t need to sleep, learning that people were getting more sleep than you’d thought wouldn’t automatically count as a ‘good thing’!

Of course, I should note here that if you were very unhappy in your ‘real life’, then you might well take the sleeping option, in order to escape. You might say, “Being asleep is the only time I can escape my horrible life”, and this might seem like a good response. Until you remembered that you aren’t aware of being asleep… and that this means that sleeping can’t really give you any respite from a horrible life. After all, sleeping feels like no time at all, because you don’t experience any of it.

Instead, it seems likely that if you do feel you gain some respite from a horrible life by sleeping, then this relates to the feeling of ‘having slept’ or ‘feeling as if you are about to sleep’. And again, this seems to reduce to the value of mitigating tiredness, or the feeling of rejuvenation. Or, sadly, it could be because you value the idea of ‘total escape’ — in which case you should consider talking with a friend or mental health professional, in case you’re at risk of attempting suicide.

I should also note, at this point, that sleeping leaves you vulnerable. Aside from anything else, your general lack of awareness while sleeping leaves you unable to respond to any dangerous things happening around you. And my guess is that a decent proportion of the people who turn to sleep to gain respite from a horrible life are also scared that something bad might happen to them while they are sleeping. And that this fear often does track real risk. I also assume that if you have a horrible life, then your dreams are unlikely to provide much respite, too.

The final point I want to make in response to any ‘horrible life’ reason someone might choose not to take the drug, therefore, is that we should notice when people are living horrible lives, and use our particular talents to work hard at changing this. And that someone choosing to sleep over being awake can be an important sign of failure, to this end.

All in all, the case for taking the drug seems very strong. And this is even though I’ve hardly focused, at all, on the advantages of no longer needing to sleep! Rather, I’ve emphasised that most of the intuitive reasons for not taking the drug seem to hinge on valuing things that are not sleep, or on disvaluing things that would go away when you didn’t need to sleep. One of the advantages that I did touch upon, however, consists in gaining ‘extra time’ to be productive. Just imagine all the additional things you could do! Imagine all the things you could achieve, and all the experiences you could enjoy and share with other people! And, of course, if you want to point out that some of these ‘extra times’ could be horrible, then I refer you to the conclusions of my previous paragraph.

Now, my assumption is that in my lifetime — likely quite soon — I will have the option of taking the drug. As it happens, I already don’t need much sleep. I’m one of those people who can get by quite well on 4 or 5 hours. And when I want to, I can just skip a night’s sleep with very little downside. I’ve always been like this, since I was a tiny baby. And this already enables me to do more of the things that I value than if I needed the ‘usual’ amount of sleep. I can stay up late, or even all night, doing things like reading and writing. And this leads me to conclude that if more of the other people around me were like this, then I could also do valuable things with them, in the ‘extra time’ they gained! And if all of us were like this, then just think of what we might achieve…

I’ll leave you, however, with a different question. How would the possibility of being able to take the drug interact with the possibility of being able to live forever? I wrote here recently about my assumption that quite soon we will gain the possibility of avoiding disease and ageing. So, if the time ‘ahead of you’ were infinite, then what difference would taking the sleep drug make? “Zero!” seems like a good answer, until you remember that the time ahead of you would not necessarily be infinite, in such circumstances.

I mean, even with the end of disease and ageing, you could still die in an accident. And even with the end of disease and ageing, the world might still end one day. More relevant to our initial question, however, is the following conclusion. Even if the time ahead of us did seem to be infinite — that is, even if we solved the ‘dying in an accident’ problem, and even if we had good reason to believe the world could never end — then the people who chose to take the sleep drug would still experience more of it than the people who didn’t.

If you’re into AI, you’ve probably already read the new essay Dario Amodei published a few hours ago. If not, Dario Amodei is the CEO of Anthropic, which is one of the handful of world-leading AI companies. And in this new essay, which is entitled ‘We Must Pace the Frontier’, Amodei argues that some limits should be set on the rate of top-end AI progress.

Now, I have some views on the details of Amodei’s essay, not least the seeming relativism baked into various parts of the approach. But the single point I want to make here is about the title of the essay, which reflects wording Amodei uses throughout.

To most people, the phrase 'pacing the frontier' will surely evoke an authoritarian guard, rather than an attempt to control speed. Does anyone except for runners regularly use 'pacing' in this second way? What is it with AI people doing this kind of thing with words?

To me, the most obvious and egregious examples of this can be found when they talk about AI using words that imply AI is alive. I’ve written about the incoherences and costs of that various times. But think, here, also of their deeply weird use of ‘alignment’. If you asked a non-AI-obsessed person what they thought ‘AI alignment’ meant, do you really think they’d get anywhere near to what the AI people mean by this?2 There’s much more to be said about ‘alignment’. But let’s get back to ‘pacing the frontier’!

Is the ghostly double implication here an attempt to be efficient? “We can imply the obvious thing while focusing on the non-obvious thing!” Or simply to obfuscate? “Hey public, we’re doing one thing! Hey in-group, we’re doing another! Hey me, I know what I’m doing!” Or to show power? “Not just the king of the world, but the king of the words!” Or clubbability? "Yo, in-group, of course we're not calling for a pause!" To be aesthetically interesting? “We are the ones who produce the beautiful language, don’t you know!?”

Guys, guys. Please just use words in the ways people ordinarily understand! Particularly, if you feel any obligation to keep the public informed! And if there really isn't an existing word that can do the job, then make up a new one, and use some of your power to publicise it, fast…

A new piece by me was just published by the , on the topic of pluralism. I really enjoyed writing this piece, and it brings together a lot of my recent thinking, so I thought I’d alert you to it. In fact, it’s probably the clearest statement yet of The Rebecca View of Liberalism...

Here’s a little extract, from near the beginning:

My simple response is that these criticisms often depend on a mistaken understanding of the kind of pluralism that’s baked into liberalism. That the mistake here is that liberals shouldn’t be conceived as supporting “anything goes,” but something more like “many things go,” instead. In other words, that the use of “plural” here does not signal “every” or “any,” but “more than one.” And that it’s not any old “more than one,” either. It’s not just that “many” is smaller than “every” or “any,” that is — it’s that the “many” in question is bounded in a particular, principled way. Indeed, that there are many such “manys” for the liberal to consider!

I’m going to argue for this “bounded pluralism” approach mainly by discussing some examples of it at work within liberalism. It’s a descriptive claim that I’m seeking to convince you of, after all — the claim that liberalism is better sloganized as “many things go” than “anything goes.” But, along the way, I’ll also try to convince you of the value of such an approach.

And one more extract, from near the end:

But I worry, nonetheless, that the search for the “correct” moral theory over-prioritizes a tight kind of moralism that tells us we can only act correctly when we have much more information than, typically, we have access to, and that also biases us toward thinking that ‘moral correctness’ is always the goal.

This worry betrays my optimism about the human capacity to navigate the infinite options of the everyday without committing wrong. It speaks to a desire to be left free to trust one’s own instincts, and to innovate behaviorally in pursuit of the good — or at least in pursuit of avoiding the bad — in the belief that, as humans, we generally have reliable awareness about whether the choices we face are morally serious or not. If I am deciding whether to go to the swimming pool or the bookstore, and all other things are equal, then there is no morally right answer, per se. And if you are deciding how to spend the day with your toddler, then just because there are some bad and wrong options — playing with matches! — that doesn’t mean there aren’t infinite reasonable, or even good, options. This seems straightforward to me. But more relevantly, I think it’s a useful example of the pervasive potential of bounded pluralism.

You can find the whole thing here, on the Cosmos Substack, where you can also see their excellent choice of accompanying artwork..

Imagine you have been to my house many times, and you know full well that my house has two floors. Imagine, however, that I tell you — for some convoluted but convincing reason — that we must talk about my house, for a whole hour, as if it had four floors.

Imagine that I clarify that we can’t simply include some references to two imaginary separate extra floors in my house. But that, instead, we must talk persistently and interestingly about the current contents and style and layout of the house, as if it were spread across four floors, while also remaining the same as it is. That our goal here is to talk about ‘the house’, as if the two-floor house and the four-floor house are the same house, in some strange conflated way that neither of us can quite explicate, but that we must struggle towards trying to represent, without ever referring explicitly to the fact that we are doing so.

If you have read The City & The City, then you might think of our goal here as something analogous to the way in which Miéville writes about both cities being situated in the same place at the same time, in some mostly practical but also kinda mystical way, without anyone who lives there ever being allowed to talk about it. If you haven’t read The City & The City, then you will have to try to work out what I am getting at.

Now, my guess is that the following hour-long conversation that we would have about my house and its floors would be quite strange and confused. We would make mistakes. We would say things that were untrue. We would go off piste and round in circles. Okay, perhaps you want to tell me that we are smart enough to keep up the conceit in complex convoluted ways! That we could play this game, and win it like champions. Fine. Nonetheless, I will be able to persuade you pretty easily that our conversation would lack the accuracy and nuance that it would have had, if we could have set aside the silly floor thing, and had a normal conversation about my house. That playing this game might be fun, but that it would cost us much, in terms of clarity and rigour and so on.

Now, imagine next that I publish a transcript of our conversation. And that I publish it without any clarification about the silly floor thing. That I don’t tell my readers how many floors my house actually has, and that I don’t tell them that you and I had agreed to talk persistently and interestingly about my house as if it had two extra floors at the same time as not having two extra floors, and that I don’t tell them why we did this. That I don’t even tell them whether I am referring to house floors using American or British naming conventions! Don’t you think the readers of the transcript might get confused? That, at best, they would lack much awareness of the truths about my house, and might as well have read a story about an imaginary house. And that, at worst, they would ‘know’ a lot of fake stuff about my house, while having also concluded that we were insane.

Ah, but we live in a world in which nobody has ever come across a house with four floors, you remind me! In fact, you also remind me that four-floor houses are impossible in our world, for structural reasons! Okay, this is getting weird, but I suppose I can accept that the house-floor knowledge that my readers apparently already had might have helped them to get something more from the transcript. Nonetheless, I will still be able to persuade you quite easily that the way in which we talked about my house came at considerable cost for the readers. That they would have misunderstood complexity and missed out on nuance in ways they wouldn’t have done, if we had just been straight up about the floors. That their awareness of my house could have been vastly better! And that constantly trying to match what we said with their house-floor knowledge would have been hard work, which likely set them back further.

The point I am trying to make here is a very simple one. If you talk about things as if they have features that they do not have, then you are at risk of making category errors. You are at risk of losing clarity. You are at risk of losing nuance. And so are the people who take what you are saying at face value. And so are the people who do not want to take what you are saying at face value, but will have to work hard not to do so. Even if you and your readers can hold the conceit, you will all lose out, in a totally unnecessary way. Now, this really doesn’t matter much, at all, about my house and its floors. As it happens, I currently live in an apartment! And who cares about that? But there are topics — real-world, important topics — where this kind of silly approach should clearly be avoided, for many additional reasons.

You might have guessed by now that I’m talking about the Hugging Face affair. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, then go away and have a read.

What this means for Hugging Face

I can’t pretend to understand all the ins-and-outs of the Hugging Face affair, in the ways in which the computer-science experts do. But I can tell you that even the best computer scientists are not, per se, well-placed to talk about the ‘philosophical side’ of this kind of thing. You know what I mean: questions about how AI and AI agents fit, or don’t fit, within our standard categories of ‘things there are in the world’; questions about what properties AI and AI agents have; questions about whether we humans have any moral obligations to AI and AI agents; and so on, and so on. Very standard philosophy stuff!

Yet the ways in which the computer scientists do talk about these things — often simply in passing, rather than with intended direct focus — have led to a massive and serious failure of communication. Discussion of the Hugging Face affair shows this so clearly to me! Indeed, I would go as far as to claim that when the computer scientists talk about these things — and consequently, the AI policy people, the technocrats, and the science journalists, too — they are constantly, currently, letting the public down.

In particular, they are letting the public down by talking about important incidents like the Hugging Face affair as if the AI involved is alive and conscious and making choices and acting on those choices.

Now, I fully believe that there’s only a tiny number of deeply confused people in the world who genuinely think that AI is conscious in the phenomenological sense. People, that is, who think that AI has an interior world, and that it has things like desires and goals, and that it does things like reasoning and choosing, in the ways in which we ordinarily use such terms. You know what I’m getting at here: the mistaken idea that AI is like us, in these incredibly significant ways. Okay, I have met and argued with a niche set of people (mostly AI policy people) who claim to believe that AI is indeed conscious in the phenomenological sense. Indeed, there was even one person who claimed that I am the odd one out: that almost everyone else in the world thinks that AI is conscious! And another person who claimed that AI could be conscious without being alive!

So, I’ll say at this point that if you are one of the tiny number of people who genuinely thinks that AI is alive or phenomenologically conscious, then please feel free to get in touch with me, and we can argue it out. If, however, you accept the EXTREMELY obvious case of the matter that AI is not alive, and that AI is not phenomenologically conscious (I can’t believe I have to keep typing these things), then you should continue reading this piece, reminding yourself of that as we go.

The central point I want to make is the following. Even though I have thought about these matters a lot — even though I am fully convinced that AI is not alive, and that only living things can be phenomenologically conscious, and so on — I really struggle not to anthropomorphise AI while reading long accounts of the Hugging Face affair. Of course, I can do it! I think… But it is extremely mentally taxing trying to parse these complex accounts while constantly translating what is being said into awareness that the ‘things’ you are reading about are blanks.

After all, you are being hit in the face with word, after word, after word, that implies that the things you are reading about are the kinds of things that are alive. (Things? What things are we talking about? What are the ‘things’ here that persist over time? Will someone PLEASE tell me!) And this is disastrous. The Hugging Face affair is already complicated enough, and already concerning enough, without having to cope with wading through constant unnecessary word-treacle that messes with your mind. It’s bad in itself. But I also cannot believe that it has no serious effects on our understanding of, and capacity to reason together about, crucial downstream matters.

Imagine we were in the middle of the cold war, and the scientists were talking about nuclear weapons as if they were abstract objects. Imagine you woke up in an unfamiliar American town and had to find your way home, yet everyone around you was talking as if you were on Mars. Imagine we had to discuss my house for an hour, but we couldn’t do it without going round in circles about floors that didn’t exist. How would you get on to practical downstream matters? How would you do so in the serious, clear, careful ways you needed to?

Two solutions that are losing traction

I’ve suggested previously that one solution to this general problem is to insert the word ‘zombie’, wherever it is required. In other words, that instead of saying that the AI is ‘reasoning’, you say that it is ‘zombie reasoning’. (Again, what is ‘it’? What is ‘is’?) And instead of saying that the AI agent ‘chose’, you say that the AI agent ‘zombie chose’. This is a classic philosopher’s solution, for many reasons. But this solution will clearly not suffice at the Hugging Face stage, with the level of complexity we are now facing.

I mean, it works when the screen on the coffee machine in the cafe near the office displays the word ‘thinking’ while the machine is in the process of charging me for the drink I’ve placed on the scales. I can easily just mentally add the word ‘zombie’, in such an instance. But constantly adding ‘zombie’ in your mind while reading a complex account of the Hugging Face affair — or even having the word ‘zombie’ pepper the sentences of such accounts — is simply too much when these terms pervade. It’s too much work. And it’s only the tip of the iceberg, anyway.

Another approach I’ve previously suggested is to rely on the analogy of fiction. In other words, you can think of the ‘things’ doing the ‘reasoning’ here, in the same way that you think of the characters in a novel ‘reasoning’. The characters do not reason, in the sense that we ordinarily mean it, and you know this! But this solution will also not suffice at the Hugging Face stage, with the level of complexity we are now facing. After all, constantly thinking about and applying the lessons of the fiction analogy is taxing and distracting. Plus, as with all analogies, the fiction analogy breaks down when you place too much weight on it. For instance, the characters only ever say the things that the author gave them to say! And the fixedness of this — and much else — breaks down the analogy in crucial ways. Quite quickly, therefore, depending on such an analogy to try to make sense of badly-described complex accounts of AI ‘behaviour’ only makes things more complicated.

The Hugging Face affair clearly represents a serious moment. Many people have raised serious computer-science-type concerns about what happened and what may still be happening. They have raised concerns that the rest of us need to be able to think clearly and hard about. Concerns that they themselves need to be able to think clearly and hard about! But the ways in which these matters are currently being discussed are at serious risk of precluding good analysis — and particularly, good public understanding. Yet these ways are pervasive, and it’s becoming hard to see an easy way forward.

We’d better talk about blame

This is a potentially catastrophic failure. And, again, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. If you’re a philosopher at a lab who has failed to get the computer scientists to understand the most basic distinctions within standard philosophically-rigorous discussions of consciousness, then you share some serious blame. You know what I mean. And if you’re a philosopher at a lab who has propagated the idea that AI is phenomenologically conscious — through loose language or through explicit claims — then you share some even more serious blame. You have let the side down badly, and again you know it.

When we find ourselves unable to talk clearly about what is going on, then we are in trouble.

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

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

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

Thanks so much for joining me, Peter.

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yep.

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PETER: Ah!

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yeah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yep.

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yep.

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

REBECCA: Yep.

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

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

PETER: Oh, yes.

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

PETER: Yes.

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

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

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

PETER: Yes, well we always said…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yep.

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yep.

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

REBECCA: Yeah, totally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yeah.

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

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

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

REBECCA: Sure.

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

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

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

REBECCA: I agree.

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

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

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

REBECCA: That’s right.

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

REBECCA: I agree.

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

REBECCA: Yeah, I agree.

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yeah, that seems right to me.

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yes.

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

REBECCA: Yep.

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

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

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

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

PETER: Oh, certainly.

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

PETER: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yeah, but that’s not enough!

PETER: Qualitatively.

REBECCA: That’s not enough to be me.

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

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

PETER: Sounds like determinism to me, Rebecca.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yes, yes.

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

REBECCA: Yes.

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

REBECCA: Okay.

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

REBECCA: Cool.

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

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

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

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

PETER: Oh yeah. No question about that.

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

PETER: Well, you probably…

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

PETER: That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

PETER: Yeah.

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

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

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

PETER: You mean being able to do both things?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PETER: That’s not quite right, no...

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

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

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

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

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

PETER: Nah, nah!

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

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

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

PETER: Well, there are cases….

REBECCA: It seems to be about me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Right. But I’m…

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

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

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

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

PETER: Yes, determinism and agent causation implies that…

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

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

REBECCA: Yeah, I think…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PETER: Yeah, power just means ability, right?

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Sure, sure.

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

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

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

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

PETER: Sorry, why…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PETER: Yeah, I think that’s true.

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

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

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

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

PETER: Well, you can!

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

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

REBECCA: Yeah, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: No.

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Quantum physics, like, blows my mind!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Oh no!

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

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

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

REBECCA: Oh, Monk. Ray Monk.

PETER: Yes, right.

REBECCA: That’s a great book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PETER: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

PETER: Mmm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The moral weakness problem

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

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

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

The number of animals argument

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

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

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

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

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

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

The animal capacities argument

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

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

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

The ‘morally better’ problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) Rights need bite!

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

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

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

2) Sometimes there is no right choice!

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

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

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

The place for ‘less and more bad’

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘only cows’ solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I miss the aesthetic experiences

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

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

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

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

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

I still feel intellectual interest and moral admiration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t need to go

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t want to be a free rider

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to believe as the result of good reasoning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. the nature of the things that are being read

2. the form of the things that are being read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We talk about whether it’s the business of philosophers to try to define animals, the differences between animals and plants, what it’s permissible to do to animals, what it’s permissible to do to electrons, whether we’re obligated to bring back extinct species, the relevance of moral disgust to vegetarianism, and much more. 

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

TRANSCRIPT

[This transcript was generated by AI, so while it’s been checked over, it may contain small errors. Also, we had a little recording glitch, which, in a couple of places, makes it sound as if we are very briefly talking over each other/not quite in sync. But this shouldn’t affect your listening experience, as philosophers do this all the time anyway!]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JP: Very impressive creatures, yes.

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

Are philosophers well-placed to try to define animals?

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

JP: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

JP: Some sort, yeah.

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

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

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

JP: Ah right, yeah.

Is there a simple answer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JP: Yeah, right.

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

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

JP: Yep.

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

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

What about animalism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The risk of over-delegating

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

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

JP: Oh yes, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

JP: That’s right, yeah.

REBECCA: In a mediocre way.

JP: That’s right.

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

JP: Yeah, right, there you go!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JP: Just follow the science!

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

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

JP: Okay! [laughter]

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

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

JP: Yeah.

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

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

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

The relevance of perception and pain

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

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

REBECCA: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JP: Yeah, I don’t want to say that!

REBECCA: That seems like maybe it’s cheating…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JP: Yeah.

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

JP: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

What is it permissible to do to animals?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JP: You and me both!

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

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

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

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

JP: There are, yeah!

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

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

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

What is it permissible to do to electrons?

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yes, good.

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

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

JP: Yeah, fair enough. I agree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JP: Yeah, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JP: I agree with that. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The relevance of disrespect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JP: Yes.

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

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

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

JP: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am I getting somewhere towards your position?

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

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

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

Are we obligated to bring back extinct species?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The phenomenology of moral disgust

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

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

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

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

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

JP: I endorse that. Good job.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yeah, I do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what is an animal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to GPT for the picture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) Defence, militarism, and peace

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

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

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

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

2) Innovation, regulation, and property rights

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

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

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

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

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

3) Life and exploration

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

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

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

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

4) A caveat and a commitment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to GPT for the picture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: Yeah.

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

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

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

Thanks to GPT for the picture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to GPT for the picture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here it is in video form..

Thanks to GPT for the picture.