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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you become a space philosopher?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing about space as a philosopher

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the core philosophical domains?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what is philosophy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why are there so many philosophical questions about space?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some philosophical questions about space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three particularly interesting and pressing questions

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

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

1) How should property ownership work in space?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2) How should human space experience be regulated?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why does the philosophy of space matter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

Q&A

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HENRY BONSU: Sounds like a great party!

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

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

You can listen to the whole conversation here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEN: Yeah.

REBECCA: You think they can?

BEN: I think so.

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

BEN: There’s nothing they can do.

REBECCA: They’re never going to know.

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

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

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

REBECCA: The change of heart.

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

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

BEN: Fair enough.

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

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

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

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

BEN: So to go back to mercy —

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

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

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

BEN: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Ben Brophy. Ben is Vice President of Strategic Engagement here at the Mercatus Center. He’s a pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Alexandria. He has multiple degrees in both political science and theology. He has an excellent Substack called , where he often writes about the conjunction of theology and philosophy. He’s also one of my favorite people to talk with, often argue with, about these matters.

Today he’s going to be talking with me about forgiveness. Thanks so much for joining me, Ben.

BEN: It’s great to be here.

REBECCA: So I thought, to start with, I was wondering if you could just give us what you think is a paradigmatic example. So, some really easy, straightforward, non-controversial example of forgiveness taking place: someone forgiving someone for doing something. So we have something to come back to, bounce off, test out, do all that philosophy stuff.

BEN: Yeah, let’s do it. I think if there are any evangelicals listening to this podcast, they will immediately know the example I’m going to give, because it comes from Tim Keller, who’s a relatively well-known pastor, at least in my circles, not all circles. He passed away in 2023. But he often gave this example of forgiveness.

Suppose that, Rebecca, I invite you to my home. You come to my home and you break my lamp. At this point, forgiveness would look like not making you pay for the lamp. Indeed, I have to take on, incur, the cost of the lamp to myself. That can mean I’m going to go to Target and buy myself another $40 lamp. Or I can forego that altogether and just say, I’m not going to buy a new lamp, but I now am lampless. And so I incur the penalty that you caused on my behalf, and then I release you from any obligation to pay for it.

Yeah, I think we can leave it there. I’m not going to make you pay. I’m not going to hold anything against you. I basically volunteer to suffer the loss of my lamp, on your behalf, that you broke in my home.

REBECCA: Okay, so I think something like someone coming to your house and breaking a lamp seems to me like the kind of thing you might well forgive somebody for doing. It seems both like it’s the kind of thing which isn’t so big that we might not get into these questions about, is it forgivable? It also seems like quite an ordinary example.

But you said something which I feel is a little bit controversial here, though, about this idea of incurring the costs. Is this something necessary? Like, if I didn’t incur all the costs, could it still count as me forgiving you?

Imagine I’m, like, look Ben, you know, I don’t have much money. I have all these kids I’ve got to spend my money on. I just can’t really afford to replace the lamp. I really want to forgive you, but can we just go halves on it? [laughter] Would it still count as forgiveness?

BEN: I think it can if I say, if there is any absorption on my part of a debt that you owe, that you’ve incurred by act of your behavior, then yes. Then I’m extending some measure of forgiveness. Or even, if you want to use the word, grace, or unmerited favor. That is something that’s happening.

But, you know, the reality breaks in. It’s again, to use your example, I can’t really, like, I don’t have any light in my house. Can you please help me here? Now, this is where your part of the bargain, you’ve done the wrong against me, you’ve broken the lamp, and there is that side of it. What responsibility, what role does repentance play in forgiveness? These are all thorny and complicated and debated issues in Christianity, and, I assume, also philosophy.

REBECCA: Yeah, so one thing I’m particularly interested in — I’m interested in these concepts where you have some kind of action, and it’s directed at somebody. Some of these, maybe there needs to be some kind of interaction. So, for instance, I actually wrote a paper recently in which I argued that one difference between consent and promising is I think consent is part of an interaction.

So, for instance, if I say to you, “I consent for you to drive my car.” I feel like that doesn’t really make much sense unless you’ve asked if you could drive my car. That’s maybe just quite a blunt example. Whereas, I think I can promise you something without you having expected something. I can write to my brother and say, “I promise I’m going to send you some Lego at Christmas.” My brother’s a grown-up who likes Lego. Fair enough, lego is cool! I don’t think he needed to ask for the Lego. Whereas, again, if I say, “I consent for you to play with my Lego,” I feel like it’s part of an interaction.

So forgiveness, I find, is interesting because it just doesn’t seem to me super clear about the role that the ‘forgivee’ — the person who the forgiveness is directed at — needs to play, if anything at all.

BEN: Yeah, I think what Christian theology would propose — and again, I’m channeling Tim Keller on this particular issue — there are essentially two forms of forgiveness, and you see this in a couple of places in the New Testament. The one would be the idea of internal forgiveness. So I’m going to, and I think scripture always requires the Christian to, internally forgive.

REBECCA: Requires? So you’d say, I was going to ask you about this as well — I was actually going to ask, do you think, can you ever be obligated to forgive? But you’re suggesting that it’s always a matter of obligation. Is that right?

BEN: Yes. So there is a relatively well-known parable from Matthew 18, it’s the parable of the unforgiving servant. I won’t read it to you, but I’ll recap it.

Essentially, there is a man who owes money to the king, a large amount, decades — I mean, actually, it’s such a large amount of money that it could never be repaid in one’s lifetime. The point of the number being so large is to be like, he could never repay. The king calls him in and says, “All right, you owe.” And the servant goes, “Please have mercy. I cannot pay.” And the king forgives the debt, has mercy on him, releases him from his debt.

The servant then turns around, grabs some other servant who owes him a minuscule amount of money, and says, “Hey, pay me what you owe, or I’m going to put you in prison. You’ve got to give it to me right now!” The king hears about it and goes, “Yo, that’s messed up.”

REBECCA: That is messed up. [laughter]

BEN: This is my translation, the Brophy Standard Version! [laughter] “I forgave you this massive, massive, massive amount, and you’re going to nickel and dime this other servant, who owes you a little bit? Now you’re going to pay the cost of what you owe,” which is essentially debtor’s prison.

And the moral of the story is, essentially, for the Christian who’s been forgiven this infinite amount, how can we then withhold forgiveness from people who wrong us on a much smaller scale?

REBECCA: But actually, going back to that point about whether there has to be some interactive nature, this seems like it’s a whole web of things! It’s not just how the wrongdoer acts in relation to being forgiven. So it’s not something like, do they have to ask for — do they have to show repentance? Do they have to understand the wrong that they’ve committed? Those things. It also seems like, in the rest of their life, they have to act in some specially good way in relation to the kind of institution of forgiveness. That’s pretty hardcore.

BEN: Well, I don’t know that I would agree with that second part, but for the first part — so, let’s talk about the interaction between repentance and forgiveness. So I think Christianity requires internal forgiveness, which means I’m going to not hold internal resentment against somebody who wrongs me, because I live in light of the grace that I’ve received from Christ.

REBECCA: So we can take two things from this. One is something like the internal state you have to be in for it to count as forgiving. If I don’t genuinely feel these things, it doesn’t count. Me just saying “I forgive you”, when I actually don’t feel the internal change of heart, that doesn’t count.

BEN: Yes.

REBECCA: Then the second thing, I think, is not just about how you’re feeling, but something maybe to do with your reasons, or —

BEN: Well, Christianity is concerned with what happens internally as well as externally. So if you think about, I can say, “I forgive you for breaking my lamp,” but then every time I see Rebecca Lowe at the office, I go, “That stupid philosopher broke my lamp!” [laughter]. And I just rehearse the wrong that you did to me, and it continues to come up in my mind. Have I ever actually forgiven you?

REBECCA: Great question.

BEN: And I would also suggest, if that is the kind of play that you are rehearsing in your mind, it’s hard for me to believe that that will not colour future interactions with said person.

REBECCA: So one thing I was wondering about, I was thinking about this this morning, sometimes when we try to think about what kind of thing something is, we might say, you know, is it an event? Is it an action? Is it an interaction, which is what we’ve been talking about. Is it some kind of state of affairs? It did strike me that I think some people will hold — and I think you’re suggesting this — that forgiveness has to be something that persists across time.

BEN: Yes.

REBECCA: So it’s not just, “Hey, I forgive you.” It’s, “I continue holding you in this state of forgiveness,” or something like that.

So one question I have for you is something like, let’s imagine that I’ve forgiven you for something, but then something changes. It might be that I just find, actually, I’m still frustrated with you for having done the thing. Or maybe something — I just learned something new. So maybe I learned you didn’t actually do it. It was your twin brother! We have these examples in philosophy. [laughter]

Was it the case that I ever did forgive you? Is it that forgiveness is conditional and it sometimes holds? Or is it that sometimes, down the line, if I no longer hold you in the forgiving state, I never forgave you in the first place? Does it have to persist for it to ever have existed? I mean, where do we get on the metaphysics of this?

BEN: So, I mean, I think persistence is, at the base level, persistently forgiving you for wrong done is necessary for me to actually forgive you.

Now, if I’ve forgiven something that didn’t actually require forgiveness, is that itself forgiveness? In some senses, I think Christianity would hold — because it’s a matter of the heart — yes, you actually did.

REBECCA: This is interesting — coming back to your point about the internal change. You could have had the internal change of feeling, which you think is part of forgiving somebody.

But I feel I want to be pretty hard-line and say forgiveness only obtains, only occurs, in the instance of a wrong. So Aristotle mentions something about blameworthiness. I just think instinctively, when I think about what we talk about ordinarily — which is my approach of going into these things — when we talk about forgiveness, I feel as if we reserve it for instances where somebody, not just something bad has happened, but somebody’s done something wrong and they’re blameworthy.

So it’s not accidental. It’s not like hardcore diminished responsibility. It’s like, no, Ben, you are actually to blame for this thing! So then if it turns out you weren’t, even though the internal change of heart has happened in the forgiver, I’m just not sure I want to say that it was a case of forgiveness.

BEN: Yeah, if I was to play a little bit of semantic games, I would say the spirit of forgiveness was in the forgiver, regardless of whether there was actually a wrong done. To run this down the line, so if I think you’ve wronged me and then I forgive you, and then it turns out that you actually didn’t wrong me, all the better that I, quote unquote, forgave you. Because then I didn’t damage the relationship, damage you, all those types of things.

REBECCA: So this could be a kind of practising the virtue.

BEN: Yeah.

REBECCA: Even when it turns out actually — so maybe it’s practice in both senses. You could be practising for the instance when you actually do have to practise the virtue.

BEN: Yeah.

REBECCA: I liked what you said, you said the spirit of forgiveness. I feel like that could be quite a nice distinction here between the actual forgiving and the spirit of forgiving.

BEN: Sure.

REBECCA: And that could maybe help us to get beyond this problem.

BEN: Sure. Yeah. And I think what’s happening in somebody internally — again, Christianity has this conception of the fruit of the spirit. And so if there’s a forgiving spirit, like there’s a spiritual life in which I’m adopting a forgiving stance to everyone around me, regardless of whether they’ve done me wrong, Christianity would say that is good. That is virtuous. That is something that should be cultivated.

REBECCA: It seems to me, if you want to move beyond the forgiving spirit to actual instances of forgiveness, I feel like we’re moving towards the idea that you need more than just that internal change.

BEN: Well, and so, yeah, this is the part we haven’t got to, which is: is repentance, or is you acknowledging the wrong that you’ve done to me, required for forgiveness?

REBECCA: I feel also some of these other conditions — like, I feel like some wrong has to have taken place.

BEN: Yeah, okay.

REBECCA: I think I have this view — maybe this is too thin and formulaic — but I feel like some of the necessary conditions I want to be in place for forgiveness to be occurring are things like: there has to be a wrong. It has to be directed at some wrongdoer who’s committed some specific wrong. I’m not sure I can forgive you for generally. I think I have to forgive you for something specific. I also think it has to be something that I’ve been the subject of wrong about. I don’t think I can forgive you for doing something wrong to someone else. I think I’m probably quite hard-line on this.

But what I’m saying is, beyond the conditions that we expect the forgivee to meet or not, which, as you’re coming to, is around whether they repent, I feel like there are just some other kind of things that have to be the case of the matter for it to count as an instance of forgiveness. So, some wrongdoing, some particular wrong act. I feel like the person doing the forgiving —

BEN: Has to be the one wronged.

REBECCA: I think they have to be the one wronged. And then I think the forgiving has to be directed. I think it’s a kind of goal-type thing, it has to be directed at the specific wrong as well.

BEN: Yeah, I think, with an explanation or a caveat, I can agree that the person who does the forgiving has to be the one wronged. Which immediately leads my mind to, well, okay, if that’s what Rebecca is proposing, how then does the Christian say, well, we need God’s forgiveness?

REBECCA: Right. That’s right.

BEN: And gratefully, theology has an answer to this, which is, all sin or all wrongdoing is first directed at God, and then directed at the person suffering the wrong.

REBECCA: Right.

BEN: So Psalm 51 is a famous psalm where David confesses, essentially, murdering the husband of the wife he then takes advantage of sexually. And so it’s a long repentance. He says, “Against God, against you only, have I sinned,” not meaning he hasn’t sinned against the woman he abused, or the husband he had murdered, or those things. But rather the person who he’s first and foremost, the primary person he’s wronged, is the very God who gave him everything he has. His life, his breath, his kingdom, his position, all of these things. And he still violated the very conditions of what the Lord would have him do.

So I think there is a — yeah, I think with that caveat, that all sin is, all wrongdoing is, first and foremost, against God, before the other human being. Yes, I think the person who forgives needs to be the person affected by the wrongdoing.

Now, the other example I would give is there are things, Christian concepts of mercy or grace, which are adjacent but different.

REBECCA: I want to come on to those, because one way that we can try to pick out what’s special about some particular concept is to compare it with some nearby concepts.

But I did have a thought, which is something like — there is this overly, I think, simplistic narrative that, towards the second half of the last millennium, people started taking the individual a bit more seriously. So there’s discussion, for instance — I’m very interested in rights. If you read some of the meta-analyses of what the operative concept of the right was back in Roman and Greek times, and then through medieval times into the early modern period, some people say things like — and it tracks very closely with what you’re saying — people didn’t really think about individuals being wronged. They thought about God being wronged through actions against individuals. And it was only when we started having this concept of individual rights — I think this is far too overly simplistic a narrative — that we start to think about the individual being wronged. And then that allows us maybe to think more about responsibility.

But I think what you’re saying — I like the way you put it — you said something like primarily God being wronged. So you are allowing some space for the agency of the individual. For wrongs to occur against individuals.

BEN: Yes, very much so. I mean, we talk about rights all the time. I, of course, think those are grounded in the image of God and every person in the imago Dei. And so there is that holds — that has weight here, too — in the sense of one of the ways we’re wronging God is by wronging other people who are made in his image. And so there’s shared — yeah, there’s shared wronging.

REBECCA: So I want to come on to both your nice point about moving to some nearby concepts. I also want us to bank a starting definition. But just one other thought I did have, at this stage while we’re talking about rights, is there’s a general sort of distinction, at least within philosophy, around the kinds of obligations that correlate with rights and the obligations that don’t.

So, for instance, I have an obligation not to torture you. You have a right not to be tortured. My obligation is a really, really serious one. I think of this as an obligation of justice. It’s a rights-correlative obligation. And then we have these kinds of loose or less demanding obligations, which correlate with the good. So philosophers sometimes call these imperfect obligations.

So if you’re walking down the riverbank and you see a kid struggling in the water, but you’re not a very good swimmer, and it’s really cold, and you’re feeling ill, I don’t think — it would be quite unusual for somebody to say that you’ve violated the child’s rights by not diving in and trying to save them and quite possibly dying. Nonetheless, you might say there’s some kind of lesser obligation, that it would be good.

I wonder whether it might be useful for us to think of forgiveness within the charity sector, so to speak [laughter] rather than the justice sector. So when you’re saying you’re obligated, are you meaning obligated in the sense of it would be a charitable action, it would be a good action? Or are you saying, no, you’d be going deeply wrongly against justice?

BEN: The latter.

REBECCA: The latter!

BEN: Again, and this is just dependent on the forgiveness that Christians contend that they’ve received.

REBECCA: So you’d always be wrong if you didn’t?

BEN: Yeah.

REBECCA: Wow, this is pretty hardcore.

BEN: Yeah. Again, because if what we believe is true, if there was a Jesus who was fully God and fully man, and perfectly innocent and gives his life in order that we might be reconciled to God. As the parable of the unforgiving servant kind of says, to then spit in the face of that and say, “You owe me for that lamp...” Yeah, it’s unjust.

REBECCA: What if you just can’t bring about that internal change of heart?

BEN: This is a good question.

REBECCA: So, I mean, there’s this idea in philosophy I’m quite interested in called doxastic voluntarism. This is the idea about whether you can change your own beliefs. So it’s like, I’m going to tell you, Ben, I’ll give you like a hundred dollars if you will believe that there’s an elephant in the room. It’s really, really, really, really hard to make yourself believe that.

I mean, if we can sometimes condition ourselves into believing things by only reading certain types of — my friend John Heil has a great paper about this. But I worry for your account, in which you’re always doing wrong, you’re going to have to have a load of control over that internal change of heart. What if I know I’m supposed to forgive you for the thing, and I know I’ll be doing the wrong thing, but I just can’t find it in myself?

BEN: Yeah.

REBECCA: Have I committed an offence against justice?

BEN: Well, here’s the other side of the coin for a Christian, which is going to sound like a heck of a cop-out. [laughter] But the other thing is, I have not arrived. I am still flawed. And so when I’m unable to do the thing that my Christian faith requires, the Bible would require, the answer is to fall back on the forgiveness that Christ offered. Because I’m just not — there are people who have wronged me that I don’t — I’m not quite there yet.

REBECCA: Yeah.

BEN: But the question then becomes, is forgiveness a feeling, or is it a virtue to be practiced?

REBECCA: Absolutely.

BEN: And Christianity would hold that it is an act of the will. So, you’re going to do the best that you can, and then know if you fall short of actually forgiving somebody, that you get back on the horse and try again.

And of course, again, I can hear evangelicals being like, “You’re talking about works righteousness,” which, you know, fair. But that has to be — we also claim that there’s a supernatural change happening in the individual.

REBECCA: So if it’s an act of the will, what about if I don’t want to change my — I don’t want to have that internal change of heart — but it just happens? I wake up one morning, and suddenly I forgive Ben. I have this feeling in my heart. But it’s not an act of will. I mean, I didn’t intend to. In fact, I went to bed thinking, man, I’m really annoyed at Ben about that thing. And then just something — or maybe even we could think of a more extreme example! Let’s imagine I take some paracetamol because I’ve got a headache, and it interacts in my brain in this way, and suddenly I feel —

BEN: Now I feel I forgive him?

REBECCA: Is that going to be enough? So you want both the internal change of heart, and you want the act of the individual’s will.

BEN: I want it all! [laughter]

REBECCA: You want it all!

BEN: I want it all — I mean, God wants it [laughter] I want it all. I do, yeah.

REBECCA: Oh, so if it’s only — is it just God’s will then? I mean, God’s will acting through you?

BEN: The interaction between us.

REBECCA: Because I can see your way out here. That was God acting on me. It wasn’t the paracetamol! Causality? Rebecca, you can’t possibly prove causality there!

BEN: Well, the interaction between God working on our internal being — soul — and our will. We’re getting down to Calvinism. Is it God’s sovereignty, or our free will? I would say it’s both. If you want me to pick it.

REBECCA: You want to have it all! I also, again, coming back to something you said earlier, this point around the spirit of forgiveness. It suggested to me almost this Aristotelian notion of practising it. Trying to get there, doing it over time. You won’t manage in all instances, but thankfully you’ve got some of God’s forgiveness to —

BEN: That’s right! To fall back on.

REBECCA: Okay, so at this stage, let us try to bank some kind of working definition. It doesn’t necessarily have to be your actual fully worked-out view.

Imagine a little kid comes up to you on the street and says, “Hey, Ben, I was in your church the other day or heard you on Rebecca’s podcast. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hear the whole thing. I just want to know, I’ve got to go and give this presentation in school tomorrow, but I’ve got to give a really simple answer. What is this forgiveness thing? What is forgiveness?”

BEN: I don’t know that I’ve moved off my original definition. Which is releasing someone who’s wronged you from obligation or debt that they’ve incurred.

REBECCA: That’s very clear. Releasing someone who’s wronged you from obligation or debt they’ve incurred.

BEN: And I think this is very human, any time you’ve been wronged, or anyone’s been wronged, it seems to me that the natural reaction is like, “That’s not fair!” [laughter] If you have kids, and one of the siblings wrongs the other, there’s this immediate emotional, human like, “What is this?” And we adults do the same thing.

It’s an immediate sense of, we are owed. This person wronged me. I’m owed some sort of recompense. I’ve not met many people whose first reaction is like, “Eh, it’s fine.” I’m sure there are some, but it’s very human to say, “I’m owed something when I’m wronged.”

REBECCA: So one way — philosophers like this term ‘standing’. This idea of how you stand in relation to somebody, whether that’s in society, you have maybe some particular position, or how you stand in relation to your friend, to other people in the world. One way I think you could look at this is it’s some kind of reparation of standing or something.

Does it have to have this nature of being aimed at repairing this? Is it much more just specifically about the wrong? Is it about being made to feel okay? I mean, how much of that is about you feeling like you need to be released from the wrong, and how much is it about being able to stand again in some good relation with this person?

BEN: Yeah, I think Christianity, or Christian theology, would start talking about the idea of reconciliation. So this is where internal forgiveness is required, but reconciliation is not always required, in Christianity. So this is the part where repentance matters from a Christian worldview. For me to reconcile the relationship with the wrongdoer is going to require their repentance in many cases, not all.

So, for instance, to go back to the lamp example, you break my lamp. I go, “All right, like, I’m going to forgive the lamp.” I may no longer let you be my interior decorator. [laughter] Until you repent of the breaking of the lamp. Okay, now maybe we try and let you be my interior decorator again, now that I can try to trust you not to break my lamps. But reconciliation would be a full restoration of the relationship.

REBECCA: Of the original —

BEN: Before the wrongdoing.

REBECCA: And you think that’s a little more than —

BEN: That depends, I mean, and this gets very practical in pastoral ministry. So, like, it really comes up with divorce. Not to go super heavy, but this is — it comes up all the time. Like, this spouse did the thing, whatever it is, adultery, whatever, cheated, whatever, and they end up, the marriage ends. There’s some sort of repentance and there’s forgiveness. Does that necessitate a restoration of the marriage? I don’t think that it does. It can. It can be a wonderful thing. There can be wonderful reconciliation there. But I don’t —

REBECCA: It’s not like there’s some necessary chain.

BEN: That’s right.

REBECCA: It does seem like one way we could look at this, I think, from what you just said, is there is some kind of progress, though. You need the repentance to have the forgiveness. You need the forgiveness to have the reconciliation. It’s just that they don’t kind of necessitate the next one. So the chain goes that way. It just doesn’t go —

BEN: Yeah. And I think you can think of any number of examples. Again, if somebody stole a whole bunch of money from me, I might forgive them, but they might not be my personal investment —

REBECCA: Yes, I think that’s a good point. So I just want to test out this idea of the other person’s involvement and ask you a few questions.

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

BEN: Yeah.

REBECCA: You think they can?

BEN: I think so.

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

BEN: There’s nothing they can do.

REBECCA: They’re never going to know.

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

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

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

REBECCA: The change of heart.

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

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

BEN: Fair enough.

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

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

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

What about if the person knows that you think that they broke the lamp, but they just don’t admit it? You call them up and you’re like, “Hey, look, you broke my lamp. I know that, you know, it was in a…” We probably don’t want to say it was an accident. Do we want to say — could it be an accident? Can you forgive somebody for doing something accidentally? Because that comes back to the blameworthiness thing.

BEN: But then it becomes like, why did the accident happen? You think of like a drunk driver, why did the accident happen?

REBECCA: So luck egalitarianism, yeah, that’s right. But let’s imagine it’s not one of those things.

BEN: They just knocked into it.

REBECCA: Yeah, it wasn’t like they should have been paying better attention.

BEN: Then that’s not something that I think necessitates forgiveness.

REBECCA: I think that’s right, too.

BEN: There’s no moral element.

REBECCA: So let’s park that. I think that’s something we can definitely agree on — I do think this blameworthiness — I think that needs to be not just something bad’s taken place, but something wrong, in the sense of intentionally bringing about some bad against some other person. That’s a simple way of putting it. So I think there needs to be intention involved. I think there needs to be genuine blameworthiness held on the part of the forgivee.

BEN: Yeah, wrongdoing. I agree.

REBECCA: So let’s say it’s not the accidental thing. But let’s say you call up your friend and say, “Look, you were in this fit of rage and you broke my lamp, but I’m willing to forgive you.” Great. And the person’s like, “No, I didn’t break your lamp! You were out of the room. Your kid did it.” [laughter] And you know that’s not true. Or even if you don’t know it’s not true.

BEN: Ok, wait. Well, that makes a difference.

REBECCA: Yeah, so let’s do both of them. So the first one: you turned your head, you’re out of the room. Actually, your kid broke the lamp. And you don’t know. You don’t know who it was who did it. But you’re pretty sure —

BEN: I’m inclined to believe it.

REBECCA: Oh, you’re —

BEN: Because of my kids! [laughter]

REBECCA: Hilarious. So let’s imagine, however, that in this particular instance, it was your kid who was actually really careful. And actually, let’s say that your kid was distracted by reading a good book at the same time. And you just think, no, no, no.

BEN: I think if I don’t know — I think I have to, another biblical principle, I have to assume the best.

REBECCA: But again, if the blameworthiness is necessary, I think you probably do need to know that they’re to blame.

BEN: Yes.

REBECCA: And again, then we come to the question about, I mean, knowledge is a very high bar. If it turns out down the line that actually they thought they were to blame, and you thought they were to blame, but some weird philosopher’s thought-experiment-like objection comes up. And actually they did break a lamp, it just wasn’t your lamp, and your lamp was broken, it just wasn’t by them, and, you know, all of this weird kind of —

BEN: Yeah. And I’m willing to allow for those edge cases. But at a base level, I have to know.

REBECCA: That they’re blameworthy.

BEN: That they’re blameworthy. That they’ve done wrong.

REBECCA: Good. But you don’t think they have to know this?

BEN: No.

REBECCA: Because they could be on the ship to Australia.

BEN: That’s right.

REBECCA: They could be dead.

BEN: Or they could —

REBECCA: But what about the denial again?

BEN: They could literally say, “I don’t think it was wrong.”

REBECCA: Right, good, yes. So let’s think of those cases where you are convinced, sufficiently convinced, reliably convinced, that they did the wrong thing, that they’re to blame. They know that you think that, but they, for some reason, deny it — either because, like you say, they don’t think it meets the conditions of counting as wrong, or they think that —

BEN: Or they self-justify. “You have so much money and I have so little!”

REBECCA: That’s right. Or, “It was just an accident, didn’t you see!”

BEN: Yes, yes.

REBECCA: In those instances, does that have any effect on your capacity to forgive?And I don’t just mean in the sense of whether you’re likely to do it. I mean, can you do the forgiving? Can the forgiving obtain if the person is in denial about their blameworthiness?

BEN: Yes.

REBECCA: And they are blameworthy.

BEN: If we maintain the distinction of internal forgiveness and external reconciliation, then yes, internally you can still forgive, even if we’re not going to reconcile over the issue of the lamp.

REBECCA: So we come to two things here. One of those is the place of forgiveness in that little order of things, the forgiveness. So you come to some change in your standing. You ameliorate, or you re-ameliorate — your standing goes back in some sense to how it was, but not fully. You don’t have the full reconciliation.

And then the other distinction is something to do with, well, you’re feeling like you’re having the spirit of forgiveness, but maybe the forgiveness hasn’t fully taken place yet. Do they need to accept the wrongdoing for it to be fully forgiveness? If it persists across time — so you said earlier, you know, the forgiving has to continue. Let’s imagine you still feel forgiving towards them ten years down the line. But every time you see them, they’re like, “Ben, really! Yeah, I just didn’t,” for whatever it was.

BEN: Yeah, I think there is something still missing. So internal forgiveness, yep, got that. But I do think external forgiveness does lead to —

REBECCA: And you mean by external forgiveness, you mean the actual forgiveness following through in terms of the person being forgiven? Or you mean in terms of the role that they play?

BEN: So I think the external forgiveness requires reconciliation, meaning the relationship is restored to exactly —

REBECCA: Yes, because you said again —

BEN: But if we’re at issue about what reality is, about what wrongness is, the relationship can never be the same. So I do think repentance, or admitting of being blameworthy, is required for that relationship to go back to what it was.

REBECCA: I also liked your point about the relationship might not return in all senses. So maybe they’re not going to be your accountant anymore, your lamp-handler anymore. [laughter]

BEN: That’s right.

REBECCA: I do feel, I think, quite strongly that forgiveness has to be directed at a particular wrongdoer for a particular wrong. So I also think, again, I’m not really sure it makes sense to say something like, “I forgive you, generally.” I think I forgive you for that specific thing. I think then the kind of restoration you’re talking about is in relation to that particular thing.

So in some sense, you’ve managed to get past that matter. Now, it might be the case that it has some other knock-on effects, or maybe you’re annoyed at them for some other things. Maybe they’ve also wronged you in some other ways.

BEN: Yes.

REBECCA: I think you can forgive them for that particular thing, and you can still have these other problems of standing.

BEN: Which, again, marriage is super helpful here. You see in my own marriage, there is a fight, I’ve wronged my wife, or she’s wronged me. We forgive one another. And yet, I also didn’t take out the trash. At all times, there are multiple wrongs in the air.

REBECCA: So it’s a pretty specific kind of a notion, isn’t it? It’s something involving specific people for some specific thing. And the act itself, if we think of it as being some kind of directed action — action directed at someone else — is about that particular thing. So it has a lot of specificity, it seems to me.

BEN: Yeah, I think it does. If we’re going to go beyond the forbearance/internal category, yeah, I think you have to be specific.

In fact, another sort of virtue that theology will talk about is, there’s something that Christians will do, or they’ll be like, “Well, just forgive me.” Like, “I confess generally I’m a wrongdoer.” And it’s like, that’s a start, but actually you do need to be specific. What are the actual things that you think are wrong and not wrong, and where? Let’s actually talk about those. I think this blanket — that can be unhelpful.

REBECCA: Are there some of these other nearby concepts — I’m just wondering, off the top of my head, something like grace, holding somebody in a state of grace, Christians sometimes talk about that, that seems to be maybe less specific.

BEN: Yeah, yes.

REBECCA: “I’m just going to hold you generally in a state of grace, Ben.” It’s not as specific as “I forgive you for breaking my lamp that time”.

BEN: Yes. State of grace is not quite my tradition, so we’d have to call it —

REBECCA: Which tradition is that from? I’m not even sure who I’ve heard say it.

BEN: That language is typically more Roman Catholic, and I love my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. I think there are, from a Christian conception, there’s a sense in which we are not even aware of all the ways in which we’re not living up to what we ought to be. And in those circumstances, you’ll see in scripture, like, there’s a tax collector who prays something like, “Have mercy on me, a sinner.” And it is this general confession of, like, I don’t even know the ways in which I’m missing the boat, but I know I am.

REBECCA: So it’s being kind of a more general kind of charitable —

BEN: Yeah. And I do think the Lord does forgive that. He’s condescending to our level.

REBECCA: It’s very meta!

BEN: He knows all the ways in which we failed, and he forgives each one of them in their specificity, even as we have incomplete knowledge as to the specific wrongs that we —

REBECCA: So I think something that could be quite useful in categorising some of these nearby concepts, they all seem to be about wrong in some sense — responsive to wrong in some sense.

BEN: Mercy, grace.

REBECCA: Mercy, grace, forgiveness. Maybe some things nearby, like atonement, excusing people, punishing people. We should talk about mercy. It seems to me like there’s at least one very simple way in which mercy is different from forgiveness.

So if mercy, I think, is to do with how you treat someone who’s done something wrong to you, it’s to do with the kind of treatment. So you might say, for instance, the judge gave a more lenient sentence because the judge was merciful. So it’s a kind of post — both of these are post-wrongdoing. They’re post, yes, there’s some blameworthiness.

But it seems to me that mercy is about the way in which you might mitigate, or you might show some discretion around the punishment you apply. Whereas it seems to me forgiveness is, I’m happy, I think, pretty much to go with what you’re saying, something about restoring the standing or releasing somebody from — I don’t think I want to go into the whole incurring of the cost stuff. I feel like that might be a bit too much for me.

But therefore it seems like mercy is about working out a punishment, whereas forgiveness is about some attempt at restoring some standing.

BEN: Yeah. And I think it’s very hard to talk about mercy without talking about justice.

REBECCA: Yes, this is right.

BEN: Rightly rewarding the good and rightly, I don’t know, punishing is a loaded word in your world, but rightly punishing.

REBECCA: Yeah, I just wrote a whole piece about punishment, which I know you want to respond to because you disagreed so strongly. [laughter] I love that. I saw Ben this morning, and he’s like, “Rebecca, I really liked your piece. I liked it so much, I’m going to write my own piece about how wrong it is!”

BEN: Incomplete — I think incomplete!

REBECCA: But this is exactly what I’m looking for. That is, to me, the best possible response someone could give me. [laughter] Because it shows that they really engaged with it. I just think this is — yeah, so I can’t wait to read your piece.

BEN: So to go back to mercy —

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

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

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

BEN: Yes.

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: That’s very interesting. So one thing, actually, I did want to ask you is about the distinctness of a Christian notion of forgiveness. Do you think that — so first of all, how do you think it is distinct? Do you think, for instance, that this discussion of forgiveness we’ve been having is one in which some of our — we’ve had some overlaps — but some of our differences of view are because we’re just going about it in a different way?

Rebecca’s doing kind of ordinary-language-philosophy thing, where what Rebecca’s interested in is what can we learn about truths about the world, and how we treat each other, in terms of this particular term that we use? If somebody comes along and says, “Rebecca, no, there’s just a technical understanding of forgiveness, which is completely different from all the ways that people ordinarily use it. Technically, forgiveness means baguette!”, I’m just going to laugh.

So that’s the kind of field I’m operating in, which is, what can we take from — what is the concept underlying this ordinary term, and how we use it? How can we learn, therefore, about truths, about morality, about the world?

Whereas I think what you’re doing is something like: there’s this important concept, which has many overlaps with my ordinary concept, but it has this very specific context in biblical teaching, and in other ways we can learn about God, whether it’s through, I don’t know, personal experience, prayer, testimony —

BEN: Reading the Bible.

REBECCA: The Bible.

BEN: All those things.

REBECCA: It’s very overlapping, but it is slightly different.

BEN: Well, yeah, I think that’s right. I think also the history of the idea of forgiveness. I mean, I’m sure you did a little light reading of the classics, as I did. I mean, Aristotle doesn’t quite have a concept of forgiveness, he has a concept of overlooking.

REBECCA: Yeah. It’s not one of the core Aristotelian virtues, anyway.

BEN: Being above it. Greek and Roman culture, like the idea of forgiveness is pretty foreign. Even, in some ways, grace is considered, in some places — the idea of grace and mercy — is on vice lists.

REBECCA: Grace seems pretty religious to me.

BEN: Yeah. And so there is this sense in which the formulations of forgiveness, and then nearby concepts of grace and mercy, have been very shaped by Christianity. And I think Christianity brought something pretty unique to it.

REBECCA: This seems to me right. So one reason why I’m saying I think our approaches are quite overlapping is I do feel that ordinary discussion, at least in Western countries like America and Britain, are pretty heavily influenced on this kind of topic by Christianity. You and I have had many conversations about —

BEN: Which came first.

REBECCA: We have pretty similar worldviews in many ways. I think that Christianity just happens to get these things right.

BEN: Just happened to stumble upon the moral order of the universe!

REBECCA: That’s right. I think these are truths regardless of whether God exists. I don’t believe in a moral God. I think it’s probably rational to believe in a creator God. Nonetheless, I am quite open to thinking about this — I’m certainly open to thinking about it — but I’m quite open to the idea of it being true that we might need certain things, certain conditions might need to obtain, for us to get to the truth of the matter.

I’m interested in thinking, like, if you had a culture which didn’t have, say, religion at all, but maybe Christianity and Judaism particularly, whether we might find it harder to get to some of these concepts.

BEN: Judaism, because the Old Testament, the Old and New Testament —

REBECCA: There is this notion in which forgiveness is quite a New Testament thing. Is that fair, or is that an over-reading?

BEN: I think it’s probably an over-reading.

REBECCA: There is a lot of vengeance and stuff in the Old Testament!

BEN: I think that’s an oversimplification. [laughter] There is certainly the idea of redemption, forgiveness, mercy, all of those things, in the Old Testament, for sure. So I do think those two —

REBECCA: Jesus seems, though, to have some particular focus on, I mean, forgiveness seems to me to be —

BEN: So the way theologians would put it is, it’s progressive revelation. What does that mean? It means, as you walk through the scriptures, it’s all true. But as we move from the beginning towards the end, more and more of God’s character is being revealed, and most obviously and primarily in Christ. So there’s ways in which we understand the concepts of forgiveness, grace, and mercy because of the New Testament. However, the elements run throughout the entire corpus of scripture.

REBECCA: Interesting. So one other question I think we should consider in terms of kind of context is the extent to which people have to know about this thing for it to obtain. So I’m thinking particularly — there’s this thing I like in this philosophy paper, R. M. Hare has this paper called The Promising Game. It’s mostly about the ‘is/ought problem’, but — and when does promising occur. So it’s quite relevant for our conversation. He has this nice bit at the end where he talks about the institution of promising. And he says something like, to be able to promise, there have to be enough people around you who get what promising is.

BEN: Yeah.

REBECCA: Now, it seems to me this conversation we’ve been having about the role Christianity’s played in helping us uncover this thing, or teaching us this thing, or even creating this thing, if we want to go that far —

BEN: Yeah.

REBECCA: Is it the case that if somebody didn’t understand — and I don’t just mean that they didn’t understand that they’d done any wrong, and they didn’t just accept the wrong — what if they just didn’t get the concept of forgiveness? Could I then forgive them? Would they then stand in this relation of forgiving? I mean, do they need to have some kind of — and I don’t just mean, again, particularly, they could be on the ship to Australia, they could be dead. Is there anything to be said for they have to be within this ‘institution of forgiveness’, in the same way that —

BEN: So if an alien flies in on a spaceship, no human concepts whatsoever. [laughter] He breaks my lamp. [laughter] Does he have to have any grounding, any sort of —

REBECCA: Let’s say he is the kind of thing [laughter] — I’ve already called him a ‘he’, suggested he has some kind of personhood or something.

BEN: He’s an alien. [laughter]

REBECCA: He’s an alien. But let’s imagine, though, that the alien is the kind of thing to whom you could assign blame. So the alien is blameworthy. That means the alien has to have some free agency. It means the alien has to have some kinds of, I think, moral apparatus.

But let’s just say that forgiveness just isn’t something that’s in the alien culture. So we’re happy to accept that blameworthiness and wrongdoing are. Let’s go that far. It’s not just that they are capable of these things, but they also have sufficient awareness maybe even to be able to discuss them. But forgiveness just isn’t in the picture.

BEN: Yeah, for the alien.

REBECCA: Is that a problem? So I think for you to do the forgiving, you probably need to be in the institution. Does the forgivee need to be within the institution? I think you’re going to say no, but maybe you’re not.

BEN: I don’t think so. No, I don’t think so. Whether or not somebody is aware of the fundamental moral truths of the universe as revealed through scripture [laughter] or because they just exist —

REBECCA: [laughter] Yeah.

Ben: His understanding of it has no bearing.

REBECCA: Yes, how interesting. Because the problem for me, I think, is if forgiveness is some kind of act, it’s not just some truth that obtains, we need to actually do something with intention to bring it about. I still think there are these outstanding questions about whether you can forgive somebody who doesn’t know that they’ve committed the wrong — that they deny committing the wrong.

You sometimes get these cases, don’t you, you see somebody standing up and they say, “I forgive this person for killing my son.” Sometimes, I think, if you were being really cynical, you might say, oh they’re looking for solace. They’re not actually really directing it at the other person. But then you sometimes see a response in which the person who has killed the son — and let’s say they did kill the son, we know that — they say, “I don’t want your forgiveness. Your awful son, you know, I hated your son.” I find it quite hard to accept that that’s forgiveness.

Sorry, I’m going to have one last go at this, in terms of requiring some kind of responsive response, or [laughter]

BEN: Yeah.

REBECCA: And not just a response, but some kind of —

BEN: I think even the forgivee’s response to my forgiveness, again, I think has no bearing on what’s happening to me internally, or the degree to which I’m reflecting the moral requirements of my faith or the universe, right?

REBECCA: Sure.

BEN: So yeah, I think there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter what the wrongdoer does.

REBECCA: But there are questions about the reasons, though. So if they were just doing it to reach some sense of solace, it seems to me like we don’t want to say that that’s a genuinely — that’s not in the forgiving spirit. The forgiving spirit seems at least to have to be other-directed. I don’t just want to restore the standing in order to look better. Or in order to, you know, be able to buy the eggs from your bakery anymore or whatever it is.

BEN: And you’ll see this kind of thought in —

REBECCA: Charitable to the person, right?

BEN: Yeah. There are some self-help folks who will just say, “Hey, you got to, like, let it go. You don’t want bitterness to consume you.” And there’s truth to those things.

REBECCA: Yes.

BEN: For sure. But is, like, my stratagem for leading a healthier happier life, actually forgiveness? Probably not. And this is why Christianity is so concerned with the atonement.

REBECCA: So coming back to where we started, where you separated out the internal state. Sometimes I think people think, it’s the Bishop Butler idea in philosophy that forgiving — another clergyman! [laughter]

BEN: I thought Bishop was his first name. I was like, whoa! [laughter]

REBECCA: I think this is sometimes reduced down to a view which is something like: forgiveness is about getting over your negative emotions. But I think you’ve given a richer notion of forgiveness, in which that’s only one part of it.

BEN: Well, and I think our culture offers two visions of how to deal with wrongdoing. One is kind of, self-help, be therapeutic, like, “Oh, just...” And then the other one is like, “You must self-flagellate enough until I’ve decided you’ve done enough to forgive you.” And both of those I find very unsatisfying.

REBECCA: Neither of these seems very attentive to the wrongdoer.

BEN: That’s right.

REBECCA: And the good of the wrongdoer.

BEN: Well, yes.

REBECCA: So it seems to me like I also would probably want to moralise in some sense and say, I feel like forgiveness has to be directed at the good of the wrongdoer.

BEN: Well, and here’s where Christianity speaks to this, right? So if you’ve been wronged, what is your responsibility to go and do? It is actually to engage with the wrongdoer and say, “Hey, you’ve done wrong.”

REBECCA: Yes.

BEN: The Bible’s like, if your brother’s sinned against you, go to him.

REBECCA: Yes, that’s another important distinction. But then again, this does lead us to requiring some kind of responsiveness from the wrongdoer.

BEN: Not necessarily.

REBECCA: Because going to them, and saying, at least trying to engage. So then that would be difficult for the one where the guy’s on the ship to Australia, or the guy’s dead. Can forgiveness obtain if the guy is dead?

BEN: Confronting someone about wrongdoing is different than forgiveness. So there is a sense in which, who is — this is often a question people ask — who is responsible for fixing the wrong thing? And the Bible will say both the person who’s been wronged and the person who’s done the wrong. So you’re both supposed to go to each other and try to work it out in repentance and forgiveness. That’s the ideal.

So the person who’s on the ship, hopefully they realise they’ve done something wrong and come back. But if they don’t, that doesn’t alleviate me of my obligations to forgive the person. And yet I’m still called to go to the wrongdoer, and maybe it’s an email, and say, hey, this thing you did, it was wrong.

There is a category of forbearance, which we’ve alluded to, which is sometimes, I don’t consider the wrong that big enough to be worth the conversation. And I just go, eh, we’re going to forbear and forgive.

REBECCA: And that’s different from excusing.

BEN: Yes.

REBECCA: It’s saying it just doesn’t meet some sufficient threshold.

BEN: Right. Like, if you insult me, you’re like, “Brophy, that guy, idiot.” [laugher] And I’m like, in my mind, I’m like, “Ah, it stung a little bit.” Is that something that necessitates a conversation? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the person. [laughter]

REBECCA: I think it’s pretty hardcore! [laughter]

BEN: All right, something even like, “Ben, your shoes are dumb.” [laughter] And I was like, “Oh, man, I really love these shoes. I picked them out!” Like, that hurts a little bit. Like, you know, that’s probably not worth a “Hey, you’re wrong!”

REBECCA: So actually, let’s just finish with this idea about — I think you’ve dealt now with how bad something has to be for it to be the kind of thing about which forgiveness comes in.

BEN: There’s a little bit of relativity there, though.

REBECCA: You’re saying there are some things that you don’t get that. Sometimes people say, you know, “I couldn’t possibly forgive someone if they did that thing.” So is there something out the other end, where, could you conceive of something — can you either think of an example, or could you conceive that there could be something, where you just think it’s so grave —

BEN: Never be forgiven?

REBECCA: Yeah. It’s not even that it couldn’t be forgiven because you couldn’t get to that stage in your heart, or however you want to put it.

BEN: Sure, yeah.

REBECCA: It’s just it would be inappropriate to forgive somebody. I know you want to say that we have these obligations to forgive, but even when we have obligations, sometimes they’re —

BEN: All right, give me a concrete example, you’re very good at this.

REBECCA: A good example would be something like genocide. It would be something like, you know, torturing babies for fun. That’s the awful example philosophers give.

BEN: Well, here’s the thing. Is that a wrong directed towards me?

REBECCA: But let’s imagine that you — this is a good point — but you are wronged by this. Could you forgive for your element in that?

BEN: So the baby they torture is mine.

REBECCA: Yeah. Now, again, you can’t forgive for the torturing of the baby, but you could maybe forgive for the wrong done against you.

BEN: The damage they’ve done to me, yeah.

REBECCA: On your conception. It’s a great — it’s a great objection, though, that you’re making.

BEN: Yeah.

REBECCA: So yes, one answer could just be —

BEN: The wrong wasn’t done to me. Genocide wasn’t done to me, I’m still alive.

REBECCA: The only wrongs that would fit in this category are wrongs whereby I’m not here anymore.

BEN: That’s right.

REBECCA: And therefore, that doesn’t count because I’m not here, so.

BEN: Yeah, so I think —

REBECCA: What about torturing somebody? Okay fine: somebody tortures you every day. They lock you in a box for ten years. There’s, like, nails in the box. They just give you enough food to have. They play loud music at you. The worst possible torture for ten years. So you’re still here to be able to forgive.

BEN: I mean, this is The Gulag Archipelago, right? Like, the guy, he’s locked up. He’s imprisoned. He’s tortured. And then, by the end of the book, he basically says something along the lines of, “I realized I’m the same as my guardsman. The line of good and evil runs through every human heart,” and then forgives the dude!

REBECCA: Because he’s already admitted that he’s evil too? I mean that’s a —

BEN: Yeah. So I think I would say, I would say at a human level, I’m imperfect. There’s a chance —

REBECCA: So you might not be able to get to the spirit of forgiveness, in some things?

BEN: Yeah, I’m going to be dealing with that for the rest of my life.

REBECCA: And if that is a condition, you have to have this human —

BEN: I think the principle would be, yes, I want to forgive that person. I ought to forgive that person. I’ve been forgiven so much more, et cetera, et cetera. But at a human level, we are frail, fallible creatures.

If my congregant tells me this story of being in prison for ten years, it’s like, “I’m really struggling with forgiveness,” I’m not going to be inclined to wag my finger. And yet we may start like, okay, what would it look like for you to forgive? Do you want to explore that? Let’s talk about what the Bible has to say.

That’s a very practical human side of it. The principle would be like, yes, we want to get to a place where we forgive, but there are wrongs that are just so awful that it’s going to be hard, at a human level, to actually do the thing. And that’s okay.

REBECCA: Okay. So I think we’ve sort of ended in a pretty similar place. You have your releasing somebody who’s wronged you from an obligation or a debt they’ve incurred. I don’t mean — we didn’t talk much about your early very big claim about having to effectively pay off all the debt for them, although then I think we did qualify that a little bit.

BEN: Yeah.

REBECCA: I think I probably want to say something like it’s a response to a specific wrong, to a specific wrongdoer, aimed at restoring the standing around that particular wrong.

BEN: Let me ask you this.

REBECCA: Yeah.

BEN: Do you think forgiveness is required?

REBECCA: No.

BEN: Like, from your side, from like, so from a rights perspective.

REBECCA: No. I think, oh but again, we come back to this distinction between — I think I want to say it’s a matter of charity, therefore, I don’t think it’s a rights-correlative obligation. I think it’s often the case that it’d be good for you to forgive somebody. I don’t think you ever — I don’t think anybody ever has the right to demand forgiveness from you. But that’s just, I’m just doing this conceptual work of putting it within the domain of charity.

BEN: That part I agree with — you can’t demand forgiveness from me. It’s something I have to offer.

REBECCA: But also, I think, I mean demand in this also sense of it —

BEN: Being a principle or something.

REBECCA: Being the case that, or something.

BEN: That’s interesting.

REBECCA: So, I don’t think you violate someone’s rights by not forgiving them. Ever. I don’t think that’s a rights violation. So I don’t think you’re obligated as a matter of justice. I think it’s a good-to-do obligation in many instances, as a charitable obligation. But I still think that’s not the case in all instances. So I think I probably want to have it as some special element of morality, which is largely within the charity bucket. [laughter]

BEN: So you would encourage people to forgive, not mandate?

REBECCA: I think it’s good to forgive.

BEN: But not necessary?

REBECCA: Because if it’s aimed at the good of the other person — and I think it’s probably good for you as well sometimes. I think sometimes, though, it’s probably bad for you to forgive. And I would say I think it’s bad for you to forgive somebody if they haven’t acted in such a way as to be worthy of your forgiveness. I feel like then you’re going to be playing these complicated mental games.

I think sometimes it’s really important to attend to the wrong that has been done to you, and to other people. And I think if forgiveness becomes something that’s required of you, as opposed to something that you work hard to determine when it’s relevant, when it’s appropriate, I worry that something might be going wrong there. So I think we have a bit of a difference on this.

BEN: I do. I also just want to make the point that forgiveness does not always satisfy justice.

REBECCA: Oh, yeah. I think we agree on that.

BEN: Yeah. So like the woman forgiving the murder of her son, that doesn’t mean the woman’s releasing the murderer from death row, or whatever.

REBECCA: I think that comes back again to the point around the distinction about whether it’s about the punishment. I actually don’t think forgiveness has anything to do with the —

BEN: I don’t either, but I was curious if that changed anything for you.

REBECCA: Although it might well be the case that once you’ve forgiven somebody, then you decide that, in that context, that has some effect on how you punish them, if you are indeed the person to punish.

I think generally, though, we — I mean, Locke has this line about giving up the individual right to punish, to kind of collectively manifest justice, when we enter political society. Personally, I have real problems with punishment, generally. It’s justified along deterrent or retributivist lines. I don’t buy those things. I certainly don’t buy the idea of physical punishment, ever. I actually kind of just want to get rid of the notion of punishment, to be honest.

BEN: This is adjacent to this conversation.

REBECCA: I think defence — you’re justified oftentimes in defending yourself and other people. Bringing punishment in — I don’t like the idea of it ever being seen to be a good thing to do something bad to someone under your control. And when — to punish somebody, they have to be under your control.

BEN: Yeah, so I sympathise, and I think I agree with your concern for the rights of the person being punished.

REBECCA: Yeah.

BEN: But I do think that you may be giving short shrift to the rights of the person who’s been victimised.

REBECCA: See, I think it’s bad to do bad things. I don’t think it’s just bad to the person you do it to.

BEN: Sure.

REBECCA: And if inherent in the notion of punishment is something like it can be justified to do something bad to somebody who isn’t free to defend themselves, you’re intentionally doing that. And you’re not just doing it, you’re doing it because it’s good, in order to bring about the good. So again, you either have the kind of justified-by-the-end thing, or you have this heavy desert kind of vengeance —

BEN: I think you have a bigger problem with the rights of the victimised than you think you do.

REBECCA: Interesting. I think I should think about that more. I do think that that’s probably going to be the strongest objection.

BEN: Which is going to be my response!

REBECCA: It’s going to be, well — we look out for your response!

I would just say, though, that while it might feel human and natural to feel like you have all of the power when you’ve been wronged, either in forgiving somebody or in punishing them, I think sometimes that stuff lies outside of your purview. I mean, you should accept this as a man of God! [laughter]

You think sometimes that’s — I’m big on this idea of what is your business? Just because I’ve been wronged doesn’t necessarily give me the power to determine what happens to the wrongdoer, or what their moral standing is, or even in relation to our own standing between us. There might just be some things that I can’t do. I don’t have the capacity to do, as a matter of morality.

And if somebody does something wrong, it’s wrong in itself as well as being wrong against me. Again, that’s partly why I like the specificity of this idea of forgiveness we’ve been talking about. But I really want to keep it very tight. I don’t want to be able to think about — I don’t think it’s the case you can forgive somebody for doing something to somebody else.

BEN: I agree.

REBECCA: Anyway, we’ve got to wrap up.

BEN: This is good.

REBECCA: Thank you so much. I forgive you for all the things you got wrong in this conversation! [laughter]

BEN: I don’t forgive you. No, just kidding!

REBECCA: Well, there we go! You heard it here!

BEN: Now I’ve just immediately been a hypocrite for everyone to see [laughter]

REBECCA: I think hypocrisy isn’t that bad of a wrong. [laughter] All right.

BEN: But it is a wrong.

REBECCA: Thanks so much, Ben.

BEN: Thanks, Rebecca.

REBECCA: Thank you.

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

1) I spent quite a lot of time over the past week reading and thinking about Adam Smith. As you can read in my only slightly hyperbolic summary piece for , I enjoyed pretty much every page of The Wealth of Nations (1776), which was already one of my favourite books of all time.

Sadly, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) did not fare so well, even though I gained some new appreciation for its justice section a few weeks ago.

“WoN is also incredibly readable. I started rereading the last section of it at 3am this morning, and I couldn’t stop. Why did I start at 3am, you wonder? Because I’d been reading The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and I needed a break! I needed to read something good!”1

2) A few days ago, the UK House of Lords voted in favour of an amendment to a House of Commons bill, currently passing through Parliament, which would decriminalise women undertaking abortions at any stage and for any reason.

You can read about this latest development on the BBC website, where you might find it interesting to note the Americanisations. What percentage of the UK public would be able to explain the term ‘Pro-choice campaigner’?

I’ve written here previously about my opposition to this amendment:

“It is not only the introduction of assisted dying, therefore, but also the decriminalisation of women undertaking abortions, that represent a concerning increase in the state’s power over the individual. In the case of abortion, we see a shift from the state protecting the life of the viable foetus, to effectively endorsing its termination, even at the full-term stage. And in the case of assisted dying, we see a shift from the state protecting the lives of the terminally ill, to effectively endorsing, as well as providing and regulating, their termination. To this end, last week’s developments cohere. They represent a shift toward state-supported death, which is badly mischaracterised as the furthering of individual freedom.”

And my friend Maddie Grant wrote an excellent piece in The Spectator this week, in direct response to the Lords vote, which I recommend you read. As she emphasises:

“There have been no impact assessments, no public consultation, and scarcely any public debate on Antoniazzi’s amendment, which passed the Commons after a mere 46 minutes of backbench debate.”

What a moral disaster zone the UK has become.

3) I decided yesterday that it was way past time I read Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations (1981) all the way through. I’ve read many sections of it, and I’ve read and thought hard about much of his other work, particularly his ‘entitlement theory’. But for some reason I’ve never read Philosophical Explanations throughout.

I’m intending to do so intensively but slowly, much like my ongoing occasional reading of J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia. So you can expect updates over the coming months.

One thought for today, however, is that if you were rating the introductions to philosophy books in terms of the quality of their meta commentary on how to go about writing a philosophy book, then perhaps the only introduction that would rival the introduction to Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia is the introduction to his Philosophical Explanations.

The first sentence sets the tone:

“I, too, seek an unreadable book: urgent thoughts to grapple with in agitation and excitement, revelations to be transformed by or to transform, a book incapable of being read straight through, a book, even, to bring reading to stop. I have not found that book, or attempted it. Still, I wrote and thought in awareness of it, in the hope this book would bask in its light.”

It’s funny, in this context, that I’ve decided to read this book slowly! And I guess I should note that the older I get, the less Nozick’s prose style does it for me.

I continue to find so much of value in his substance, however — regardless, of course, of whether I agree with it. And in his attitude and approach and ambition. A little later in the introduction, Nozick explains that his overriding reason for writing Philosophical Explanations was that “I want (to be able) to conclude that we [humans] are worthwhile and precious”.

I wrote recently about why I don’t have a favourite philosopher. But if I really had to pick one, it would likely be him.

4) All that said about Nozick and Smith, the thing I read this week that really blew me away was John L. Foster’s anthology of Ancient Egyptian Literature (2001). Regular readers will know that I enjoy reading poetry. I’m also extremely intrigued by Ancient Egypt.

Indeed, beyond philosophical matters, some of the questions to which I’d most like to know the answers pertain to Ancient Egyptian technological achievements. But until this week I hadn’t ever read a single Ancient Egyptian poem. Well, thanks to John L. Foster’s anthology of Ancient Egyptian Literature, I have now read many!

As Foster explains in his introduction, translating Ancient Egyptian poetry is a particularly complicated matter. I’ll write some other time about my interest in the philosophical questions that arise around translation more generally. But while I enjoyed Foster’s introduction, my excitement at reading these poems was a little blunted by his admission that his translations of these poems are intended to serve as ‘critical readings’ of them. And by his stated belief that “all translators worth their salt want, with Pound, to ‘make it new’ for their own times and languages”.

Nonetheless, how incredible it is to be able to read poetry from such an unthinkably long time ago. How incredible it is that, even with Foster’s involvement, such poetry reads like the following:

5) I finally have a favourite restaurant in DC! By this, I don’t just mean that there is now a restaurant in DC that I firmly prefer to all the other restaurants I’ve been to in DC. I also mean that one of my favourite — let’s say top 15 — restaurants anywhere in the world is this restaurant.

It’s a Brazilian place called Brasero Atlántico, which does fantastic fire-grilled meats — their steaks are almost as good as the best steaks I ate the one time I went to Brazil. That said, everything I’ve eaten at Brasero Atlántico has been great, particularly the crab empanadas (man, the pastry) and the sharp endive salad.

There’s also a sister bar next door in the guise of a flower shop.

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

1) The only time I’ve ever found Wittgenstein properly philosophically satisfying was immediately after visiting the house in Vienna he designed for his sister. It’s one of the top five buildings I’ve seen. That evening, I found myself getting more from On Certainty than I had from any of his works before. Sadly, when I arrived back in the UK the next day, I returned to my previous philistine state! But I keep on trying.

This week, I reread the 2022 Liveright edition of his Private Notebooks 1914-1916, edited and translated by the poetry expert Marjorie Perloff. I have to admit that I don’t really like Perloff’s introduction to the volume. Somewhat appropriately, I find it philosophically unsatisfying. But we philosophers owe Perloff much gratitude, because her bilingual edition fills a gap for both English speakers and German speakers (presumably the Wittgenstein notebooks aren’t available in any other language!).

Moreover, even though my German is pretty bad, I enjoy reading the ‘parallel texts’ that Perloff presents here — on each double-page spread, you get the German on the left, and the English on the right. This luxury comes with some cost, however. As Perloff explains, the notebooks themselves contain both ‘personal’ sections and ‘philosophical’ sections:

“For the entries of any single day in each notebook, his personal remarks, written in a code he had learned and used with his siblings when he was young, are placed on the left-hand page (the verso). On the right-hand page (the recto), he composed in normal script, the logical treatise that was to be the penultimate draft of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.”

Whereas in the Perloff edition, we’re only given the ‘personal’ sections — since, as above, the verso/recto layout is reserved for presenting the German alongside the English. Except towards the end, that is, when Perloff thinks we should get some philosophy!

For the majority of the book, this means reading endless statements like “did no work” or “worked a little” — or even more frustratingly, “I am on the way to a great discovery” — without much idea of what Wittgenstein is referring to. And then suddenly, in the final section, you’re thrown the occasional lump of philosophy. For me at least, this doesn’t work well.

On the upside, however, it does mean you’re free to focus on the everyday. That is, even though the experiences Wittgenstein is writing about here are physically tough, wartime experiences, much of the time he comes across as pretty ordinary. (Not least for his use of multiple exclamation marks!!!!) He struggles to cope with a lack of letters from the man he loves. He struggles to cope with uncertainty over what his English friends are thinking about his choice to join the Austrian army. He finds joy in reading, frustration when his ideals fall, and temptations he hates himself for.

This is the second time I’ve read this book, which is probably two times more than if Perloff had left in all the philosophy.

2) A few days ago, I read the Vita Nuova — Dante’s celebration of his love for Beatrice — translated for Penguin Classics by Virginia Jewiss. I speak only very basic Italian, but as with the Perloff, I enjoyed being able to read the Jewiss translation alongside the original Dante.1

The thing I like most about the Vita Nuova (mostly written in the 1290s) is its form. There’s debate about how to present and even describe this, however. So I’ll just say that the chapters of the Vita Nuova generally fall into one of two types: 1) a short essay; or 2) a short essay, followed by a poem, followed by a short analysis of the poem.

Now, it’s tempting to respond to the inclusion of these analyses with surprise. How clever! How self-reflexive, as the literature people say! But surely it just shows us that modernity doesn’t get a monopoly on artistic experimentation. The all-too-common idea that the Medieval people were intellectually barren is silly, as you’ll know if you’ve ever listened to Machaut.

This doesn’t mean that the analysis parts of the Vita Nuova aren’t special, however, or that they aren’t the precursors of much later achievements. They’re certainly my favourite parts. They’re so earnest, and I like how they remind me of contemporary philosophical exegesis. Take this one, for example, which I chose pretty much at random:

Man, those last couple of sentences, in particular, could’ve been written by R.M. Hare.

3) Yesterday, I finished According to the Law, by Solvej Balle. If you’ve read my recent long piece about Balle’s three most recent books — the first three of her ongoing On the Calculation of Volume series, and the best three novels I read last year — then you’ll know that I finished each one the day I got hold of it. Whereas, According to the Law took me a couple of weeks, a few pages at a time, often feeling unsure about whether I’d continue. Sometimes this is a sign I really like a book! Not in this case.

It’s okay, I guess. Some of the better bits even remind me of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy — a book I rate very highly. Like the Auster, According to the Law is a set of short stories, which seem separate until you realise they aren’t. The best is perhaps the first, in which a scientist called Nicholas S. cuts up a young woman’s brain in the hope of proving a thesis about how humans stay upright. Sorry… describing it this way reminds me how annoying it was!

The simplicity of style, and mastery of structure, that I love about the On Calculation books is almost entirely missing from According to the Law. If I’m being blunt, it’s try-hard juvenilia: of interest to Balle obsessives, but likely few others.

4) Last weekend, I went to Bill Irwin’s one-man show about Samuel Beckett. I didn’t know who Bill Irwin was beforehand, but I learned quickly that he’s an extremely good clown. I’ve never been much into Beckett, and Irwin’s first reading — the show takes the form of Irwin alternating readings and analysis — left me thinking that I wasn’t much into Irwin’s interpretation of him either. All too over-the-top surreal, for me.

Something changed during Irwin’s performance (‘reading’ definitely isn’t the right word, on reflection) of part of Beckett’s Watt, however. And by the end of the show, I was completely bought in. Not only to Irwin’s take, which is clever, and at times extremely funny (tonight’s the last night, so go go see it, if you’re free!). But also to the idea that I’ve been seriously underrating Beckett. I thought he was a bad non-realist version of Pinter. I think I was wrong.

5) Yesterday, I went to hear English pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen play (mostly) English music at the Hopkins Bloomberg Theater. This theater is hard to find — hidden away in a complicated wood and metal multi-story-carpark of a modern corporate building, full of grey locker rooms down wrong turns. The lady sitting next to me missed the first half of the concert because she got lost, and I bet she wasn’t the only one.

Rushdie Momen’s playing was lovely, though. Not world-class, but maybe one day. Her Byrd and Bull were light and neat. And there was some excellent Haydn — really technically great. The best part, however, was the final movement of the late Beethoven E major sonata: the glorious variations on the slow chordal theme. Wonderful. You go to a concert of English music; you’re forced to think about where it stands.

This is the sixty-first in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end. And because this edition is a little overdue, you can expect another sooner than usual.

1) A couple of days ago, I read this short Vogue piece by Susan Everard, about her daughter Sarah. If you were to read this piece without knowing what happened to Sarah Everard, you would surely realise that she is dead. But it is such a gentle, close kind of a piece that you would likely not suspect what kind of death she suffered.

That feature of this piece seems to me a beautiful achievement. There is also something majestic about the writing — it has a simple poise that I’m not sure I’ve seen before. It is open and straightforward, but it is also careful. “I miss the goodness of Sarah”, Susan Everard tells us. “I like to think of her dancing”, she says.

2) I wrote a while back about Eric Schwitzgebel’s investigation into the most cited works in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.1 In particular, I was glad to note “the way the authorship of its top 10 (Rawls, Kripke, Parfit, Nozick, Wittgenstein, Lewis, Quine, Scanlon, Kuhn, Rawls) goes some way to propping up my view that there’s no better place for an analytic philosopher to live than America.”

I was delighted to see this week, therefore, that Schwitzgebel has undertaken some further philosophy stats analysis! This time, Schwitzgebel’s focus is the ‘discussion arc’ — something he defines as “a curve displaying how frequently a term appears in philosophical journal abstracts, titles, and keywords”.

As with last time, I enjoyed thinking about Schwitzgebel’s methodological choices. He argues, for instance, that searching in these places enabled him to capture something more substantive — a stronger likelihood of discussion — than by searching citations:

“A philosopher who is cited in passing might have very little influence on the shape of an article. In contrast, if a philosopher's name is explicitly mentioned in the title, abstract, or keywords, that philosopher's work is among the chief topics of the article. Discussion rates and citation rates thus capture different phenomena and will sometimes diverge.”

Now, surely having “influence on the shape of an article” isn’t necessary to counting as a topic of discussion. And I wish the titles of philosophy articles were better signals of their content! But I’m nitpicking, here. Schwitzgebel’s piece is full of interesting claims, many of which ring true, not least:

“Wittgenstein peaks in the late 1960s, Frege in the early 1980s, and Nietzsche in the early 2000s. Heidegger's influence is moderately steady from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, declining modestly in the past couple of decades.”

I was a bit surprised by the supposed relative death of ‘ordinary language’, however!

3) A few days ago, I read some of the 2.6 million words of the Chilcot Report. This is the 2016 document that records the findings of the Chilcot Inquiry into the UK’s involvement in the Iraq War. You can read my thoughts about the report, and about the UK’s involvement in the Iraq War, in my new piece about liberal interventionism, which I published earlier today on the .

4) Regular readers may remember my love for the original and best RFK. Handsome, stylish, oratorically gifted, self-affirmed saviour of the Cuban Missile Crisis, only wrong on about 50 per cent of other matters, etc etc. Well, yesterday I learned from this WSJ piece by Jared Mitovich that the original RFK’s current namesake has been busy undercutting the dynastic privilege he usually spends his time trading upon.2

“Massachusetts may have a unique bond with the Kennedys,” Mitovich explains, “but it has a particularly rabid connection to its hometown coffee brand” — Dunkin’ Donuts! Now, it’s only recently I learned that Dunkin’ Donuts is not the precisely descriptively-named store that I assumed it was. It is a coffee place, first and foremost! At least, reputationally. And it’s only from Mitovich’s piece that I learned that it is technically now named just Dunkin’, even though I walk past one every day.3

Anyway, RFK has taken to criticising Dunkin’s sugary drinks. This went down well in Austin, Mitovich reports:

““We’re gonna ask Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, ‘Show us the safety data that show that it’s OK for a teenage girl to drink an iced coffee with 115 grams of sugar in it,’” Kennedy said to laughter and applause. “I don’t think they’re gonna be able to do it.””

But this did not go down so well in MA. Mitovich reports that “locals snapped”! Some of them, anyway. One Bostonian told him, “It just made me remember that I hadn’t gotten one yet”. It wouldn’t be the first time a Kennedy had tried to sneakily intervene in the economy..

5) Last weekend, I was in Austin (not with RFK Jr.) for an excellent conference held by the . My favourite part was hanging out and talking philosophy with and . I also ate all the Texas food!

This is the sixtieth (!) in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.

1) I’ve been rereading parts of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). I particularly like the sixth chapter of Part III, which is where Smith outlines his theory of justice within a discussion about motivation beyond duty.1

There are “general rules” of justice, Smith tells us, which are exact and demanding. And our motivation for behaving justly, he adds, should come entirely from “reverential and religious regard” for following these rules. These two points about rules help Smith to distinguish justice from virtues like charity and gratitude. This is because he sees the “general rules” of virtues like charity and gratitude as being much more “loose” than those of justice, and the range of motivations for behaving in line with these virtues as having much greater scope.

I’m writing a piece about Smith at the moment, which I’ll publish here soon, so I’ll save my thoughts on his theory of justice for then. But in a nice coincidence, the orthodoxy of Smith’s approach was referenced in the latest episode of my podcast:

“REBECCA: So, I want to start with the relation between rights and perfect obligations. I think this is a good place to start. I think it’s somewhere where you and I have a bit of unusual crossover of views. I also think it’s a good route into getting into the question of what a right is, which is the main goal of today. So, do you agree that it’s orthodox to say that perfect obligations are in some sense the content of rights?

JOHN [TASIOULAS]: I think certainly there was a time when this was the orthodox view amongst philosophers from very different schools. So, people like Smith, Kant, Mill, I think, would have agreed that rights relates to that subsection of morality that concerns perfect obligations. So, I think there was that consensus. Whether there is a similar consensus now, either philosophically or in the wider culture, I think is way more doubtful.”

Smith doesn’t explicitly refer to rights in the sixth chapter of Part III, but he might as well have done!

2) This week, I also returned to Adam Smith on Equality — Elizabeth Anderson’s chapter in Ryan Hanley’s 2016 edited collection on Smith. Anderson argues in this chapter that Smith is a moderate moral egalitarian, rather than a radical one. I find this crazy, on various counts.

Again, I’ll save revealing my reasons for my Smith piece. Indeed, my main aim in that piece is to make a strong case for Smith as a radical egalitarian. But I found that this Anderson chapter — and particularly her definitional approach — annoyed me even more than the last time I read it.2

3) A while back, I wrote here about some Colin McGinn pieces I’d enjoyed reading. This week, Philosophy Twitter was full of chat about McGinn’s recent one-paragraph blog piece My Honest Views, in which he slates twenty-three philosophers, ranging from Aristotle and Plato (“philosophical preschoolers”!) to David Lewis (“off his rocker”!).

McGinn’s piece neatly represents why I moved from England to America. I don’t want to be among the cynical people any more! I want to live forever in the land of enthusiasm! The hardcore ‘American version’ of the McGinn piece would’ve been an unabashed run-down of philosophical excellence.3 To avoid the irony, therefore, of including two segments in a row about bits of philosophy that have annoyed me this week, I’ll end this segment by relinking to my recent McGinn appreciation post.

I’d also point you to the one-paragraph blog piece in which McGinn reveals his favourite philosophers, but I’m a hardcore individualist, so the idea of intellectual heroes really doesn’t do anything for me…

4) I’ve been enjoying One Hundred Poems from Old Japan (Tuttle Publishing, 2025). These poems, which collectively form the Hyakunin Isshu, were collated by Fujiwara no Teika in the thirteenth century. The Tuttle edition is translated by Michael Freiling, and features reproductions of classic nineteenth-century woodblock illustrations.

The poems are short and formulaic (5-7-5-7-7). They come from the ancient court, are mostly about courtship, and are by poets including Sei Shōnagon. I also finally just got round to starting reading her Pillow Book, so maybe I’ll write about that next time. But for now, here’s one of the hundred that I particularly liked:

5) Yesterday, I watched Beyond Utopia (2023), a documentary about what it takes to flee North Korea. It’s also very much a documentary about the network of people inside and outside of North Korea who make such escapes possible. This network is mostly made up of ‘brokers’ — paid mediators and accomplices, who are presented as treating the escapees as widgets.

It also includes the hero of the film — a South Korean pastor called Seungeun Kim, who not only raises funds to pay the brokers, but also risks his life, again and again, in unthinkably physically and emotionally tough ways. We learn that he does this partly in honour of his dead son, and partly out of gratitude for his North Korean wife. But mostly, I think, because he simply cannot bring himself to turn away from these people in such need.

Thanks to GPT for the “philosophical preschoolers” picture.

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 John Tasioulas. John is a Greek-Australian legal and moral philosopher. He has held various important positions, including Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy at Oxford, and Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at UCL. He’s advised the Greek government on AI, and produced two excellent reports for the World Bank on human rights. His paper on mercy is particularly good, I think, as is his Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Law, the front cover of which features an excellent painting by Rouault.

He’s also one of my greatest friends. So I’m delighted he’s here with me today and that we’re going to be talking about one of my favourite things: rights. Thanks for joining me, John.

JOHN: Wonderful to be with you, Rebecca.

REBECCA: So, I want to start with the relation between rights and perfect obligations. I think this is a good place to start. I think it’s somewhere where you and I have a bit of unusual crossover of views. I also think it’s a good route into getting into the question of what a right is, which is the main goal of today. So, do you agree that it’s orthodox to say that perfect obligations are in some sense the content of rights?

JOHN: I think certainly there was a time when this was the orthodox view amongst philosophers from very different schools. So, people like Smith, Kant, Mill, I think, would have agreed that rights relates to that subsection of morality that concerns perfect obligations. So, I think there was that consensus. Whether there is a similar consensus now, either philosophically or in the wider culture, I think is way more doubtful.

REBECCA: Okay, so let’s just clarify a little for our less rights-obsessed friends. There is this standard distinction in philosophy, which I think pretty much generally holds, that perfect obligations are these rights-correlative obligations. These are obligations that are really, really important. There are either no or very few instances in which those obligations shouldn’t be upheld. And then we have what we might think of as imperfect obligations. They’re something more like, they track the good.

So, a standard distinction might be something like, a perfect obligation correlates with the right not to be tortured, whereas, I don’t know, you’re walking along the river and you see a kid in trouble. You think you’ve got an obligation to jump in, but nobody’s going to say if you didn’t do that, that you violated his rights. So, that seems to be some kind of, in some sense, less strong obligation. That kind of obligation is typically referred to as an imperfect obligation.

So, we’re saying something like, rights correlate with these more severe obligations. They’re demands of justice — something like that.

JOHN: Yeah, I’m not sure that I would explicate the distinction in terms of severity. So, I think the extent to which the obligation is stringent, or has great force, I think, can vary from case to case. So, I think one way into this is just to focus on what an obligation is, because I think we’ve lost our focus on that. Very often people think any kind of moral reason is automatically an obligation.

Whereas I want to say that, no, obligations are a subset of moral reasons. And they are reasons that are categorical — they apply to you independently of whether you are motivated in a certain way or not. That they typically exclude certain considerations that you could otherwise act on. If I promise to do something, like attend your conference, then I can’t act on other reasons that I would normally have, such as, it’s nice to stay in bed, so I think I’ll just miss attending your conference. And then there’s the point that you’re making, that they’re not readily overridable. And finally, there’s the point that if you violate these obligations, usually you’re a target for blame — a legitimate target for blame, including self-blame, which we call guilt.

So, once we have this notion of obligation, then we might differentiate between different kinds of obligations. And I think perfect obligations have been understood in different ways — for example, as obligations that can be enforced. Whereas other obligations might not be enforceable — for example, obligations of charity. But I think the salient distinction, for me anyway, in thinking about perfect obligations, is that they are directed obligations. They are owed to specifically someone, and that person is the right-holder with respect to that obligation. So that violating that obligation is in some sense to wrong that person in particular.

So, if I, for example, plagiarised from one of my colleagues, I’m violating their right not to be plagiarised. There is a specific victim there – that particular colleague whose right has been violated. But if I’m generally a kind of uncollegial person, I might be violating a general obligation — an imperfect obligation — of collegiality. But there isn’t anyone in particular who could claim that their duty owed to them has been violated. That’s the kind of distinction.

REBECCA: I like that. I struggle sometimes with this directionality matter. I think if it’s tied together with the victim sense — with the sense of wronging somebody — it makes a lot of sense to me. But I wouldn’t want to say, for instance, that not jumping in the river correlates with a right. I wouldn’t want to say that’s a perfect obligation. But I think if I fail to do that, there is some sense in which I’ve let down that particular kid in the river. There’s a wider sense in which I haven’t acted in line with the good, but I do feel there’s some element of directionality.

So, if what we’re aiming to do is to separate out these kinds of obligations, I worry that maybe the directionality only works in combination with something else.

JOHN: Look, I think you’re on to something there. So, I do think you’ve let down that particular child, even though we might say there wasn’t a right in that child for you to take a risk to save their life. So, that’s certainly true.

But I think the question then is — that obligation that you fail to act on, or that consideration that you fail to act on, could be a general obligation of humanity that is not fully explained by the interests, for example, of that child. Whereas the obligation not to torture that child would be fully explained by the child’s interest, if you see what I mean.

So, in both cases, you’ve let down someone, but the explanation of the norm that you’ve transgressed, in one case, in some sense is fully individualistic. In another case, is not fully individualistic.

REBECCA: I see what you’re saying. I think I’d push back, though, and say the instance of the right, it’s individualistic in that it’s held by an individual, but that individual is an instance of the set of human beings. So, in some sense, it’s still the case that that generality holds.

Then, there‘s going to be a question about how did the obligation or the right arise? And again, you might want to say something like, there’s a distinction because the kid’s the one who’s in the river, the kid got there in the river in certain ways. One of the reasons, maybe, you’re not violating the kid’s right by not jumping in, is because the kid shouldn’t be in the river in the first place — whereas the not-to-torture right doesn’t track anything you’ve particularly done.

But again, I probably just want to say that those are the kinds of distinctions you find both within perfect obligations and imperfect obligations. So again, I’m not sure that that’s going to be sufficient to track that distinction.

JOHN: Well, I think we may have a technical disagreement here. But I would certainly agree with the generality point in this sense, that if I have a particular right, then anyone who has the relevantly similar qualities will also have that right. So, in that sense of generality, of course that must be correct.

REBECCA: Yeah.

JOHN: But that sense of generality doesn’t bring in the idea that the existence of that right depends upon an aggregation of my interest and other right-holders’ interests, if you see what I mean. So, one way to think about this is to say, look, the obligation not to, for example, plagiarise someone has its origins in their interest alone. The obligation of collegiality is more of a common-good kind of obligation. It’s partly a function of the combination of a bunch of people’s interests in having a certain kind of collegial atmosphere.

REBECCA: I mean, I think I could probably push back and say the same about plagiarism, and I could probably say, it’s because you’re an instance of the kind of person doing the kind of job. But I agree — I think this may be either us just cutting very fine lines in slightly different places.

I feel like we’ve broadly got on to something, though, where we’re saying: if we want to get off the ground in thinking what rights are, talking about perfect obligations might be a good starting point. At least, it has been an orthodox starting point.

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. So, I think what I want to get into saying is something like rights generate perfect obligations.

But then, I’m very aware that the more obligation-focused person might say, no, the obligation generates the right. Do you have a view on the, kind of, the arrow there?

JOHN: Yeah, there could be different kinds of arrows —

REBECCA: Yes. [laughter]

JOHN: But I guess what I would say is that having a right is having a certain kind of moral status.

REBECCA: Yes.

JOHN: And the content of that moral status is paradigmatically certain obligations owed to the right-holder. So, the thought might be something like there is something about me — and of course, different theories of rights will differ as to what relevant quality we’re talking about. It could be an interest of mine. It could be the fact that God loves me. It could be some other feature of me. But some feature of me is such that it generates these obligations that are owed to me. And if you violate these obligations, then you have wronged me in particular.

I think that’s how I would think of it. And so you’re right, I think, the perfect obligations are the content of the right, but then not simply to be identified with the right.

REBECCA: Yes, I like that I like that locution, “not to be identified with.” That seems different from — we can come on in a moment to things like what grounds the right, we can talk if we like about things like generating rights. I think there’s a difference.

But if we were to try to just bank a kind of starter working definition, I think we already have a couple of options. One is something like, a right affords a certain kind of moral status. That’s quite loose. Another might be: rights generate perfect obligations. If you had to give a starter at this point — you don’t have to necessarily agree with it — but something that then we can come back to, push against for the rest of the episode. What would be your simple starter?

JOHN: Well, I think given how the conversation has gone so far, perhaps we could say having a right means having a certain kind of moral status, such that it generates obligations on others, that are owed to you. And if they’re not complied with, then there’s a special sense in which you are the victim, or have a grievance in that particular case.

REBECCA: Yeah, I mean, that’s quite wordy, but that sounds pretty good. I think we might have some disagreements at the edges about some of the clauses. But I feel like that’s a good starting point. If we were to simplify it down, we might just say having a right means having a certain moral status that generates particular kinds of obligations that are owed to us, or something like that. That seems like a good starting point.

Another starting point might be to say something like — and this actually also brings us back into this orthodoxy question — within political philosophy over the centuries, there are some leading figures who have pretty much treated justice as the domain of rights. I think it’s fair to say that about Locke. This can tell us certain things. It can tell us certain things that — maybe about the relation of justice and morality, maybe about the fact that rights are some particular element of morality. If we want to say that justice is a subset of morality, it implies that rights are not the same things as other kinds of things within morality.

Is this a useful starting point? Do you think it’s still orthodox to say that people treat justice as the domain of rights?

JOHN: No, I don’t think it’s orthodox, but there’s always been a duality in understanding about justice. So, one conception of justice has always been quite broad, which is as other-regarding morality. Morality, insofar as it relates to how I should treat other people — as opposed to, for example, it being immoral if I don’t take care of my own health, or don’t try to develop my own talents. And then there’s a more narrow, more technical sense of justice, which is a subset of moral concerns relating to others, and that is the rights-based ones.

So, I think that those two locutions have always operated. And that’s why I think Michael Sandel wrote a book called, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Well, that’s relating to that first locution, probably. But then there are also people who will say, yes, but there was also this other sense of justice, which is a subset of moral concerns, and they’re the rights-based ones.

REBECCA: Yes, this also brings us on to this thorny question about whether ethics and morality are the same thing — the Bernard Williams question.

JOHN: Sure.

REBECCA: Because if you think that morality is the thing that is the other-regarding thing rather than justice and you think ethics includes these questions about the good life, that pushes you towards then seeing justice as a subset of morality.

I quite like this kind of concentric circles approach. [laughter] I like this idea of spending my life mapping out this terrain. Working out how these elements fit within it. That’s the secret goal of these podcasts — just to help Rebecca work out the ontology. [laughter]

Okay. That would be an alternative route in, I think, though, to thinking about what rights are — to think about the world in which they live, something like that.

JOHN: Yeah. But there are, of course, a lot of people who think about justice, and try to do that independently of rights. They focus on notions of equality. So there’s always been that dimension. And certainly, a lot of utilitarians, who tend to be often allergic towards rights but don’t want to have to ditch justice, try to come up with conceptions of justice that are not rights-involving.

REBECCA: Yes. And then, of course, we have another overlapping sense in which some people want to say that justice is the domain of law.

JOHN: That’s right.

REBECCA: And then that brings them on to thinking about legal rights. And then, post-Rawls, this big focus on distributive justice, which, again, pushes us towards the equality idea. So, we then have to do a whole mapping of positions within philosophy and different little groups and gangs.

But let’s think a little more about separating out rights from other, what we might say, elements of morality — if we take a particular place within that anthropology of political philosophers.

So, I sometimes see, for instance, people eliding rights, or conflating rights, with other kinds of things that I think are separate from rights within discussions of morality. So, obvious candidates here would be interests, might be preferences, might be needs. I think quite easily, however — at least within a kind of ordinary language approach — you can think about why that just isn’t going to be satisfactory.

So, it’s easy to think of examples of things that you have a preference for but no right for, at least on an ordinary understanding of a right. So, I might have a preference for daily ice cream. Few people are going to think it’s correct, or indeed a good idea, to start thinking of daily ice cream as a right. And something that’s good for somebody, that they have an interest in, but they have no right to — a satisfying sex life. If they have a right to that, that puts pretty hefty obligations on other people that we probably don’t think obtain, unless you’re one of those quite niche, crazy philosophers. Then there are things that you might not have a preference for, but you do have a right to, like carrying out some act of violent self-defense. And there are things you do have a right to, but wouldn’t be good for you — behaving in an unnecessary objectionable manner.

This just kind of language-based approach shows us, I think, that there are distinctions between these kinds of elements of morality.

JOHN: Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean we’ve already talked about rights as involving perfect obligations. But that implies there are imperfect obligations like, for example, certain forms of kindness or generosity or consideration or compassion for others that wouldn’t necessarily be rights-involving.

There are also ideals — moral ideals people have of service or of courage that go way beyond anything that could be demanded of them, even as a matter of obligation, i.e. they wouldn’t be in any way acting wrongfully or subject to blame if they forwent these ideals and weren’t able to fulfill them. And as you say, you can’t go simply from interests to rights, or from preferences to rights.

Certainly, some rights seem to me to be grounded in interests. But they’re not to be identified with those interests because you always have to raise the question — I may have a very strong interest in all the best philosophers in the world giving me feedback on my work. That would really enhance the quality of my work. But they don’t have an obligation to do that, because it’s simply not feasible. It would be unduly burdensome for them to do that.

And again, with preferences, the mere fact that I have a preference doesn’t generate a right or is not to be equated with a right. Although it may be the case that there are some rights — for example, the right to choose what occupation you will have — that are responsive to your preferences. But that requires a further step. The mere fact that there’s a preference is not going to be enough.

REBECCA: Yeah, I mean, this seems right to me — it seems important that we have terms to pick out these concepts, when they quite clearly are different concepts.

JOHN: Yes.

REBECCA: At least in the way in which they operate in our ordinary everyday lives, and our language, and have done for centuries.

It also seems to me some of these, conflating rights with preferences or interests — like you said, identifying as opposed to grounding — we should come on to grounding in a moment. It seems like you also then just get into a world of competition, in which, well, why is your interest stronger than mine? Oh, wait a second, I have four interests in doing this thing, and you only have one right!

But that seems pretty risky because — I mean, this is the great Joseph Raz example about if people like ice cream enough, then there’s enough ice-cream-eating that means that that should happen, and somebody’s rights should be violated in order to ensure the ice cream happens.

JOHN: Right.

REBECCA: You know, this kind of aggregation account, which, if you think that rights are just even some special kind of interest, you are at serious risk of doing something— not only being permitted, but being required to do something — really horrible. Just because there’s enough people, or people want something enough.

JOHN: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s definitely a problem. I mean, I’d say there’s an even more basic problem, and it goes back to your initial question about rights and perfect obligations. That the reason I’m reluctant to say that is now orthodoxy is that people are cutting the tie between rights and obligations.

And they’re doing that just by basically saying that an important interest — or pretty much any interest worth noting — constitutes a right. And we see this especially in the legal context with proportionality doctrine that says, well, okay that person enjoys feeding pigeons in the park, therefore, they have a right to feed pigeons in the park. But once you go down that route, of course, then rights massively multiply. And then you’re in a process where you have to trade off rights against each other, which starts to look like this dangerous utilitarian process that you’re hinting at.

And the idea that rights afford us real protections and that they’re overridden — if at all permissibly — only in extremis, goes out the window. So, it looks like you’re really respecting rights because you’re willing to find rights all over the place. But in fact, the very proliferation of rights — because you’ve identified them with interests — now loses the distinctive moral role that rights were performing.

REBECCA: This seems to me even more risky if we identify them with preferences. Because if at least we take a conception of interest on which it’s something that’s good for you — objectively good for you — I get that not everybody takes that conception of interest. But preference — I mean, you might have a preference to do something horrible. Once you start identifying rights with preferences, you’re going to get into pretty nasty ground.

JOHN: And I think a lot of the people who talk about interests really are talking about preferences.

REBECCA: I think that’s right.

JOHN: And part of the point there is to say, well, who am I to judge what objectively makes someone’s life go well? If they decided this is the thing that they want to do — feed pigeons in the park or whatever—then they have a right to that. That’s something I’ve got to take into account. But now I’ve got to factor in other people’s interests, rights.

And I think really the whole notion of rights goes out the window. I wrote a piece once where I’m quoting one of the leading writers on this proportionality theory of rights. And he very candidly says, well, you don’t have very much in virtue of having a right. And, of course, that follows from the analysis because it’s just any old interest, including one that’s purely based on a preference, is going to be counted as a right. Then, of course, it doesn’t mean much because it might be very easily traded off by other people’s so-called interests or rights.

REBECCA: You have this deep irony — which isn’t really even irony if you’re smart enough to see the logic — which is, people claim to be caring about these things, therefore we need more of these things. But by there being more of these things, their value decreases. I mean it’s kind of basic maths. [laughter]

JOHN: You kill the thing you love, that’s right.

REBECCA: Let’s — before we get on to the grounding question — I’m keen to get on to grounding and moral theory. Let’s just think a little about what our discussion might tell us about the kind of thing a right is.

So, we’ve thought about its relation to other elements of morality. We’ve thought about what its content might be, or what it generates. I’m quite interested when I think about these concepts in thinking about things like, is something a state of affairs? Is something a power? Is something a condition? Is something… And there are some obvious examples of kinds of things that people say that rights are.

So one thing we’ve talked about is interests. Sometimes people think about them as capacities. Sometimes people think of them as demands. All of these ideas, I think, can be considered in terms of whether there’s something to do with you — whether they’re a part of you. A capacity is a part of you. They might be something that’s afforded to you. They might be just something that tracks in the world that relates to you. Like something outside of you, like a demand of justice — it’s not really something that you hold. That seems to me a little odd in itself, if we want to be able to talk about rights-holders or rights-bearers. Do you have anything to say about —

Powers, I feel, is a good contender here. Is a right a power?

JOHN: Yeah. Well, these things go back to sort of medieval discussions, and there was that distinction between subjective and objective right. And I think subjective right was meant to capture this idea that you’re getting at — that somehow rights discourse relates to a particular subject, a particular person, an individual who has these rights.

So, that’s why I sort of tried to anticipate this sort of question, by talking about a moral status — a moral status that has as its content these directed or perfect obligations that we talked about earlier.

REBECCA: Yes, so we should say this is a kind of unusual use of objective/subjective, in the sense that it doesn’t track that standard sense in which we talk about in philosophy. It’s more like a shift from something like natural restraints on power to people having powers to exercise for themselves. Or something that has the subject as the — it has as some kind of particular subject. This also probably tracks a shift in religious belief. There was some idea that if you were — even if you had the concept of wronging somebody, you were wronging God. There’s some kind of intermediary in there.

JOHN: Yes. Although that’s a tricky one because there are some rights theorists who will say that ultimately the reason we have these rights is because, for example, we’re loved by God. So, if you really dig down deep —

REBECCA: Yes. I thought about that when you said that earlier in your list. Because if you have the right —

JOHN: That’s right. And a similar problem is going to arise with the utilitarian account of rights. There won’t really be an individualistic characteristic. But for me, I think that probably — rather than saying this is a bad analysis of rights — indicates why utilitarians always have [laughter] problems with rights.

REBECCA: [laughter] I think that’s right. If rights are just part of some calculus, if you’ve instrumentalised them. If there’s something you’re being — this concept you’re being parasitic on, in some sense — in order to do your calculations. And they’re things that can be traded off against each other. Then, it’s pretty hard to have that cohere with the idea that they are something for some particular person. That John has rights, and Rebecca has rights. If they need to be zjummed together in some big calculus in the sky, it’s pretty hard to keep — I mean, we just come on to the classic separateness of persons argument, which Rawls and Nozick —

JOHN: Yeah, I don’t think it’s so much the calculus, because this problem is also a problem for the more theocentric account of rights. A theocentric person need not be doing a calculus. But what they’re saying is, yes, but ultimately the reason you have this right is something to do with not you, but the fact that you have a certain relationship to this further entity, which is God.

And I think the utilitarian then brings the additional problem that the thing that they’ve identified is going to be the sort of thing that involves the kind of calculus that makes us think, well, this is not the kind of protection, the robust protection, we think that rights genuinely afford us.

REBECCA: I think that’s right. I think both of these accounts just aren’t going to be sufficiently individualistic, in one sense or another, to track this idea of the right. You put it nicely when you said something like, generating these obligations that are owed to you. This specificity, whether then it’s you as an instance of a bigger set of people, and this comes on to this, I like to sometimes make this, distinction between general rights and particular rights. General rights, in the sense of a right that all people hold. A particular right, you know, I have a particular right to this mug of water because I bought the mug at the museum. Whereas we all have the right not to be tortured. I feel like this is quite a useful distinction.

But let’s just talk a little about grounding. This has come up a few times. You made a nice distinction between the idea of identifying a right with an interest, and the idea of rights being grounded in interests. I think I’m certainly open to quite a pluralistic approach to grounding rights. I don’t think, necessarily, the same thing has to ground all rights, partly because I do have this belief in these general and particular rights. I think there are other distinctions that are important between rights: the kinds of rights that hold in all places and time just because you’re a human; the kinds of rights that you acquire along the way; distinctions between moral and legal rights.

But what does it mean to ground a right? When I say this, when we have this conversation, what are you thinking I’m talking about?

JOHN: I think there are many things one could be talking about. But I think the most fundamental is a kind of ontological point about explaining the existence of the right. So, what is the case for saying, there is a right not to be tortured, but there isn’t a right, for example, to have feedback on my work from all the best philosophers? What makes it the case that one exists and one does not? How would you go about establishing that?

REBECCA: That makes sense to me. I —

JOHN: And we know philosophers have massively divergent views about this. Some people think that interests of the right-holder play a key role, and they say, that’s why typically rights are things that benefit us. Others say, no, no, look, we also have rights that in no way benefit us, like the right to access pornography, perhaps, but we still have that right, so there must be something else, a status of ours.

And even amongst those who talk about interests, there’ll be some who say, it’s not any interest. So, my great mentor, Jim Griffin, wrote an important book about human rights where he thought that autonomy and liberty are the only interests that can justify the existence of rights. But then you get into big problems about, well, what about those humans who have no real capacity for autonomous decision-making? Like a newly born child, does that not have a right not to be tortured? So obviously there’s huge contestation there.

And then there are, of course, the more theocentric views that we’ve talked about that say it’s neither really about your interests, nor about a status that can be articulated in terms of naturalistic terms. It’s rather some kind of relationship you bear to God. Either you’re made in the image of God or, for example, God loves you, loves human beings, and therefore, human beings have a special status in virtue of that love.

REBECCA: Yeah, I think I agree with most of that. I’d probably want to make a distinction between the kinds of explanations that justify, and those that don’t. I feel like when we talk here about grounding, we’re talking in some sense about what justifies something.

JOHN: Sure.

REBECCA: I also, I like to make this quite niche distinction — particularly when I think about Lockean property rights — between what means that someone is justified in holding a right, having acquired a right, and why is somebody justified in holding that right at all. You want to say, why did Rebecca acquire the right to have the apple on the tree, when John could have also? Because either of us could be justified in holding it. But I want to separate out the fact that I’m justified in holding it, from how I acquired it — or how I generated it, as we talked about it earlier.

But yeah, this seems to make sense to me. I feel like when we talk about grounding rights, we’re explaining why they exist. We’re justifying their existence in some sense, or asking what provides their justification.

JOHN: Yeah.

REBECCA: You mentioned God. We talked about interests. I think I’m happy to say that need probably pretty much sufficiently grounds some rights. I think there’s a question about the human good more broadly. About reason. I think it’s fair to say some people think that reason can do a lot of work in justifying some rights.

Again, when I think about these matters, I’m broadly pluralistic, in a bounded sense. I don’t mean that anything can ground a right. But I think that different —

JOHN: I just want to say I share your pluralism. And I think one of the reasons people are worried about pluralism is that they think that if a diversity of kinds of interests, for example, and considerations can generate rights, then they worry that that means that you’re just going to proliferate rights endlessly. But the answer to that is to say, the fact that the input into the argument for the existence of a right could include a very diverse range of factors, doesn’t mean that automatically you have a right.

So, for example, in the case of need, someone may have an incredibly rare disease, and they would need a certain kind of therapy in order for them to save their lives. It doesn’t follow from that, that if creating this therapy was going to cost astronomical sums, that they would have a right that society spend astronomical sums, in order to cure this disease that only they have. So, the need is very urgent there — it’s life-threatening. But you can’t automatically go to the issue of rights because you need to go via the notion of obligation, and that brings in feasibility constraints.

So, once you understand the importance of obligation, you can be more relaxed about the kind of input into what justifies the existence of a right in the first place.

REBECCA: I think that’s absolutely right. I think you have to be careful. Again, I mean, you touched on urgency also. Urgency can indeed play some role in determining what rights are, or when they’re generated. But just because something’s urgent, again, doesn’t make it a matter of rights. Because indeed, some of the obligations that might impose upon people might be too burdensome. It might just be infeasible.

If you think everyone has a right to eat whatever they want, but everybody wants to eat some particular cow, and there’s only one cow like that in the world [laughter] — I mean, that’s a silly philosopher’s example. But quite quickly, we can see that we want to be making distinctions between the kinds of rights we’re talking about.

We want to be able to ensure that rights are — I mean, the great Kantian doctrine of ‘ought implies can’ I often come back to, when thinking about these matters. I feel like that’s the sensible Kantian doctrine [laughter]. I’m not so sure about the other ones.

JOHN: I think that is a very powerful point, that ought implies can. In particular, obligations imply feasibility. And that if it’s genuinely an obligation that someone is going to be blamable for not complying with, then you have to factor in the question, what is the burden on them in complying with them, and is that a reasonable burden?

And that’s why, as I was saying to you, the tendency now — especially amongst a certain kind of legal thinking in human rights, for example — where you simply identify the right with the interest, and then say, well, I have a right to everything that will cater to that interest.

And my favourite example of this is the UN special rapporteur on the right to health, who has to go around to different countries to see if they’re complying with the right to health. And in one case, he told the story about going to Sweden, and the Swedes were very smug, because they thought, well, of course, we comply with the right to health. [laughter] But he was able to find a group in Sweden that was sort of living in a far-flung area, where they had poor television reception. And he said, “Aha! so their right to health is not being adequately complied with, because if you have poor television reception, you might not get important information that’s relevant to your right.” [laughter]

Now, of course, they’re simply operating with the right to health as one’s interest in health. But if you think of one’s interest in health, well, virtually the whole of the budget could be spent — government’s budget — on furthering that interest. But that’s not what the right to health demands. The right to health demands only to the extent to which there’s an obligation to do that, and there you’ve got to factor in other priorities as well.

REBECCA: That’s right. I mean, this also just seems like it’s expansionist both at the level of the right, and of the concept of health.

JOHN: Oh, yes. Well, I mean, the WHO also operates with an incredibly expanded concept of health. [laughter]

REBECCA: What a surprise! An organisation with the word ‘health’ in it wants to see everything as a matter of health —[laughter]

JOHN: As a matter of health. But I think that is a deformation that everyone is subject to. You know, lawyers want to say that rights are fundamentally legal entities, or reasons for creating laws. I’m afraid we all suffer from this kind of deformation, depending upon what our specialism is.

REBECCA: So, coming back just briefly to this point about obligations implying feasibility, one thing I enjoy thinking about is this idea of conflict within elements of morality. So, obviously a lot of philosophers have talked about value conflict. Some people want to say values just can’t conflict metaphysically. Other people say they can, it’s just about working out what the tradeoffs are — people on the other side of things.

I tend to just take quite a metaphysical approach to doing political philosophy. And I just think that in terms of rights and obligations, that stuff should be able to be sorted at the metaphysical level. If we think that there’s an instance in which you have competing obligations, I think you just haven’t understood what the content of your obligations is. Because I don’t think you can hold — one person can hold — competing obligations. Somebody might just say, well, maybe you’re being overly strict about what an obligation is — maybe you want to say you just want to reserve that for perfect obligations. Either way, though, I feel like it seems to me like there should be some kind of ontological solution to this kind of problem.

JOHN: I think I would sort of agree with that, but not the whole way, I think.

REBECCA: Yeah, you’re just going to say, Rebecca’s doing too much metaphysics —

JOHN: No, it’s not that you’re doing too much metaphysics. [laughter] But I think that you’re making things maybe too easy in saying there can never be a conflict of obligations. So, I’ve already criticised those lawyers who proliferate rights, and say any time you find an interest there’s a right, and therefore they’re generating supposed conflicts of obligations. I think that doesn’t make sense. If an obligation exists, it’s got to be the sort of thing that is not readily overridable. But you seem to be heading in the direction of saying it’s never overridable.

REBECCA: I did qualify slightly when I said it, because I realised that you were going to object in this way. [laughter] It would be right — not just because it’s you, although I thought you would because you’re smart — but I think I realised I objected with myself. But I think certainly in terms of these perfect obligations, because I don’t believe in rights conflict, for instance, therefore I think I can’t believe in perfect obligation conflict.

I think oftentimes when people talk about even imperfect obligations conflicting, I’m not really sure I want to think that it’s those constituent parts of morality that are conflicting. I think it’s to do with working out what the reasons are, working out — there’s more than one right answer in many instances. So, it’s weighing things up.

JOHN: I think there is often a kind of lazy pluralism, sometimes encouraged by certain readings of Isaiah Berlin, that is too ready to find conflicts.

REBECCA: I was thinking of that.

JOHN: You need to think through the content of those particular obligations or concerns. So, one of my favourite examples is, again, Griffin giving the example of someone who has committed murder, has been subject to a fair trial, and has been sentenced to imprisonment for murder. Is there a conflict between that demand of justice that he go to prison, and his right to be free?

And he says, yes, there is a conflict, but the demand of justice overrides his right to liberty. Whereas I’d want to say, your right to liberty — the scope of that is determined by the obligations that it generates. And those obligations do not include an obligation to allow you to be at liberty even though you’ve committed a crime.

But there will be some cases, I think, where we’re going to say, well, there was an obligation, but there was a competing obligation. I mean, the classic one, of course, is Sartre’s example of the young man who’s got the competing obligation. Does he join the resistance and fulfill his patriotic obligation, or does he look after his aged mother, his obligation to his mother? I think there are such situations that arise, for sure.

But also, your further point—that that doesn’t mean that because there’s this conflict, anything counts, or we can just go one way or the other. There may be more or less intelligent ways of trying to respond to both of those demands.

REBECCA: Yeah, I think there’s some just very sophomoric, simple sense in which you can’t be obligated to do competing things. Therefore, you have to work out which obligations hold. Which obligations, if they are — I don’t really like the term — overridable. But I tend to think of this stuff more in terms of conditionality. I think this certainly when people talk about rights being overridden.

So, to use your nice example of the right to be free, but, justified imprisonment. I have hardcore views on whether imprisonment can ever be justified. I think in some instances, on defensive grounds it can, for instance. Therefore, do I think the right to be free has been overridden? In those instances, I just think the right to be free doesn’t hold, because I do think it’s conditional. Which I think is what you were getting at when you were saying — when you gave that example.

JOHN: But then you have the case of, you know, will you torture a person in order to find out where the terrorists are who are about to bomb Manhattan? The question there is — it does seem to me that it would be a rights violation to do it, but it might still be an open question whether that is, all things considered, permissible.

REBECCA: I think for me this is the hardest question about rights, because my instinct is to be hardcore and say, you just let the world explode. Or at least that the right thing to do would be to let the world explode. Because it’s never right to torture somebody. That seems to leave me in a pretty difficult position.

JOHN: No, but the person who’s making the point is conceding that it’s not right, in the sense that you are blamable, you have done something wrong. But that this wrong thing was nonetheless, all things considered, permissible. But it might still mean that you ought to feel guilty about that, you ought to compensate that person, or do certain things that wouldn’t apply in the previous case we talked about, which is putting the convicted murderer in prison.

REBECCA: I just worry that this is going to unravel all the work we’ve done, if it can be the case it’s sometimes permissible to do something —

JOHN: No, see, I think this is not the case. I think very often people want to put forward a kind of utilitarian analysis by saying, ah but aren’t there going to be conflicts? And doesn’t that mean that ultimately you’re a kind of utilitarian if you admit that rights get overridden? But the answer to that is, they don’t get overridden at the point at which the utilitarian says they get overridden, which is the point at which they maximise utility. They get overridden way down the track from that.

REBECCA: Yeah, but this still seems like cheating to me, Johnny, because it’s not just utility that I don’t think should be a ground for trading away stuff. I just don’t think rights are the kinds of things — if we want them to have this bite. So, one reason I think utilitarians aren’t good liberals is because they don’t have access to this really demanding notion of rights, as in giving this kind of ultimate biting force. Because if everything is always a matter of tradeoffs, you’re just left with — there’s always going to be something more competing.

JOHN: Well, look, I can give you what you want very easily, by specifying rights in a certain way.

REBECCA: Which is what I’m trying to do with the conditionality thing, but then —

JOHN: Sure, but there is an absolute right not to torture people for fun. So, that right can never be overridden. There is no case in which you’d be justified, all things considered, in transgressing that right. So, the question to you then would be, you know, a lot of people are going to feel uncomfortable with the thought that rights will only have bite if you let Manhattan be destroyed, rather than twist someone’s arm to find out where the bomb is being launched from. So, what are you going to do in that case?

Are you going to say, no, no, no, yes, let Manhattan be bombed. Or are you going to say, I’m going to avoid the conflict by saying his right to torture incorporates within it an exception, which is if Manhattan’s going to be bombed, then actually he doesn’t have a right to it. Which path would you go down?

REBECCA: This is a very particularist approach! I feel like I haven’t yet quite solved this problem for myself. But I feel like the conditional approach, which is sort of what you’re saying, but I don’t want to bake in — I don’t want to have to bake in a particular — I don’t want to bake in some list of exclusions. And I certainly don’t want to go down the emergency route.

Nozick has this famous footnote about catastrophic moral horror, in which, in fact I wrote it down, 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?

JOHN: Oh, absolutely.

REBECCA: Therefore, isn’t this a serious problem for all of these matters? I don’t have a good answer, but I feel like the conditionality approach helps a lot, more generally, with what might seem to be rights conflicts.

JOHN: I agree with that. I think rights do —

REBECCA: Of course people like Amartya Sen have tried to bring in hierarchical things — the goal-rights solution. I feel that’s just smuggling in consequentialism.

JOHN: Sure.

REBECCA: I don’t think hierarchy is the answer here.

JOHN: Yeah. I mean, what did Tim Scanlon say? That interests are overridden and rights are redefined. I think that is a good starting point for thinking about these things. That your first port of call when it comes to rights is to think about what the actual content of the right is, and it may incorporate conditions which obviate the thought that there is a conflict in that case.

But I guess my claim against you would be that you’re still having a lot of bite, even in the case where a right can be overridden. Provided that it’s not like a habitual feature of practical reason that these rights are overridden. But I understand the temptation to say they’re absolute.

But then another thing one might think about there, is whether the absolutist conception really finds it’s more natural home in a more theological, or theocentric, account of rights. That basically says, no, no, no, your role in this world is to obey these absolute demands, and of course, there is another world where you’ll be rewarded for doing so.

REBECCA: So, one thing though we should clarify — and I know that we’re going to agree on this — is that you could hold that some rights are absolute, but of course not hold that all rights are absolute.

JOHN: Correct.

REBECCA: There’s a bad reading oftentimes when, you know, we people who are interested in rights start talking this way, and then they think, oh but, and then they come up with some instance of a right which clearly isn’t absolute.

I think this actually can bring us quite neatly into something I think we should discuss, which is different kinds of rights. And by that I don’t mean, let’s list some rights. I mean some distinctions between things like — so we mentioned natural rights earlier. My view is that natural rights are a subset of moral rights, so they’re not legal rights. They are — I think I’m quite happy to say that natural rights are the old-fashioned way of referring to human rights. I know that not everybody agrees with that.

But if this is something like a set of rights that all human beings hold in all places and times in virtue of their humanity — in virtue of being a member of the set of human beings, something like that — then quite clearly the legal right to get your driving license from the DMV [laughter] isn’t a natural right. It’s also not a moral right. So, if the distinction between moral rights and legal rights is moral rights reflect truths about morality, and legal rights are posited, conferred by positive law — we’re already starting to make distinctions between the set of things that are rights.

Are there other useful distinctions, do you think, within these — I mean, these kind of general, big-cut kinds of distinctions — within the broad set of things that count as rights?

JOHN: Well, I just want to go back a bit to natural rights. So I think natural rights is an important concept. But it’s important, I think, to distinguish at least two things it can mean. One is that they’re rights that you could have even in a state of nature, even in a pre-political environment. And that fits in with your point about that they’re rights that humans have throughout human history at any particular stage. So, they’re kind of timeless because they simply come along with your humanity.

And then on the other hand, natural rights could mean also, or instead, rights that are discoverable through natural reason — through ordinary moral reasoning, rather than by looking into law books, or looking at revelation, et cetera. And I think it’s important to keep those two things distinct. If we think of natural rights as rights you have in a state of nature — pre-political rights — then it looks to me that’s going to be a pretty meager set of rights.

REBECCA: I also think that you probably want to say that some of the rights you hold in the state of nature, you don’t hold in political society.

JOHN: Oh!

REBECCA: So, I think there’s a distinction between state-of-nature rights and natural rights.

JOHN: Okay, well, that’s very interesting, because —

REBECCA: So, if you take Locke, for instance. He thinks you have the right to punish in the state of nature, but he thinks that then you kind of — he says “forfeit”, I don’t like that — give that up to collectively work out matters of justice together. But also, there might just be — I’m sure you can think of some other thing that just doesn’t obtain. So, as soon as you get access to political justice — to things like a fair trial—then whatever way you’re supposed to morally determine those matters in the state of nature just don’t hold anymore.

JOHN: Yeah, that’s an interesting point, but — so, maybe there isn’t this straightforward move from ‘I have them in a state of nature’ to ‘I have them timelessly’. Although, he does, as you say, talk about forfeit. So in a sense, you’ve chosen to give them up, in some sense, in transitioning to civil society. But nonetheless, the point still holds, I think, that one is a conception of rights as the conditions under which one holds them, and they include these pre-political conditions. The other is about the methodology through which one discovers them.

REBECCA: Yes.

JOHN: Which is through ordinary reasoning. And I’ve had the view that natural rights in the second sense — discoverable by reason — are fundamentally what human rights are. And that’s how we should understand human rights law, as an attempt to legalise, insofar as is appropriate, background natural rights. Rights discoverable by reason as inhering in all human beings simply in virtue of their humanity.

But responsive to the fact that the rights we have in virtue of our humanity can change, as technological and other capacities alter over time. So I wouldn‘t want to say that the caveman has a right to in vitro fertilisation in order to procreate, but— or a right to internet access — but people today might have those rights.

REBECCA: I like to have this little space in my conception of rights for potential rights. So this is something like, rights that potentially hold for all humans in all places and times, but are conditional on there being certain access to certain things. So, if the cavemen — suddenly someone came along, and worked out about trials, and gave them that, then they’d have that right to a trial. It’s not because they’re cavemen living in that time that they don’t have the right to the trial. It’s just because — we come also back on to your nice point about feasibility here.

If suddenly there was some awful famine and food was very scarce, that might well change at least the scope and the content of some of our rights. Not because reasoning determined things differently, or was able to pick out things differently, or we were different kinds of things, or we had different needs. So, I think this potentiality thing — again, it’s metaphysical — it allows us to say that these are truths that obtain, but it has space for the feasibility complication.

JOHN: I guess I would strike a rare pragmatic note here, and say that these potentiality rights, they are potentially infinite, given the different sorts of circumstances that might crop up. Some of those circumstances are incredibly remote, like there’s no way the internet’s going to be invented during the lifetime of the caveman that we’re talking about. There’s no way that they’re going to have a right to a nationality, because suddenly the state has emerged in their environment.

So, they wouldn’t really be playing much of a practical role. So, there’d have to be some other kind of motivation for acknowledging them, over and above the fact that we’re interested in the moral reasons we may genuinely have cause to comply with.

REBECCA: I think I’m probably just going to come down on something like, we have these core capacities as the kind of creatures that we are. These tell us things about our needs. They tell us things about our interests. I feel, again, we can separate some of this stuff out at a different level.

But I just quickly want to get on to a couple of questions, to finish, about the kind of role of rights in the world. Can you have liberalism without a strong rights culture? What about democracy?

JOHN: Well, liberalism, I think, is a hard one. My understanding of liberalism is that it fundamentally prioritises, or gives great weight, to liberty as a political value. And that it has a certain kind of individualism at its core, that each individual matters, and they matter equally at some deep level.

There are clearly people in the liberal tradition who are of a utilitarian bent, who would not see rights as playing a fundamental role. They have much more of a downstream role. But I think Rawls was right that there is an important need within the individualistic characterisation of liberalism to capture the distinctive value of each person. And I think a very important way of cashing that out is through the notion of a right. And not simply a right that exists because it maximises utility or performs some other sort of aggregative social function but respects the status and interests of the right-holder. So, I can’t see really that liberalism can be a compelling doctrine without having a pretty central place for rights.

As for democracy — I think, I’m one of those people convinced by one of your previous guests, Josh Ober, that democracy is extremely important, but it’s not mere majoritarianism. That it is a form of collective self-government that necessarily involves a certain kind of schedule of rights. In particular, rights to various kinds of political participation. And also rights, I suspect, to certain kinds of socioeconomic provision, because I can’t really participate in democratic deliberation and decision-making, if I’m starving or worried about where my next meal is going to come from.

So I think there is a sort of almost definitional aspect to democracy that it must incorporate certain rights. But then there’s also the empirical point — people like Kathryn Sikkink and other important social scientists have argued — that the best way to fulfill rights generally is through a democratic system of government.

REBECCA: Yeah, I think one thing I’d say is, to me, there’s a very interesting question about what are the rights — you put it nicely, you said democracy must incorporate certain rights. That makes a lot of sense to me. I think there’s a separate matter, though, about the conditions that need to obtain for democracy to get off the ground. And I feel like respect for certain rights might be in that bucket, rather than within the definitional content of democracy.

And on the point around the central place of rights within liberalism. Yeah, I mean maybe I’m just being again a pragmatist, I don’t really want to rule out a load of those utilitarian liberals from within —

JOHN: Oh, no. That’s right.

REBECCA: I agree with you on that. I think liberalism is a family of theories, and I do think that there are some non-rights-focused theories. I just think that they have a much harder job in protecting that central thing, which is individual liberty or, indeed, other kinds of liberty.

JOHN: Yes.

REBECCA: I like your point about Rawls. It made me think — I read a book a while back, where somebody made this hilarious claim at the beginning, which was something like, “There has been much great thinking about rights over the history of mankind. But for about 200 years, nobody thought about rights until Robert Nozick came along!” And I was like, you do realise Nozick was writing in response to Rawls!? [laughter] And what is Rawls’ first principle — right? We need to have equal access to these basic goods — including what? Including rights!

Rawls is a really, really important rights thinker. I think people forget this. They jump straight on to the difference principle, and they forget that you don’t even get on to that unless you’ve already met the conditions of the previous two principles.

JOHN: Well, you know, that’s right. And I think we forget how dominant utilitarianism was, in political philosophy, prior to Rawls.

REBECCA: Totally.

JOHN: You know, there was sort of taken for granted utilitarianism. Or alternatively, there were other traditions, like the Catholic tradition, which didn’t necessarily also accord a very important role to rights.

REBECCA: And intuitionism, which is just very hard to know what it even is.

JOHN: Well, okay, we may have differences —

REBECCA: Unless you read W. D. Ross. He’s great.

JOHN: W. D. Ross is who I think about. [laughter] Yeah, I think he is great.

REBECCA: [laughter] He’s fine, but more broadly.

JOHN: Yeah, no, Ross is great. But I think there is this — when I wrote a commentary on the chapter in The Concept of Law, by Herbert Hart, that’s on justice and morality, Hart never mentions rights, really, as what the core of justice is. He sometimes comes close to it, talks about entitlements, etc. Then, of course, by the 1970s, he has this beautiful essay, Between Utility and Rights.

But all of that is really sparked by people like Rawls, and then others like Dworkin who follow in his wake, Nozick, etc. So, you know, Rawls’s achievement here is pretty spectacular, in that respect.

REBECCA: I love the Hart ‘is there only one natural right?’ essay. I know he went back on that.

JOHN: He repudiated it.

REBECCA: [laughter] He suddenly got into rights.

All right, so one final question. How come there are so many great Australian philosophers?

JOHN: Yes.

REBECCA: David Armstrong, J.J.C. Smart. Even today, probably the most influential philosopher in the world is Peter Singer. I don’t like his work, but I think he’s a important philosopher. I think he’s a good writer. It’s a small place with not that many people. You’ve had to bring people over from other places. What is it about Australia that — certainly in the 20th century — very, very good at doing philosophy?

JOHN: That’s right. Some people think philosopher and Australian are a contradiction in terms. [laughter] But in fact, you’re right. There is a very strong philosophical representation of Australians. And you’ve only mentioned some of them. John Finnis —

REBECCA: Yup.

JOHN: And, you know, Alan Donagan — there’s very serious people that have come out of Australia.

I haven’t really given this much thought, but one thing I would say is, as Aristotle says, in order to do philosophy, you need leisure. In order to have the leisure, you need wealth. Australia is a wealthy society. There was one point in, I think, the 19th century, Melbourne was the richest city in the world. So there are these material preconditions that people are able to engage in this kind of speculation — take a wider view — because they live in a wealthy society that affords them the leisure to do so.

But I think also there’s another aspect, which is of being on the other side of the planet from the countries that you look to as having the philosophical tradition. So maybe that spurs a kind of need to reappropriate those in your own terms, and try to engage with those fundamentals. Because you’re sort of, as it were, transplanting a culture to an entirely new environment. And that means you can’t, in the same way, take things for granted, as those who are actually living in those countries do.

I’m not sure, but I think that immigrant aspect of Australia —

REBECCA: Yes, I was going to say, I think there’s also a pluralism, a beneficial pluralism, that derives from immigration. Australia is an immigration nation. You see the same thing in America. Natural resources, not just — we can look into the history of wealth in Australia — but just things like good weather, great food.

JOHN: That’s right. And then we get to another issue, which is whether weather influences the content of one’s philosophical view. [laughter] So I remember Michael Devitt, another Australian philosopher, saying that Australians are realists, just like the ancient Greeks, because they’re in very sunny countries. Whereas in misty northern European countries, there’s a much bigger uptake of idealism. So that’s another question worth exploring. [laughter]

REBECCA: Well, to finish, I want to get back on to this point that we started about rights and perfect obligations, and decide whether that’s where we want to define it. But I would say another thing you and I agree on is great Australian wine. I should do a whole episode on the philosophical value of wine. And maybe some of these great philosophers benefited from some of those great Victorian wines.

But let’s finish with this point around perfect obligations. No, I see you want to say something about Australian wine!

JOHN: No, no, no, I think that’s a brilliant thought, actually! [laughter] Yes, I think that is another precondition, along with wealth, for excellent philosophy.

REBECCA: Aristotle, you know, had those great grapes from Naoussa, after all.

JOHN: That’s right. And I think he refers to one grape variety, Limnio, which still exists.

REBECCA: Yes, that’s right.

JOHN: That’s quite remarkable.

REBECCA: All right. So, you’re in the Australian wine bar, and someone says, “Hey, that’s that Tasioulas guy! I hear he writes about rights.” Now he’s already had a little bit of the wine. He’s not a philosopher. He wants a simple answer, so he can go back to his table of friends and show off. What do you tell him? What’s a right? What do you say to this Australian dude?

JOHN: Well, yes, one would have to probably modify the way one expresses this in the wine bar context. [laughter] Or probably, more accurately, pub context. But I think, you know, the notion we came to, a couple of minutes ago, about a status people possess that imposes obligations on others —

REBECCA: He’s already — he’s looking a little confused. Even simpler?

JOHN: Well —

REBECCA: How can we say status? Position?

JOHN: Well, there are certain ways you need to treat people —

REBECCA: Yeah.

JOHN: Otherwise, you’ll be wronging them.

REBECCA: Good!

JOHN: How about that? [laughter]

REBECCA: I like that! I think your friend is happy. He’s gone back to his table. He’s showing off. All is good. The sun is shining. John, thanks so much for joining me. This has been really fun, and I think we managed to get some — to get to the heart of the matter.

JOHN: It’s a great pleasure, Rebecca. Thank you so much.

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

1) This week, I spent quite a lot of time reading and thinking about Jane Austen. Mostly, though, I focused on Emma. One of the reasons I like this novel so much is because it stands as a serious warning against over-intervention. The peculiarly English pursuit of ‘being a busybody’ is, in particular, shown up as disrespectful and risky. Emma herself falls cleanly into the ‘busybody’ category.

Surely, however, it’s the Mr Knightleys of the world who should concern us more. Mr Knightley knows better! Mr Knightley only tells Emma off when she deserves it! The most powerful moment, to this end, comes near the end of the novel, in the following conversation between the two of them:

“Emma laughed, and replied: “But I had the assistance of all your endeavours to counteract the indulgence of other people. I doubt whether my own sense would have corrected me without it.”

“Do you? I have no doubt. Nature gave you understanding:— Miss Taylor gave you principles. You must have done well. My interference was quite as likely to do harm as good. It was very natural for you to say, what right has he to lecture me? — and I am afraid very natural for you to feel that it was done in a disagreeable manner. I do not believe I did you any good. The good was all to myself, by making you an object of the tenderest affection to me.”

So much for the benevolent interventionist!

2) On topic, I really enjoyed this site, where you can search the sheet music owned by the Austen family. If, for instance, you ever have a pressing desire to find out if or what Austen knew about Mozart, then it’s a nice place to start.

3) This new piece by is easily the best short article I’ve read on the contestable notion of a ‘liberal education’, and also on the very American ‘Great Books’ approach. Oliver wrote this piece for the Substack that and I run, so perhaps I’m biased. But it’s great.

I particularly liked the ‘they meet these conditions’ approach that Oliver takes to explicating the didactic value of the Great Books. Broadly he argues that, minimally, each Great Book provides novelty, practical insight, and challenge. I also liked his discussion of the importance of being challenged within education more generally:

“What’s crucial and crucially missing in much of modern schooling is the challenge inherent in a genuine liberal education. This challenge shouldn’t be a matter of “viewpoint diversity” or encountering perspectives that might offend one’s sensibilities, but rather a matter of raw difficulty. Our abilities can only be developed through very hard work.”

4) The other day, I returned to Nozick’s footnote on ‘catastrophic moral horror’. This is the brief moment in Anarchy, State, and Utopia where Nozick, the great anti-consequentialist, wonders whether rights could be permissibly violated in order to avoid such outcomes.1

I’ve read this footnote many times. I have many views about it. One of my views is that most people assume Nozick must be referring to scenarios which involve the deaths of many people. I think he probably is indeed referring to such scenarios: scenarios like ‘torture the guy or the world explodes’. But if we are to take rights as seriously as Nozick demands we do, then why turn to incidents involving large numbers of people? Is this Nozick going all aggregationist on us?

Isn’t, for example, any instance in which any human is tortured an instance of ‘catastrophic moral horror’?

5) I enjoyed this tweet about some physicists co-authoring a groundbreaking paper with GPT. I particularly liked the line about the physicists being “giddy with excitement for what might lay ahead”.

I’ve written here previously about how I assume I’ll always continue to care more about human poetry than AI poetry (even though I am interested in the latter). I’ve also written various times about how I never want AI to give me answers to the philosophical questions I’m working on.

But I also think that scientists — and anyone whose main aim is to get closer to truths about complex empirical problems — should be insanely excited about the ways in which AI can speed up their processes of experimentation and analysis.

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

1) On Substack this week, I really enjoyed Scott Alexander’s energetic tale of the Moltbots having a happy old time on Moltbook. Okay, I’m already on the record criticising this piece for its philosophically loose language use. I wrote:

“What can it possibly mean for something to make the Moltbots happy, if the Moltbots are not the kind of thing that has internal awareness? Okay, I’m reading extensive implicit claims into what Alexander is saying here, to come to this conclusion about his position! And again, there are important long-running philosophical debates about whether, for instance, dogs can be happy in the ordinary sense of the term.

But how could you be happy without being alive? Does Alexander really mean that the Moltbots are alive, when he describes them as “lifeforms”? That they are living things, in the sense that we ordinarily understand the term ‘living’? And even if he does believe this astonishing thing (!), then how could the Moltbots be happy without having any of the interiority that only phenomenologically conscious kinds of living things can have?

In other words, it’s hard not to come away from the Alexander extract thinking that Alexander is saying something like: ‘Hey, even if the Moltbots have no inner life, Moltbook makes them happy!’. Or less strongly: ‘Hey, I don’t need to get into discussing the “consciousness or moral worth” of the Moltbots, or whether or not they are able to “mean” anything they write, or anything like that, to be able to conclude that something can make them happy’.1

This is bizarre!”

But it’s a fun piece on a fun topic. A fun topic for now, at least.

Another piece I enjoyed on Substack this week was Michael Pakaluk’s reflection on Elizabeth Anscombe. Pakaluk’s focus ranges from Anscombe as a subject of boycott, to Anscombe on when the Virgin Mary became a zygote, to Anscombe as a rigorous respondent:

“At this Anscombe bristled and treated him harshly. What do you mean that there is a deterministic chain? Have I asserted this? “No, but of course there is.” On what basis do you assert such determinism? “Each stage or phase follows upon the other by laws which are deterministic. This is obvious. You can find it in any textbook of human embryology.” Name me the textbook you have in mind which says this.”

A third piece I enjoyed on Substack this week was my Mercatus colleague Patterson Beaman’s discussion of the Counter-Strike 2 skin market. “The what market?”, you ask, concerned! Don’t worry. The skins in question are just “cosmetic modifications to weapon aesthetics in one of the world’s most popular competitive first-person shooter games”. Though it turns out that trading these skins is a serious business. I have zero interest in online shooter games, but I like the way Patterson uses his analysis of this multi-billion-dollar digital market to provide explainers on broader matters of pricing.

2) I’ve written here before about how I sometimes strongly agree with Peter Singer’s conclusions, even though I think he’s guilty of propagating bad moral theory on a grand scale. So I agree, for instance, with Singer that industrial factory farming is abhorrent. But I do so without needing to give an inch to his consequentialist reasoning. Indeed, I agree with Singer’s conclusion that industrial factory farming is abhorrent, confident in my view that his consequentialist reasoning has no more capacity to respect the rights of animals than it has to respect the rights of humans.

Singer’s most recent Project Syndicate piece, When Misinformation Kills, doesn’t really bring us into the realm of debating moral theory, however. It’s a pretty basic discussion of the clear-cut danger of spreading bad information about vaccines. As Singer tells us, vaccines are “among the most extensively tested medical interventions in history”. And as he discusses, vaccines save countless people from easily avoidable pain and death, every year.

A deeper question that Singer’s piece provokes, however, is how we should respond to the fallibility of scientific enquiry. Singer contends that:

“In a free society, individuals may express their unfounded opinions about vaccines, knowledgeable scientists can rebut them, and public-health officials should examine the evidence and act accordingly. In rare cases, views opposed to a scientific consensus will turn out to be true and become a new orthodoxy.”

Except, of course, when we look across human history, it’s not just rare cases, is it? Many of the longest-held and strongest-held scientific consensuses have fallen across the years. An easy way that Singer could’ve bolstered his argument, therefore, would’ve been to emphasise that, at least in modern times, humans keep on getting better at science. Another, more important point he might have noted — something that consequentialists often seem to forget — is that there’s a crucial difference between strength of consensus and strength of argument.

3) One of the best pieces of science writing I’ve read recently was Will Guisbond’s report on the horrific collision that took place last year between a commercial jet and a military helicopter in the sky above the Potomac. Guisbond carefully, and largely non-sensationally, advances his case that the incident “was the predictable outcome of a deteriorating system that had been flashing warning signs for years”. Such tragedies can be hard to think about, but well-argued readable analysis pieces like Guisbond’s sometimes prove essential to holding lax actors to account.

4) Perhaps the best poem I read this week was this (below) astonishing T.S. Eliot reflection on the state in which I live. I also just started reading The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath — so far, this mostly consists in reflections on her dates with a series of very American college boys. Maybe I’ll write about it next week.

5) A few days ago, I finished watching the first series of Severance. As with Pluribus, I initially gave up on this show about 30 minutes into the opening episode, only to return to it months later and persevere.

Overall, I found Severance more philosophically interesting and coherent. And, although much of Pluribus was pretty compelling, I thought it really flagged towards the end. Whereas the final Severance episode was so tight and tense I almost couldn’t watch. The ticking in the background!

These shows have largely been wrecked for me by Solvej Balle, however. The world Balle creates in her On The Calculation of Volume novels — with its similarly central philosophical puzzle, and its similarly central set of isolated main characters — is just so much more complex, yet so much better cashed out.

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

1) Today, I reread the great G.A. Cohen article Are disadvantaged workers who take hazardous jobs forced to take hazardous jobs?.1 Every time I read this article, I get more from it. It is perhaps my favourite thing that Cohen wrote, even though he clearly should’ve saved the disjointed end section for another day. And even though I can think of good objections to many of the arguments about freedom he makes in this article, I’m convinced that they are arguments that all philosophers interested in freedom should engage with.

The big argument at the heart of the article runs like this:

“If you are forced to do A, you do A. But, if you do A, you are free to do A: you cannot do what you are not free to do. So, if you are forced to do A, you are free to do A.”

Cohen attempts to refine this argument in various ways, some of which don’t help. For instance, I think his conception of choice becomes whittled away. But there’s a lot to be taken from his claim that this argument — or something quite like it — brings together the “leftists” who are keen to focus on how disadvantaged workers are ‘forced’ to take on hazardous jobs, and the “rightists” who are keen to focus on how such workers are ‘exercising their freedom’ to take on such jobs. It is wrong to assume, as most people do, that these positions are contradictory, Cohen tells us — just read the big argument, and see!

There are so many other things to take from this paper, however. Today, I particularly enjoyed the opening section, in which Cohen sticks up for the value of ordinary language philosophy. The value of this kind of philosophy imbues the article. It’s why its arguments are so clear and beautiful to me, even when I think their substance is wrong. Even when I think their substance is crazy!

Cohen’s substance got less crazy, over his lifetime. Particularly significant to this were his early gradual turn away from core Marxist commitments and his later acceptance of the practical limitations of socialism. Think about how, in Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995), he says Marxists should think hard about why they’ve been ignoring the importance of equality. Think about how, in Why Not Socialism? (2009), he can’t bring himself to dismiss standard feasibility objections.

At his best, Cohen is the paradigmatic analytic political philosopher — committed, above all, to applying methodological rigour to the search for the truth, no matter the costs to his long-held beliefs.

2) As someone living through a snowmageddon who’s interested in space, I’ve been enjoying reading about the role satellites play in weather forecasting. Weather Forecasting Satellites — Past, Present, & Future (2025) provides a useful overview of the development of the field since the 1960s. Etai Nardi and his co-authors afford great emphasis to the importance of building weather observation systems that can collect, analyse, and report ‘near real time’ information.

The success of such systems remains limited, we learn, by ‘satellite revisit rates’ — i.e., how often a satellite can monitor a specific location. Yet thankfully, it seems that technological development (including AI, which is given less prominence in this paper than you might expect), in combination with the bulked capacities of new multi-national collaborations, make improvements likely soon.

“Ultimately”, the paper concludes, “the driving force behind these technological achievements remains clear: to safeguard human life by improving our ability to predict, monitor, and respond to increasingly complex weather and climate phenomena”. This is even though its authors have just told us about the ongoing role of military incentives!

I’ve written before about the significance of the role military spending plays in space progress:

“the Space Foundation (2024) has 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. And Euroconsult, which published similar figures, claims that 2023 was the first year in which more was spent on these military budgets (which it calculates at $58 billion, and describes as “defence expenditures”) than on civil programmes (Euroconsult, 2023).”

3) On topic, other things I’ve been enjoying reading this week include Orson Scott Card’s American sci-fi classic, Ender’s Game (1985). It’s the story of Ender, a young boy sent up into space to train to be a war hero. I might write about this novel in more detail some other time. But one question that keeps arising is whether Ender is being trained to provide defence against the Earth’s potential aggressors, or to win power against his nation’s supposed Earthly allies…

4) My current favourite space photography book is Infinite Worlds by my friend Michael Soluri. It’s full of astonishing behind the scenes NASA shots, ranging from astronauts practising under water, to rockets ready to blast into the sky. I think my favourites, however, are the close-up portraits of tools on white backgrounds: the bright blue of the high torque connector that’s been used inside the Hubble telescope; the delicacy of the metallic mini power drill employed on EVAs. Everything here is art.

5) At the weekend, I watched Devil’s Playground (2002), a documentary about rumspringa. Rumspringa is a period of time in a young Amish person’s life, starting around age sixteen, when they try out other ways of living, to help them decide whether or not to commit to the Amish church for the rest of their life.

If we take the documentary at face value, then these ‘other ways of living’ entirely cohere around cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, sex, and — seemingly just for the boys — cars and ‘English’ clothes. ‘English’ is the term the teenagers in the film use for non-Amish people, but it seems particularly to track the everyday trends of the modern West.

Now, perhaps some Amish teenagers try out other ways of living aside from partying hard — perhaps they experiment with options like returning to school (having generally left around age 14), working for non-Amish employers, and experimenting with other religions. But the partying option is clearly attractive both to the teenagers, and to the wider Amish community, as a ‘getting it out of their system’ experience.

For some of the documentary’s subjects, this proves really hard. Faron, a compelling central figure, struggles with meth addiction. He also can’t seem to move beyond his dependency on the Amish network, no matter what he’s doing or where he goes.

Velda, however, finally manages to go it alone. She’d also partied hard during her rumspringa years — largely, she tells us, to try to overcome depression and suicidal thoughts. Valuable support was available to her as an in-patient at a psychiatric hospital, but her parents made her come home. By the end of the documentary, however, Velda has built a life for herself, working as a receptionist and planning for her future: “When I was a young Amish girl, I never dreamt that I would have a career”.

The best moment of the film is when we witness her delighted amazement at gaining a place at college.

Thanks to GPT for the satellites picture.

I’m delighted that we’ve just posted the job advert for the second cohort of Mercatus Emerging Scholars. Emerging Scholars is a program I direct, alongside my philosophy work at Mercatus. We appointed the first cohort in September, and they’re brilliant.

So if you’re brilliant, then think about applying. And if you know someone who’s brilliant, then tell them about this opportunity, so they can think about applying, too.

The job advert gives all the information you should need. The application process is very simple, and is now open on a rolling basis. But here are a few quick notes.

What is an Emerging Scholar?

Emerging Scholar is a Research Fellow position at Mercatus. It’s a full-time two-year job, based at Mercatus’s Arlington offices. It’s an opportunity to be fully immersed in our exciting interdisciplinary intellectual community.

Who counts as emerging? Who counts as a scholar?

‘Emerging’ is construed broadly, as is ‘scholar’. Again, see the job advert for details, or simply make a convincing argument in your application that you are both emerging and a scholar.

What’s the most important thing applicants should know?

Here are some necessary conditions that all successful candidates will meet:

• Super-smart

• Openly and provably committed to classical liberalism, and ambitious about furthering its ends publicly

• Ready to do rigorous work on some particular set of research questions, and keen to share that work widely

The further questions philosophers might ask include, “Are you more of a liberal type of egalitarian or a socialist?”, and “What relevance do you afford to luck?”. Whereas, if there’s an economist in the room, then they might start off with something more like, “Do you mean income equality, wealth equality, or consumption equality?”. No matter what, however, there’s bound to be someone nearby who’s keen to hold forth on the over-done difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.

A standard view, therefore, seems to be that ‘equality’ pertains to many different things. That there are, in other words, many matters of equality. In this piece, I’m going to consider what it might be — if anything — that neatly ties together all these matters. And I’m going to consider this in order to help me to advance an argument about what equality is.

Tim Scanlon tells us that egalitarian reasons are “reasons for objecting to the difference between what some have and what others have, and for reducing this difference”.1 This seems like a useful starting point for my inquiry. That is, mightn’t all the different matters of equality pertain to reducing differences between the things that different people have?2 I’m going to make five responses to this idea.

1) The significance of sameness

First, we can’t be talking about any old reduction here, can we? That is, if we were to accept that all matters of equality were to do with ‘reducing differences’, then we’d have to ask how far these differences needed to be reduced. This is mainly because ‘reducing differences’ is not the same as making things equal. I mean, you can clearly make things ‘more equal’ — in the sense of making them ‘closer to equal’ — without equalising them!

Okay, implying that ‘equality’ is about ‘equalising’ does seem a little bit like cheating. But I’m going to bite the bullet and accept from the off that ‘equality’ is related to the term ‘equal’ in the sense of having some kind of focus on ‘sameness’. I’ll discuss below the kind of focus on sameness that I think is particularly significant. But for now, I’m happy to go with the general relevance to equality of ‘sameness’ over the relevance to equality of ‘a reduction in difference’.

I’m not going to accept, however, that equality is necessarily about equalising. This is mainly because, as with reducing, ‘equalising’ implies action — even intervention. Whereas, it seems clear that there are at least some matters of equality that pertain only to the first part of Scanlon’s claim. Some matters of equality, that is, pertain only to “the difference between what some have and what others have”, and not to the reducing (or equalising) of these differences. Most obviously, this is because some matters of equality are descriptive matters. I mean, we surely don’t want to rule out, per se, the relevance of equality to descriptive matters like “Jane is richer than Jenny”, or “People in Malawi have worse access to legal representation than people in America”.

Beyond that, however, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. What I mean by this is that it wouldn’t help us, over all, if the answer we gave to the question ‘what ties together all of the matters of equality?’ were, in itself, to include an answer to the downstream question of ‘how should we address inequality?’. Minimally, this would confuse things. But also it really isn’t necessary!

Rather, we can simply conclude that matters of equality all pertain to some kind of ‘sameness’ obtaining, without baking into this conclusion any additional commitments around how to go about making non-same things the same, or which kinds of non-same things should get this treatment! After all, my goal here is to work out what equality is, not when and how we should try to bring it about.3

2) The significance of morally-relevant sameness

But what kind of ‘sameness’ are we talking about? Here, I want to introduce the idea of ‘thinner’ matters of sameness, and ‘thicker’ ones. An example of a ‘thinner’ matter of sameness would be two people having the same height. Whereas, an example of a ‘thicker’ matter of sameness would be two citizens having the same legal right to political participation. What makes the second matter ‘thicker’ here is that it is more morally imbued — that there is a clear ‘should-ness’ element in play. In other words, if we discover that the two citizens do not have the same legal right to political participation, then we should clearly ask, well, should they?

We should consider the reasons, that is, why these two citizens don’t have the same legal right to political participation — in order to conclude whether something morally wrong is going on. If one of the two is a baby and the other is an adult, for instance, then we won’t have much cause for concern!

Whereas, in almost all instances, we simply won’t get on to these ‘should’ questions when we’re considering the fact that two people are of different heights. Exceptions here, of course, would include an instance in which the two people in question had lived their lives under a political regime that limited certain children’s access to food. But the reason this instance would be an exception is that the information about childhood access to food opens up the possibility that one of the two is shorter owing, at least in part, to having suffered morally-wrong behaviour.

The point I’m working towards, therefore, is that we tend to reserve the term ‘equality’ for instances of sameness that have some moral valence. I mean, even though we talk ordinarily of the four sides of a square as having equal length, it would be really odd to bring the term ‘equality’ into such a discussion!

This doesn’t mean, however, that we should exclude all naturally occurring samenesses and differences from considerations of equality. As implied above, for instance, many philosophers are interested in the moral relevance of luck. And even if you end up concluding that luck is never morally relevant, you will likely still think that the question itself is morally relevant — in a way you likely wouldn’t think about the question of whether the equal length of the four sides of a square is morally relevant!

Why is this, however? The best explanation I can offer is that matters of human equality all hinge on the moral relevance of certain basic samenesses that are shared by all human beings. These samenesses tie us together as instances of the same kind of thing — samenesses, for instance, that relate to our shared capacities, such as agency and consciousness; and samenesses that relate to our shared needs, such as sustenance and shelter. To this end, these samenesses play an essential role in shaping the content of the human good. They also underpin an especially fundamental matter of human equality: the equality of moral status.

As I wrote recently on the Pursuit of Liberalism:

“By ‘equality of moral status’, I’m referring to two foundational liberal ideas. First, the idea that all human beings, regardless of circumstance, share a fundamental equal status, as a matter of moral truth. This kind of equality is grounded in features particular to being human, including the capacity for free agency.

Second is the idea that there’s a different but overlapping basic moral status held by all members of a legitimate political society. This second idea depends on the first, but comes with additional demands to behave towards each other in certain ways. It overlaps with the discussions of ‘relational equality’ you can find in the work of Elizabeth Anderson.”

One way of looking at all this, therefore, is to conclude that this especially fundamental way of being the same forces us to question the moral relevance of all other differences between us.4

3) Should we allow some space for ‘being’ as well as ‘having’?

I now want to turn to Scanlon’s focus on ‘having’. That is, Scanlon talks about the “difference between what some have and what others have”. Yet some matters of equality seem to fit outside of this. Matters of equal status, for instance, seem to be more about ‘being’ than ‘having’. Sure, you can say things like, “We have equal status”, but this seems like a locution-type solution to the problem. This is because what we’re really talking about when we talk about ‘equal moral status’ is the way each of us ‘is’, rather than the things each of us ‘has’.

Okay, if we’re tying ‘equal moral status’ to the sameness of things like capacities and needs, then again we do typically say that we ‘have’ such things. Nonetheless, Scanlon’s talk of “the difference between what some have and what others have” seems to me best suited to ‘having’ the kinds of things that aren’t inherent to being human. These are things like apples rather than minds, and things like skills rather than fundamental capacities. They are the kinds of things, in other words, that we come to possess, rather than the constitutive features that tie us together.

Again, this is bolstered by Scanlon’s additional focus on “reducing the differences”. This is because a focus on difference reduction applies most cleanly to the kinds of ownable things that are switchable between owners. I mean, you can’t ‘reduce the difference’ between a person’s capacity for free agency and a rock’s lack of such a capacity! Even though, of course, you can ‘level down’ two people’s opportunity to exercise such a capacity by knocking both of them unconscious.

4) It’s not always about pie!

The relevance of ‘having’ brings us to the question of shares or portions. That is, people often talk about equality in terms of ‘slices of the pie’. And, whether or not you acknowledge the valuable option of ‘increasing the pie’, all this talk of pies implies that matters of equality are to do with having some part of a larger set. Whereas, it seems clear that some of the most significant kinds of things that humans ‘hold equally’ are not shares of larger sets. These things include equal freedoms and equal moral rights, as well as equal moral status.

Equal moral status is the most straight-forward of these examples. I mean, what possible work could a pie metaphor do in explaining how or why each of us holds this kind of status, equally? There is no pie required here!

But I also want to emphasise that you and I hold certain moral rights ‘equally’ simply in the sense that these are the kinds of moral rights that all human beings hold. The right not to be tortured, for instance, is one of these rights. There are certain freedoms we all hold in this way, too. And, while equal rights and equal freedoms are multiple, and therefore countable in a way in which equal moral status is not, we don’t hold these things ‘equally’ in the sense that we each have some determinable portion of some particular larger whole. It simply doesn’t come down to an ‘amount’ in this sense! There is no pie, in other words, to determine the ‘size’ or any otherwise quantifiable extent of each of our equally-held rights and freedoms.

5) Comparisons between any numbers of group members

Finally, I want to note that Scanlon’s reference to “some and others” seems overly confining. That is, he talks of “the difference between what some have and what others have” — and yes, equality is clearly a comparative matter. Indeed, I’m happy to accept that all matters of equality involve evaluations across groups. As discussed above, these groups can be as big as the whole of humankind! But we surely have to include instances in which there is only one group member on one or both sides of the equation!

So, what is equality?

I’ve already concluded that equality has to do with morally-relevant sameness. But what kind of a thing is equality? When, for instance, I’ve thought about freedom in a similarly analytical kind of way, I’ve concluded that I’m broadly happy to think that ‘being free’, in its most fundamental sense, is ‘being able to do things of your own accord’. We can take this as meaning, therefore, that I’ve concluded that freedom, at heart, is a capacity.

But it would seem very odd — generally, and in the context of what I’ve argued here today — to conclude that equality is a capacity! Rather, it seems to me as if equality, in the sense of the morally-relevant thing that obtains in particular instances, is a state of affairs. Therefore, I’m happy to conclude, for now, that equality is a state of affairs of morally-relevant sameness between group members.

In this context, instances of inequality are instances in which equality doesn’t obtain: states of affairs of morally-relevant non-sameness. And, in this context, all possible matters of equality can be assessed and addressed from the starting point of asking the following two questions: 1) what is the sameness or non-sameness that obtains between the group members in question? 2) is this a morally-relevant instance of sameness or non-sameness?

Then, and only then, can we turn to the hard work of determining whether any particular morally-relevant non-sameness that we’ve identified — any particular inequality, that is — is the kind of thing that can and should be intervened upon.

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

1) On Friday, I read some of Tim Scanlon’s Why Does Inequality Matter? (2018). I always enjoy reading Scanlon, not least because he’s such a clear writer. But I was reading this particular Scanlon book because I’m currently writing a piece entitled ‘what is equality?’, ahead of recording an episode of my Working Definition podcast in which my friend Teresa Bejan and I will address this question.

While I’m working out what I think about a particular philosophical topic, I tend to avoid reading other philosophers’ related writing. As I’ve written about here before — albeit in relation to my practices around using AI — working these things out for myself matters a great deal to me. But I’ve already thought and written and read lots about equality, and Scanlon makes some useful distinctions I want to discuss in my piece.

That said, for the most part, this book is quite light on the things I’m most interested in. In particular, Scanlon says near the start that:

“One important idea of equality that I will presuppose but not argue for is what might be called basic moral equality—the idea that everyone counts morally, regardless of differences such as their race, their gender, and where they live”.

I’ll probably refer to this statement in my piece, since I’m planning to argue that any serious inquiry into equality (or inequality or egalitarianism!) requires a proper account of what Scanlon gestures at as ‘basic moral equality’. This is because, on my liberal kind of approach anyway, such a thing bears extremely heavily on most moral questions, never mind most moral questions about the varying distributional matters that philosophers tend to group under concerns of equality.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Scanlon ignores basic moral equality in this book — and indeed, I didn’t read all of it! But I strongly believe that simply presupposing such a thing is almost always costly when it comes to making other equality-focused arguments.

I also wasn’t convinced by a crucial argument Scanlon makes, early on, to defend his focus in this book on six specific objections to inequality. These objections are the following: that inequality leads to (1) humiliating status differences, (2) unacceptable kinds of power use, (3) damage to economic opportunity, and (4) unfair influence on political institutions. And that inequality stems from (5) the violation of the principle of ‘equal concern’, and (6) unfairnesses within economic institutions. The argument that didn’t convince me about the joint significance of this particular set of objections can be found in the following extract:

“There may be other reasons for favoring equality, or for objecting to inequality, that I have not listed. I will focus on the objections I have listed because they seem to me important, but especially because there are interesting normative questions about the values that underlie them. Not all objections to inequality raise such questions. For example, as I mentioned earlier, inequality may be objectionable because it causes ill-health. It might also be argued that greater equality is desirable because inequality leads to social instability, or because equality contributes to economic efficiency by fostering a greater sense of solidarity and willingness to work hard for the common good. If the empirical assumptions underlying such claims are correct, then these are good reasons for regarding inequality as a bad thing. I am not discussing these reasons, however, because there seems to me nothing puzzling about the values that they appeal to. There is no question, for example, about whether ill health is bad. So the questions of whether these objections apply are purely empirical.”

But on this reasoning, then aren’t most — if not all — of Scanlon’s six objections also “good reasons for regarding inequality as a bad thing”? Isn’t there also “no question” about whether humiliation and unfairness are bad? Aren’t there questions about what kinds of “social instability” are justifiable? And about what kinds of ways of “fostering a greater sense of solidarity” are morally concerning? Now, I’m sure Scanlon goes on to make much stronger arguments about these matters elsewhere in the book, but I didn’t just buy this reasoning at all.

2) Gregory Dreicer’s American Bridge (2026) has a beautiful front cover. Indeed, if front covers are what count, then it might be the most beautiful book I own. There are also some great pictures — photos, diagrams, posters, more — inside this book. And on the rare occasions that Dreicer drags himself away from over-theorising and on to the technical bridge stuff, it’s a pretty good read.

Mostly, however, this is a book of over-claims, padding, grating metaphors (such-and-such “may allow us to change the story and build new bridges to the future” etc etc), and confused attempts at philosophical inquiry. There’s a particularly tortured bit where Dreicer sort of tries to distinguish lattices from tubes — which, to be fair, is at least one of the bits about bridges per se.

As it happens, I have sympathy for Dreicer’s biggest non-bridge point: that expanding evolutionary theory to try to explain societal development risks undercutting the relevance of human agency.1 But his argumentation skills aren’t strong enough to make this point compellingly, and it gets lost amongst all the other moaning — plus, I really really just wanted to read about bridges! Again, however, the pictures are great.

3) This week, I enjoyed reading Second Acts and Semiquincentennials — a new Substack piece by my friend and Mercatus colleague, Eileen Norcross. It’s a tightly written tribute to her aunt and uncle, who turned together towards travel in the latter half of their lives:

“My uncle launched his second act first. After two decades as an FBI Agent and upon his retirement from the Navy (captain), he started his own company as private investigator and security consultant.

[…]

My aunt loved to travel.

My uncle loved to fly planes, and to fly on them.

When the time was right they combined these interests. At a desk in the guest room my aunt followed suit starting her second act as a travel agent.”

I particularly like how Eileen shows us ways in which individualism and the common good are inherently bound up. How, for instance, the extensive realisation of a person's valuable talents and interests typically depends on cultural conditions and community support, as well as individual drive and commitment. And how the realisation of those kinds of talents and interests is good not only for individuals, but also — indeed as part of that! — for the groups of which they are members, including romantic partnerships.

I also enjoyed the bits about penguins.

4) This week, I also valued reading this Time piece, co-authored by my friend Pip Webb — a leading expert in international law — about the unrealised value of using AI to provide much-needed legal aid, across the world. Early on, a World Justice Project statistic is cited, telling us that “only about 10% of people reach a lawyer when they need one”.

Throughout, Pip discusses the work she’s been doing at Oxford, in collaboration with various organisations, to develop AI legal assistants and advisors. She explains how these tools can offer interactive multi-language support to people lacking access to necessary legal information and representation — including help for journalists under threat, and services to increase the efficiency and knowledge of lawyers and judges.

The piece begins with the following example:

“In Malawi, one in three women is a victim of violence. Almost one in ten girls is forced into marriage before turning 15. But fewer than 800 lawyers serve the population of 22 million. What chance does a girl in a rural village have of finding legal help—let alone affording it?”

I’m fully convinced that AI ventures like Pip’s will change the world.

5) A few days ago, I went to see Resurrection. I don’t know enough about Chinese cinema to know how revolutionary this film is. And my aphantasia puts me at a serious disadvantage when watching anything in which you’re supposed to realise that multiple characters are being played by the same actor (here multiply!).

It was all totally visually compelling, however — particularly the red-tinted 1999 section, which was my favourite section generally, although I think each of the five main sections works well individually, and in combination. If I had to guess what the whole thing is supposed to be ‘about’, then I suppose I’d go for either the distinction between need and obsession, or a Chinese political commitment to long-term cultural dominance.

But perhaps it’s just about a couple of guys fighting over a box.

This is the fifty-fifth in a weekly series. It’s a little later than usual, owing to travel, illness, and various other factors. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.

1) On Tuesday, I published a piece about how Solvej Balle interacts with the philosophy of time in her On the Calculation of Volume novels. While writing my Balle piece, I reread two of my favourite philosophy of time papers, both classics. The first of these is J.M.E. McTaggart’s The Unreality of Time (1908). As I discussed in my Balle piece, it’s in this paper that McTaggart introduces his influential ‘A series and B series’ framing:

“These two series offer us different ways of thinking about when events happen. McTaggart picks holes in both series, but many philosophers identify as either A or B! If you’re an A series person, then you think of events as happening in the past, or the present, or the future. Whereas, if you’re a B series person, you think of events as happening in relation to one another — in the sense, for instance, that some particular event happened “earlier than” some other event, but “later than” another one.

One thing to note about this second view, therefore, is that these “earlier than” and “later than” kinds of relations always hold. That is, no matter what else is going on, and no matter what time it is, Julius Caesar was always killed earlier than Franz Ferdinand was killed. Events on the B series have a fixedness, therefore. Whereas, when you think about events in the context of the A series, they have a non-fixedness. That is, the killing of Julius Caesar switched from being in the future to being in the present, and it also switched from being in the present to being in the past.”

This distinction serves largely as a means to an end for McTaggart in this paper, however — although it’s clearly a useful and interesting distinction, in itself.

Rather, McTaggart’s main aim here is to persuade us that time is not real. He uses the A series, in particular, to help him in this. Indeed, the central argument of this paper hinges on the following two A-series-claims being true: 1) that time depends on the A series; and 2) that the A series cannot exist in reality. McTaggart pretty much asserts the first of these claims from near the beginning of the paper, although he does then attempt to back this up. He also spends valuable time making it clear that the A series is an ordered series — that is, that its events can only shift ‘stages’ in one direction, from future to past.

The really crucial part of the paper, however, is where McTaggart tries to persuade us about the second A-series-claim: that the A series cannot exist in reality. His core argument here depends on the idea that “the characteristics of the A series are mutually incompatible and yet all true of every term”, and that this means that the A series cannot be “applied to reality” without a contradiction arising.

A contradiction arises, McTaggart tells us, because whether we take the elements of the A series to be relations or qualities, a single event cannot take place in the future, in the past, and in the present, unless we assume that time exists. This is because, as McTaggart sees it, all events have to be able to be in all three stages (questionable, but okay!), yet this cannot be the case without either each event being in all three simultaneously (self-defeating!), or without presupposing the existence of time (bad!), so we become stuck in a vicious circle.

McTaggart addresses some obvious objections to this conclusion, not least the objection that perhaps time is “ultimate”. Perhaps that is, time is the kind of thing — like truth and goodness, he analogises — that cannot be explained without reference to itself. In other words, perhaps time is the kind of thing that does not ‘reduce’. Well, to conclude this would be to make a false equivalence, McTaggart parries, because it’s not that the A series “does not admit of a valid explanation”, but rather that it cannot be “applied to reality” without a contradiction! Now, I think it’s quite unhelpful that he keeps focusing on the contradiction, rather than the vicious circle, which is where the real pressure lies. But this point about the difference between being explicable and being able to exist is another useful and interesting offering from McTaggart.

My favourite thing about this paper, however, is the introduction of the C series (!) The C series is a non-temporal ordering of events. What I mean by this is that the events that form the elements of a C series are in a set order, but that time plays no role either in the elements’ placing within the order, or in the directionality of the order. Here, McTaggart gives us the lovely (aptly letter-based!) analogy of the alphabet.

He goes on to use the C series within various arguments before telling us, almost offhand and at the very end of the paper, that while he has concluded that the A series (and also the B series, which I haven’t had time to get into here) do not “really exist”, he thinks it’s “probable” that the C series does. He offers a few quick glimpses of what such a thing might mean, before leaving us totally hanging. Here, he throws us the fantastic line that “on the solution of these questions it may be that our hopes and fears for the universe depend for their confirmation or rejection”!

2) The other classic philosophy of time paper I reread this week is Time Without Change by Sydney Shoemaker (1969). This is a paper about the relation between time and change. As I discussed in my Balle piece, there’s a big philosophical debate about this relation, in which the two main positions are called substantivalism and relationism:

“First, some people think that time is independent from change. On this view, time can be thought of as a container. That is, people who hold this view tell us that even if events stopped unfolding — if, instead, somehow everything in the world ‘froze’ — then time would nonetheless continue. The container wouldn’t go away! It could have frozen contents, and it could have no contents, and it would nonetheless persist. This view is called substantivalism, because its proponents typically think of time as a substance. Isaac Newton was one of them.

Some other people think, however, that there cannot be time without change. On this second view, if the kind of ‘freeze’ took place that meant events stopped unfolding, then time would also be frozen.⁸ This view is called relationism, because on this view, time is reduced to relations between events, or between things and events. So on this view, there is no container. There are just the things that, on the container view, are the container’s contents! Leibniz held this view.”1

Shoemaker’s main aim in this paper is to persuade us that “changeless intervals” are conceivable. In other words, to persuade us that it’s reasonable to believe that such things are logically possible (as opposed to physically possible under our actual laws of physics!). Of course, if Shoemaker is right about the possibility of changeless intervals, then this has big implications for relationism, which he presents as the standard view. Here, he refers to David Hume’s claim that “’tis impossible to conceive ... a time when there was no succession or change in any real existence”.

In this context, Shoemaker sets about creating a wonderful world of ‘local freezes’. That is, he gets us to imagine a universe in which events could stop unfolding in certain discrete areas, while time ‘ticked on’ elsewhere. He describes what goes on “during” (!) these local freezes quite beautifully, telling us that:

“it is impossible for people from other regions to pass into the region where the freeze exists, but when inhabitants of other regions enter it immediately following the end of a freeze they find that everything is as it would have been if the period of the freeze had not occurred. Eggs laid just prior to the beginning of a freeze lasting a year are found to be perfectly fresh; a glass of beer drawn just prior to the beginning of the freeze still has its head of foam, and so forth. And this remains so even when they make the finest measurements, and the most sophisticated tests, available to them; even radioactive decay, if such exists in this world, is found to be completely arrested during the period of a local freeze.”

The main argument that Shoemaker advances in this paper depends, however, on a whole load of further ‘truths’ about these local freezes — details, that is, about their regularity, their duration, and even the “sluggish” behaviour by which we can identify their soon-to-be-frozen inhabitants! Shoemaker tells us that if we knew about all these things, then we could work out when a ‘general freeze’ would take place. And a general freeze would be a freeze in which, unlike the local freezes, time would not continue to ‘tick on’ anywhere!

Shoemaker addresses various objections against using his local-to-general-freeze argument to cut away at the prevalence of relationism. He also tells us important and interesting things about ‘McTaggartian changes’ (or ‘Cambridge changes’, as these kinds of changes later, broadly, became known.) Now, I love all of this stuff, and I don’t buy relationism, and there are few papers I enjoy reading more than this one. But I’m afraid I find its central substance simply too much like science fiction to be philosophically convincing.

3) I started reading Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures (2025) a couple of months ago, but I struggled to get past the first chapter. It all just seemed so much more ‘on the nose’ than Taylor’s previous two novels, which I’d really loved. The Late Americans, in particular, I was fully convinced was one of the best novels of the past decade. Yet this new novel felt so self-conscious! It felt as if Taylor was trying really hard to write a Great Novel about Art.

I’m extremely glad that I came back to it and persisted, however, because by a third of the way through, I came to believe that Taylor had indeed written a Great Novel — even if it was a Great Novel about a romantic relationship, rather than a Great Novel about Art. By the end, however, I came to accept that it was indeed, at least in parts, a Great Novel about Art.

Okay, I stand by my view on its opening chapter. And I also stand by my view that Taylor’s greatest strength, in this novel and elsewhere, is writing about romantic relationships. Many kinds of relationships, actually! It helps here that he’s astonishingly good at writing conversations. I’m not sure I can think of anyone better at this — anyone who’s writing today, anyway. But this new novel also shows how great Taylor is at writing about the city, something that wasn’t so clear from the previous novels, which were largely (beautifully!) set in the country and in the town.

I’m afraid I feel compelled to finish by saying that I found the explicitly ‘political’ moments of this new novel jarring and cliched: the occasional worthy monologues on topics like consumerism and homelessness. But the implicit stuff — including stuff on both of those topics — is really wonderful. And the art that ‘happens’ in Minor Black Figures is fully convincing. At its best, this is the best new novel I’ve read in decades.

4) Last spring, I wrote about Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). Every time I come back to this collection, which is often these days, I’m taken away by its sense of modernity. This week, Whitman’s use of a “subtle electric fire” as a metaphor for love made me look up when electric fires were invented!2

5) I wrote most of this post on a flight from Palermo, where I saw many great things this week. I won’t easily forget the shocking brightness of Serpotta’s stucco at the Oratorio di San Lorenzo.

Thanks to GPT for the amusing pictures of McTaggart and Shoemaker.

The best three novels I read in 2025 were the first three novels of Solvej Balle’s seven-volume On the Calculation of Volume series. I read these three novels straight-through, the day I got hold of each of them, experiencing little desire to do anything else. The English translation of the fourth is out in April, and I can’t wait.

If you don’t know anything about these books, then the easiest starting point is to think of them as ‘Groundhog Day’ novels. This is because, as with that movie, the Balle books feature a main character whose day begins over and over again — although, as I’ll discuss below, there are better ways to describe what this character experiences, time-wise. A sign of Balle’s greatness, however, is how completely she manages to revivify what seemed like an exhausted idea: “Groundhog Day? Uh huh, I saw that years ago. I guess it was kinda funny. But you want me to read seven novels on the same theme?” Yes. Yes times seven!

There are many reasons you should try these novels, from the tightness of Balle’s prose, to the illuminating yet non-didactic way she engages with important ‘human’ concerns like love, friendship, and the demands of morality. I’ll return to some of those concerns at the end of this piece. But my favourite thing about the Balle books is their interaction with the philosophy of time. So I’ll mostly focus on that.

I should tell you at this point that, beyond revealing some basic facts you would learn by reading the opening pages of the first Balle book, I’m only going to include one serious spoiler in my discussion of Balle Time — a piece of information that’s important for my discussion, but which you wouldn’t learn from the novels until the end of Volume III. So if you want to be surprised by the way Balle interacts with philosophical questions about time, then you should stop now and read the books!

What’s going on time-wise in Balle World?

The first thing to note about Balle World is that many of its inhabitants are living in a ‘repeating’ day. By the end of Volume III, we don’t know how many of these ‘repeater’ people there are, but let’s say there are several billion. For all of these people, every day is November 18th. What I mean by this is that each of The Several Billion wakes up every morning where they woke up on the ‘first’ November 18th,1 with no memories beyond the night of November 17th — a day which, as far as we know, was totally ordinary, time-wise at least.

When thinking about The Several Billion, therefore, you might focus on how none of them is concerned that the morning newspaper is now always dated November 18th, and that its content is always the same.2 It’s not just that The Several Billion have forgotten that November 18th has already passed, however. They also don’t age in a normal manner. Their hair doesn’t grow from day to day, for instance, just as their memories don’t persist. Rather, the minds and the bodies of The Several Billion ‘reset’, every night.

Let’s now turn to a second set of Balle World inhabitants. The members of this second set ‘live outside’ of the ‘repeating’ day. I’ll explain what I mean by this in a moment, but the serious spoiler I’m going to give you is that, by the end of Volume III, we know that there are at least nine of these people for whom the day doesn’t ‘reset’ and ‘repeat’. What I mean by this is that if three days had passed since November 17th, then The Nine would be aware that three days had passed. And it’s not just that this set of people can retain memories beyond ‘each’ November 18th — their hair grows normally, too.

Unlike The Several Billion, therefore, The Nine are (unsurprisingly!) extremely concerned that, no matter how many days have passed since November 17th, the morning newspaper is now always dated November 18th, and its content is always the same. There are many other things The Nine find concerning, too. If, for instance, one of them were to fall asleep in Grand Central Station on the night of any particular November 18th, then the next morning they would see the exact same members of The Several Billion who were in Grand Central Station on the morning of first November 18th, and those members of The Several Billion would be doing the exact same things they were doing that day!3

So, The Nine aren’t affected by the ‘repeating’ in themselves, either physically or mentally. But they are definitely aware that the ‘repeating’ is happening to people around them — as well as to other physical things. When each new November 18th begins, that is, the shelves of the shops become restocked with the items that had been bought the previous November 18th!4 And if someone had forgotten to put a household item back in its place during one of these ‘repeater’ days, then there it would be the next morning, as if it had never been moved. Okay, some objects in Balle World do fail to ‘reset’ in this way — I’ll return to this below — but most of them do. And The Nine are very aware of this.

A key distinction between The Nine and The Several Billion, therefore, is that The Nine are able to count the ‘repeating’ days as different days. Whereas The Several Billion cannot do this because, as above, everything ‘resets’ for them, every single night. It’s important to note, however, that this means that The Several Billion do nonetheless continue to exist across The Nine’s more fully passing time. Otherwise, what would it mean to say that everything ‘resets’ for them, ‘every single night’? It’s not as if The Several Billion are totally frozen in time, therefore, or as if time has stopped for them. It’s more that the passing days have no physical or mental effect on The Several Billion, outside of the temporal extent of each day.

By now, you probably have some pretty big questions about what’s going on in the Balle books, time-wise. I’m going to focus on the following three. First, is time ‘messed up’ for The Nine or for The Several Billion? Second, what are the classic philosophical debates about time that Balle is engaging with in these novels, explicitly or implicitly? And third, why is the Balle series called On the Calculation of Volume, when the books are surely about time rather than space?

Is time ‘messed up’ for The Nine or The Several Billion?

A funny thing about these books is that Balle is constantly trying to get us to think that ‘the bad thing’, time-wise, is happening to The Nine. Tara Selter, who narrates the novels through a series of diary entries, is one of The Nine. And, from the start of Volume I, Balle pushes us to focus on Tara’s distress at finding herself suddenly experiencing the world differently from everyone else around her — and, in particular, at having been divided in this way from her husband, Thomas, who is one of The Several Billion.

Yet, as soon as we come to realise that Tara isn’t the only person who differs from the norm — when we meet some other members of The Nine, that is — it seems to me especially clear that the people we should be the most worried about are The Several Billion. Indeed, it’s them we should’ve been the most worried about from the start of the Balle books! They are the ones who cannot ‘move on’ from day to day. They are the ones who cannot remember the days that pass.

This is why I said there’s a better way to describe what’s happening to the main character of these novels than describing her as someone whose ‘day begins over and over again’ — that description should surely be reserved for the members of The Several Billion! What’s more, if everyone in Balle World were like Tara, then wouldn’t day-dating have continued as normal, from the off? I mean, if everyone were like Tara, wouldn’t the ‘second’ November 18th have been collectively referred to ‘November 19th’? Indeed, we might well assume that the reason the morning newspaper is now always dated November 18th is simply that the people who write the morning newspaper are members of The Several Billion who cannot remember that November 18th has already passed!

Okay okay, we know that the ‘repeating’ problem goes much deeper than the malfunctioning memories of The Several Billion. But if the memories of the newspaper writers were working normally, then wouldn’t they have continued to date the newspapers normally, regardless of any weird physical ‘resets’ that were happening to their bodies and the objects around them? Sure, the weather and the seasons also ‘reset’ in Balle World. And we can assume that the same thing happens to all clocks and computers. But none of this should be enough, in itself, to persuade anyone that the days have stopped passing! I mean, just because your clock says it’s yesterday, and just because it’s raining at the exact ‘same’ minute that it did yesterday, doesn’t mean you’re going to accept that today is indeed yesterday! And before you suggest it, why would this happening lots of times in a row make such a thing more — rather than less — likely?

The memory malfunction of The Several Billion is very important to the framing of these books as ‘Groundhog Day’ novels, therefore. At the extreme, this is because without the collective memory malfunction storyline it seems as if the weirdness of Balle World would hinge on physical regeneration rather than time repetition. This could be one route into thinking about why the series’ title focuses on space over time! More straightforwardly, however, if we conceive of The Several Billion as suffering from some kind of collective amnesia, then this can help us get a grip on the way in which time surely does continue to ‘tick on’ in Balle World — even though many of its inhabitants have weirdly limited awareness of this, and even though many other weird things are happening, too.

The most concerning personal problem each member of The Several Billion is facing, however, is neither a malfunctioning memory nor a regenerating body. Rather, it’s that they’re unable to do anything but the same things, in the same way, every single day. Okay, sure, when they interact with members of The Nine, then members of The Several Billion can indeed break out of the ‘patterns’ they’ve become trapped in — at least until they awake the following morning. Tara can prevent Thomas from going out of the house at the same time he ‘usually’ does, for instance, if she delays him on some particular November 18th. And she changes his patterns every time she speaks with him: he can say new things to her, in such circumstances. But aside from these temporary pattern changes caused by interactions with The Nine, The Several Billion seem to be subjects of some kind of determinism.

After all, if you weren’t subject to something like determinism, then why should failing to remember what you’d done the first time you did whatever you did in some particular scenario entail that you’d do exactly the same thing whenever you found yourself in that same scenario again? This leaves me wondering whether the most significant distinction between The Nine and The Several Billion is not that the latter are stuck in a ‘repeating’ day, but rather that, without external stimulus, they cannot exercise their capacity for free agency. If this is true, then the repetitious dating of the newspaper goes far beyond a matter of memory malfunction!

What are the philosophical debates about time that Balle is engaging with?

I’ll now turn to considering Balle Time within the context of two classic philosophical debates about time.5 First, is time ‘independent’ in Balle World? Second, how does Balle Time relate to John McTaggart’s A series and B series?

1) Is time ‘independent’ in Balle World?

I’ve assumed since Volume I that the Balle books are, on some level, a comment on what’s sometimes referred to as ‘the container theory of time’. I’ll discuss this theory below, but mentions of the word ‘container’ grow throughout the series. If the Kindle app search function is correct, then the word appears zero times in Volume I, seven times in Volume II, and fifteen in Volume III. Some of the early mentions aren’t made in relation to time at all, but here’s a particularly clear example from Volume II:

“When I sit in my backyard I can tell that my time is a container. That is how it is. It is a day one can step into. Again and again. Not a stream which one can only dip into once. Time doesn’t fly anywhere, it stays still, it is a vessel. Every day I lower my body into the eighteenth of November. I move around but nothing runs over the edge. Time is a space. Time is a room. Time is my backyard in afternoon sunshine, with the sound of cars, with trams in the distance. My day is a container filled with a mild breeze and sunshine every day around three. The night is a container with a medlar tree that rustles in the breeze, and the night says danke when the fruit falls.” (p.145)

By Volume III, Tara refers repeatedly to time itself as a container. And here she is narrating a disagreement she has with a fellow member of The Nine, on the topic:

“We’re a strange bunch inside a container of time.

If time is a container, that is, says Henry.

He thinks it’s more like a train, and we are all seated in the same compartment. As if we are on a journey.” (p.169).6

Okay, I’ll admit upfront that Tara’s references to time as a container often don’t match the way in which time is treated as a container with the container theory of time. But I don’t think this matters much for my view that Balle is interacting with the theory. After all, the novels of novelists can be about different things from the things their characters tell us! So perhaps Tara’s words serve as a signal rather than an explanation. But even if Balle isn’t commenting on any particular philosophical theory of time in these novels, thinking about how time ‘works’ in the world she has created can nonetheless be useful for thinking about the strength of that theory. In this context, I’ll give you a quick explainer of the container theory of time, before getting into what I think Balle might be saying about it.

The container theory of time is a theory within a philosophical debate about the relation between time and change. There are two big standard philosophical theories in this debate. First, some people think that time is independent from change. On this view, time can be thought of as a container. That is, people who hold this view tell us that even if events stopped unfolding — if, instead, somehow everything in the world ‘froze’ — then time would nonetheless continue. The container wouldn’t go away! It could have frozen contents, and it could have no contents, and it would nonetheless persist. This view is called substantivalism, because its proponents typically think of time as a substance.7 Isaac Newton was one of them.

Some other people think, however, that there cannot be time without change. On this second view, if the kind of ‘freeze’ took place that meant events stopped unfolding, then time would also be frozen.8 This view is called relationism, because on this view, time is reduced to relations between events, or between things and events. So on this view, there is no container. There are just the things that, on the container view, are the container’s contents! Leibniz held this view.9

Putting all this in the context of Balle World, we can return to my claim above that The Several Billion surely continue to exist across The Nine’s more fully passing time. Otherwise, again, what would it mean to say that everything ‘reset’ for The Several Billion, ‘every single night’? Another way of looking at this is to accept that time ‘continues’ in Balle World, even though some of its people and things are subject to an odd kind of ‘freezing’, in the form of the ‘repeating’ day. This interpretation of what’s going on in the books reflects the position of the container theory of time.

Perhaps, however, we can also see the second view at work in Balle World. Remember, this view is the relationist view, and it says that time is just change: that if events stopped unfolding, then time would stop. In this context, you could see The Several Billion as helping to show us that time can, in some sense, stop — after all, they don’t age beyond each day! But then, what about The Nine? Wouldn’t they still show that time passes ‘normally’ in Balle World, because the Several Billion’s lives can be tracked against The Nine’s, regardless of any ‘stopping’?

A third option arises here. Perhaps we could see the novels as a comment on the (most extreme!) quantum theories of time that allow time to pass differently in different parts of the universe, and also allow for time to move beyond linearity. Maybe this could explain the way that the day ‘repeats’ for the Several Billion — the way in which time seems to ‘go back’! Regardless, a question would still remain about whether this ‘weird’ time could be tracked against ‘normal’ time, or whether there could be a bigger time ‘container’ in which these two differently passing times existed.

2) What about the A series and the B series?

Next, let’s briefly consider Balle World in the context of John McTaggart’s famous ‘A series and B series’ framing.10 These two series offer us different ways of thinking about when events happen. McTaggart picks holes in both series, but many philosophers identify as either A or B! If you’re an A series person, then you think of events as happening in the past, or the present, or the future. Whereas, if you’re a B series person, you think of events as happening in relation to one another — in the sense, for instance, that some particular event happened “earlier than” some other event, but “later than” another one.

One thing to note about this second view, therefore, is that these “earlier than” and “later than” kinds of relations always hold. That is, no matter what else is going on, and no matter what time it is, Julius Caesar was always killed earlier than Franz Ferdinand was killed. Events on the B series have a fixedness, therefore. Whereas, when you think about events in the context of the A series, they have a non-fixedness. That is, the killing of Julius Caesar switched from being in the future to being in the present, and it also switched from being in the present to being in the past.

Here’s McTaggart’s own explanation of all this:

“Positions in time, as time appears to us prima facie, are distinguished in two ways. Each position is Earlier than some, and Later than some, of the other positions. And each position is either Past, Present, or Future. The distinctions of the former class are permanent, while those of the latter are not. If M is ever earlier than N, it is always earlier. But an event, which is now present, was future and will be past.”

Many questions arise about these framings, not least: how long does the present last? But if we take the two series on the simple terms above, then how might they relate to Balle World?

Well, on the A series view, events have the non-fixedness that comes from switching from being in the future to being in the present, and then from being in the present to being in the past. But in Balle World, events can switch in some further ways — from being in the past to being in the present, for instance! Or at least, they can if we take what’s happening in Balle World at face value, and accept that every time Thomas walks through the rainstorm on the ‘repeating’ afternoon of November 18th, it is the ‘same event’. (As you might have guessed from reading this piece so far, I don’t like thinking about these events as the ‘same event’, but I’ll put my objections to one side!) If we take Balle world events at face value in this way, therefore, then we can think of them as having an extra kind of non-fixedness — a non-fixedness on which past is not always “earlier than” the present!

In that context, let’s now turn to the B series view. On this view, events have the fixedness of happening “earlier than” and “later than”. But in Balle World, such things are not fixed in that way because something can happen both “earlier than” and “later than”! What I mean by this is that: 1) when Tara learns that Henry is a fellow member of The Nine, it is “earlier than” Thomas goes to bed on November 18th, because Tara learns this about Henry in the afternoon of one particular November 18th; but also 2) when Tara learns that Henry is a fellow member of The Nine, it is “later than” Thomas goes to bed on November 18th, because Thomas has already gone to bed on the previous November 18th! Again, this only works if we take what is happening at face value, in the sense above. And then, it is complicated here by the fact that we are depending on multiple November 18ths in a way in which we weren’t above.

Nonetheless, I think we could interpret Balle as trying to invent a world that addresses some of the problems of relations within and between the two time series that have interested philosophers for decades. McTaggart’s own arguments, for instance, would play out very differently in a world in which the present could be at the same time as the past!11

Why is the series called On the Calculation of Volume?

Philosophers often make analogies between time and space. One reason for this is that most people find it far easier to get a grasp on space, than time, as a concept. There are various neat analogies with space, therefore, that are often used to help explain complex ideas from the philosophy of time. Here’s Katherine Hawley, for instance, introducing perdurantism by telling us that:

“Some philosophers believe that you take up time by having different temporal parts at different times. Your spatial parts are things like your head, your feet and your nose; your temporal parts are things like you-yesterday, you-today and you-tomorrow. If you have different temporal parts, this would explain how you can exist at different times, and it would also explain how you can have different properties at different times (you-yesterday hasn’t heard of temporal parts, you-tomorrow is an expert). According to these philosophers, then, persisting through time is pretty much like extending through space: it’s all a matter of parts.”

Another reason that space analogies can help us to deal with the complexity of the philosophy of time is that most of us intuitively accept that space is an independent objective thing. Nonetheless, as you might guess, there is a relationist view about space, which mirrors the relationist view about time! So, as above, the relationist view about time holds that if there were no events, then time would no longer exist. Similarly, the relationist view about space holds that if there were no objects, then space would no longer exist! This, I think, could be another route into understanding the titles of the Balle books.

Remember I mentioned that sometimes objects in Balle World don’t ‘reset’ over night? Well, I’m going to give you another spoiler now and reveal that, while by the end of Volume III we don’t know why or fully when this happens, it always seems to involve interaction between these objects and members of The Nine. Tara, for instance, becomes worried on realising that, at least sometimes, the things she consumes do not ‘reset’. The cakes she buys do not return to the shelves of the shop, and she begins to see herself as some kind of consumption monster! Another way of putting this is to say that Tara realises that what she does in ‘her time’ can affect — and even destroy — objects in the ‘time of The Several Billion’.

Now if, in this context, the time of The Several Billion were the time that ‘mattered’ in terms of the relevance of objects to space, then couldn’t it be that if The Nine destroyed all the objects in ‘their time’, then space would no longer exist? That would be a pretty good reason for focusing on volume over time in the titles of these novels! And if of course it were, instead, the time of The Nine that ‘mattered’ in this sense, then The Nine had better start being productive! Either way, if this ‘consumption monster’ concern were to become a central theme of the Balle books, they could then be interpreted as a comment not on the independence of time, but on the independence of space.

Some more ‘human’ questions

I’ll finish by raising five questions about the implications of all this philosophy of time complexity for some more ‘human’ concerns: death, obligation, the independence of the self, love, and fertility. There’ll be a few more spoilers here, so think hard before carrying on!

If a character died, might they switch group?

At some point in the coming four novels, I assume that one of the main characters will die. This seems likely because, within Balle World, there’s a pressing unvoiced question about whether someone could escape the ‘repeating’ day by dying. By the end of Volume III, we know that members of The Several Billion can indeed die, because some of The Nine spend time trying to prevent these deaths. We haven’t as yet been afforded narrative access to anyone who has ‘come back from the dead’, but we know that members of The Several Billion who died on the first November 18th go on to die ‘repeatedly’ without such intervention, and it’s also been implied that they continue to do so afterwards.

If one of The Nine were to die, however, I wonder whether they might become one of The Several Billion. If so, the Balle books could be interpreted as advancing a theory about death, or as describing the fallout of a catastrophic event. That is, rather than suffering from some kind of collective amnesia, perhaps The Several Billion died during some catastrophe, and their state of temporal entrapment represents what it is to be dead? Or perhaps it is The Nine who are dead, and they have found themselves having gained the heavenly quality of free will! Regardless, the bodily death of one of The Nine is something to watch out for. It could also help us to think about mental persistence within the context of the independence of time debate.

Will Balle switch to moral theory?

There were some signs in Volume III that the Balle books might turn out to be a more of comment on morality than metaphysics. This can be seen, in particular, in the disagreement that arises between two members of The Nine about how they should use their ‘advance knowledge’ about what will happen to The Several Billion each day. Here, in moral philosophy terms, a line is drawn between an approach on which the reduction of aggregate suffering is what matters, and one on which the ‘separateness of persons’ overrides.

My guess, however, is that the flaws of consequentialist reasoning will be a focus only for Volume III. This is because one of the most delightful things about these books is the way in which Balle comes up with unexpected focuses for each. Here’s a semi-spoiler, but I struggle to think of any feature of any twenty-first art object that has pleased me more than Volume II’s interaction with the seasons.

Are these novels telling us something about the independence of the self?

It’s become increasingly fashionable to undermine the moral and even metaphysical significance of the self. Many contemporary art objects — and of course pieces of political commentary — trade on the idea that it’s not just that individuals depend on community, but that the self is an ephemeral thing with porous edges. Within philosophical writing, I see this even in libertarian circles!

It’s interesting to me, therefore, that the Balle books, by contrast, depend on a really strong sense of self across time — on the idea, that is, of each ‘normal’ person having their own discrete and steady internal world. Tara exemplifies this. She is presented as deeply normal in a way that has been lost to Thomas, now he’s stuck within deterministic repetition. In the wake of this loss to Thomas, Tara realises that she herself has become her only dependable companion.

Outside of complex philosophy, I find it hard to understand why the discreteness and steadiness of the self isn’t the status quo within general discussion about the human condition. I mean, the self is how we each are in the world! It is through having a self, and only through having a self, that we can experience anything. I can no sooner exist and have experiences ‘outside of’ having my own self, than I can ‘inside of’ someone else’s. And the communities we each depend upon are groupings of these separate selves, not blurs. What would it even mean for our selves to blur together? How could such things combine? How could we share a self? If I know anything, then I know that I have a discrete and steady self!12 It’s refreshing to see this so confidently reflected within art.

Is Balle making a point about the conditionality of love?

While I was reading Volume I, I thought a lot about the relationship between Tara and Thomas. Tara and Thomas are presented as having been an extremely happy couple before the ‘repeating’ began, yet relatively quickly their closeness dissolves. I was confused that Tara wasn’t choosing to spend more of her days with Thomas, when she was presented as loving him so much.

Okay, Thomas doesn’t know that Tara is choosing to be apart from him, but that doesn’t reduce the moral significance of what she’s doing. Rather, it adds an extra layer. As I discussed with on his excellent podcast, a useful analogy here is the way in which just because your granny who has Alzheimer’s doesn’t know that it’s been a year since she last saw you, this doesn’t make it okay that you visit so rarely. You know it’s been that long! You know that she experiences the time passing without you! As with Thomas, this remains the case regardless of the fact that she isn’t able to add the days together and understand how long it has been, cumulatively.

In this context, I came to think that another theme of the Balle books is the conditional nature of love. What I mean by this is that sometimes it’s impossible for love to persist when the conditions in which it arose undergo serious change. Balle shows us, in particular, the risks that arise when people who love each other come to have some significant point of difference in their experiencing of the world. The differences between how Tara and Thomas experience the passing of time are extreme differences.

While I was reading Volume III, I wondered whether Balle might, therefore, be making a comment about the different ways in which autistic people and non-autistic people experience the world. On a superficial level, I thought this because Tara and many of The Nine display traits that are often strongly associated with being autistic. But I also thought it because Tara and Thomas suffer a fundamental disjunction of communication. This disjunction doesn’t derive from either of them lacking the capacity to communicate, but rather because the things they need and want to communicate don’t quite overlap. I think Balle is telling us here that the gaps that arise in such situations — as small as these gaps each might be — can compound. They can compound, as in the case of Tara and Thomas, to the point of relationship failure. I continue to think that Balle is telling us this even though, on reflection, I’m unconvinced that she’s making any comment about autism.

Rather, I think the thing to focus on is that Balle has given us a couple who seem to be perfectly suited. They run a business together, neatly complementing each other’s skills. They are sweet as well as passionate with each other. They have built a stylish home that reflects each of them, as well as their pairing. But so quickly, the solidity of their partnership falls apart, with Tara becoming not only unable to communicate convincingly with Thomas, but also quite quickly — in the context of their supposedly perfect relationship — seemingly being unable to bring herself to keep trying. Are we to take from this that their perfect match was made on superficial grounds? That there are some kinds of similarity that are more important than others, to this end?

I think we should focus less on the idea that the Tara-Thomas relation has certain inherent qualities, and more on the relevance of the actions of Tara — the only member of the couple who can instigate new shared experiences for them. I think that Tara behaves badly towards Thomas by acting as if his interests don’t matter so much, now he is stuck in the ‘repeating’ day. But I also think that Tara’s actions remind us how beautiful it is that romantic love is not unconditional — that, instead, it requires persistent intentional choice. Love of this kind can only be experienced between free agents, and sadly, Thomas may no longer qualify as such.

What about fertility?

The final comment I want to make is that Balle is writing these novels during a moment in which a time-related challenge is the near the top of the world’s concerns. We aren’t told Tara’s age, or whether she and Thomas have ever wanted to be parents. But one of the reasons surely that many women have such anxiety about fertility is that fertility is one of the few entirely time-constrained options that any humans ever face.

What I mean by this is that most of the progress we make in our lives — passing exams, getting jobs, holding certain positions, obtaining things that fulfil us — aren’t tied to being at any particular stage of life. Of course, social norms do direct that this is often the case! But throughout the passing of our lives, it’s only certain rare biological matters, like puberty and menopause, that are strictly tied to certain ages. It seems unsurprising to me that this rare fixedness poses deep anxiety for creatures with free will!

I’m not suggesting that the Balle books are about the fertility crisis. That, for instance, their time-related ‘rule-breaking’ can be read as a comment on the way in which modern science is on the verge of freeing us from the time-constrained events that have throughout human history been correctly conceived as both natural and inevitable. These novels do, however, force us to focus on the constraints of time. Balle reminds us that, even though we live with the freedom of The Nine, we live — as yet — within a box.

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

1) On Boxing Day, I finished reading Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.1 I’ve been rationing my access to this novel, since mentioning it here a few weeks ago. I’m not sure why I enjoyed it so much, considering I found much of its writing either clunky or cliched. But I think it’s because Desai manages to create a wholly convincing world out of some pretty unconvincing characters, and some almost convincing love stories out of some pretty unconvincing matches. The Ratty refrain! The moment Satya’s wife borrows the car! The kebabs at the end! Even now, Desai’s characters hold sway in my mind, disappointing each other, seeking purpose through migration, struggling with their reactions to world events, bickering, eating, and swimming in unpredictable seas. One of the best novels I’ve read this year.

2) This week, I read this excellent 2024 overview piece by Joseph Heath about the twentieth-century ‘no-bullshit Marxists’. Heath argues that these exponents of modern analytic Marxism gave up their last few Marxist commitments after being convinced that Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism offered better answers to their concerns about capitalism than attempts to engineer the labour theory of value into proving the wrongness of worker exploitation. It’s a strongly written and argued piece, marred mainly by a few big over-claims, including:

“Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs, John Roemer, Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as ‘liberal egalitarianism’.”

“Every single one” is a bizarrely unnecessarily high bar, which risks undercutting reader confidence in the rest of the piece. And it’s simply obviously not true about Cohen (and various of the others), either!

3) Some of the best poems I’ve read this year are by Langston Hughes. I really like the 2020 edition of the Serpent’s Tail collection of his poetry, which draws from Hughes’ own selections from his collections, alongside rarely and never previously printed poems.2 [See footnote for clarification about this!] I love its front cover, and its range is great. It covers everything from oppression to freedom to fatherhood to drunkenness. Perhaps its only flaw is that it doesn’t include Juke Box Love Song.

4) Last week, I read this Guardian piece about a couple arguing over the word ‘bun’:

“Joe’s approach to food terminology is chaos. He needs to learn from supermarkets: it’s important to clearly categorise your food. Joe claims “buns” can mean any type of cake, and that in Rotherham, where his family is from, they call all cakes, biscuits and sponges “buns”. He defends this practice by saying the term “cake” doesn’t make any sense to him either, because you can have fishcakes and savoury cakes. I think that’s a false equivalence.”

I’m happy to know that philosophy of language is alive and well in everyday Britain.

5) Speaking of being made happy, I just published the latest episode of my philosophy podcast, Working Definition. This latest episode is, yes, on the topic of happiness, and it stars my excellent friend . Since Mozart comes up in it a few times as an exemplar source of happiness, here’s a link to the Mozart piano sonata movement that I most enjoy, both to listen to and to play.

2

I’m grateful to the excellent for pointing out (see comments section) that this volume is effectively a reprint of Hughes’ 1959 selection. It’s odd that the Serpent’s Tail volume doesn’t make this clear (except, as far as I can see, on the back cover), and that even the intro doesn’t mention it. It’s also odd the way the ST volume refers to the previously unpublished poems, since it seems these must have been previously unpublished prior to the 1959 volume, not this one.. But there we go!

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 Henry Oliver. Henry’s a writer and a literary critic. He’s the author of Second Act, an excellent book about late bloomers. He runs the popular Substack, The Common Reader. And he’s a research fellow and emerging scholar at the Mercatus Center, which means we’re colleagues. He’s also one of my favourite people to talk with.

So I’m delighted — I’d even say I’m happy — that he’s here with me today. And yes, we’re going to be talking about happiness. Thanks for joining me, Henry.

HENRY

Thank you for having me. I’m obviously delighted to be here. [laughter]

REBECCA

So we’ve already made our first distinction — delight / happy. What makes you happy, Henry Oliver?

HENRY

I like reading books, hanging out with my kids, having philosophical conversations like this. [laughter] I’m quite easy to please.

REBECCA

Is there some kind of unequivocal example of something that makes you happy? So by this I guess I mean every time you experience this thing it makes you happy, and every time it’s fully happiness that you’re experiencing.

HENRY

I don’t think such things exist because I would say that happiness is quite context dependent.

But I think there are things that are very close to what you’re describing. So listening to Mozart, eating chocolate, things like that, very rarely fail to work. But if you’re in the middle of a profound grief, or a major bureaucratic annoyance, and someone comes in and starts playing Mozart while you’re filling in a form, I don’t think it can — I don’t think it — you see what I mean? It can’t sort of nullify the pre-existing effect of the bad thing.

So that’s my general view of happiness.

REBECCA

That’s very interesting. So one distinction I think is quite useful when thinking about happiness is some kind of temporary state of mind, some kind of overwhelming positive feeling. And a more, kind of, happiness as a disposition — or some people think of it as happiness across your lifetime, over a long period of time.

Being generally happy, we might call the second of those things.

HENRY

Exactly.

REBECCA

So, I think I would probably be willing to say something like, when I eat the chocolate bar — when I do feel that state of mind, that happiness — I think maybe I can feel that pretty fully. Even if I am in otherwise a state of grief, or maybe I’ve broken my leg and I’m in a lot of pain.

Does that match what you’re saying? Or do you still think it’s the case that you can’t be happy if there’s bad stuff going on?

HENRY

I think there are overwhelmingly difficult or bad emotions. And that they are overwhelming, and it’s very hard to counteract them with small things like that.

REBECCA

So you don’t think happiness can be overwhelming?

HENRY

I think happiness can be overwhelming.

REBECCA

Yep.

HENRY

All I’m saying is, you know, Mozart makes me happy. But the idea that Mozart makes me happy every time, in a reliable way, has to be countered with the fact that if I’ve just stubbed my toe, it won’t work.

REBECCA

Okay, so we’re making a distinction, I think, here then between the state of mind that is happiness, which could be some overwhelming feeling, and the things that make us happy. And I think the thing you’re not willing to go and commit to — which I asked you — is for an example of happiness, some particular thing about which, let’s say, you’re unequivocally happy. So it could be the case that you could have this overwhelming state of positive state of mind of happiness, even in a bad time.

HENRY

Yes.

REBECCA

But Mozart isn’t going to be the thing that could always do that, for instance.

HENRY

No, if we’re going to say hold other things equal, yes Mozart, chocolate. I think the list actually is fairly obvious for most people. Hanging out with my kids, seeing my wife. I think these things are just — seeing a wonderful tree in autumn when the sunlight is at the right angle. You know, great art. I think everyone knows in a way...

REBECCA

Yes.

HENRY

That to me is not the relevant question as it were.

REBECCA

That’s very interesting. So I think an early distinction I’d like to make is something like — there’s a question about what happiness is. And I think we’re coming down, at least in terms of the state of mind sense of happiness, about some kind of overwhelmingly positive feeling. We don’t know always when it occurs, or the conditions in which it obtains. Then the second question is something like, what makes you happy?

Those are different questions, right?

HENRY

Yes, yes.

REBECCA

Because to ask what makes you happy, you have to have some idea of what happiness is.

HENRY

Exactly.

REBECCA

I think it presupposes —

HENRY

Exactly.

REBECCA

You were happy to…[laughter] I’m going to keep saying this! That was actually unintentional, which makes me happy in itself [laughter]

HENRY

We’re discovering so much happiness just by doing it! [laughter]

REBECCA

You were happy to give me an example — several examples — straight up, of things that generally do make you attain this state of happiness. So that’s what the state of happiness is, or what happiness is.

Second, what are the things that make you happy?

There’s a third question, which we’ll get on to in a moment, about why happiness is important, whether happiness is good. Whether it is a good, as the philosophers sometimes say. We even talk about bads. I find this funny. [laughter]

And then the fourth one is something like — we are in America, after all — we’re two English people in America — there’s this idea of pursuing happiness. Is that something you should do? If so, how do you do it?

So I think those are four broad questions. We don’t have to answer all of them, but having some sense of them being different is…

HENRY

Oh, no, we can answer all of them! Let’s be ambitious! Ambition makes you happy, right?

REBECCA

Okay! So in that case, let’s try and bank a kind of starting working definition for the main question at hand. In this podcast, we think about these contested philosophical concepts, and today we’re talking about happiness.

So in terms of what happiness is, I’m happy, I think, initially to say something like, there’s a difference between the state of mind, the disposition, and maybe the bigger sense of happiness you might want to accord to someone over a lifetime.

But if we start on that state of mind sense — and I think that’s important, because I don’t think the other ideas make any sense without it. I don’t think you’d be generally happy, unless you have some of these moments of state of mind happiness. Is that true? Do you think these other senses trade on it? Similarly, I don’t think you can pursue happiness unless that involves the state of mind sense of happiness.

Am I going too far?

HENRY

I don’t know. There is an idea in psychology, which is not a discipline I think we should be over-reliant on.

REBECCA

Totally agree.

HENRY

But there is an idea that you can — if you’re at work, you can be very happy with the inherent qualities of your job. You like the actual, you know, whatever it is you’re typing, or saying, or researching, or building — you enjoy it. You love laying bricks. You love writing arguments. While simultaneously being very unhappy with the conditions. You know, you don’t like your manager, the pension is no good, the company culture kind of sucks, like, whatever.

And so you can have this weird thing — I think we’ve all worked with someone like this — where you are quite a grumpy person, you’re frequently saying that’s no good, I don’t like that. But you are still highly motivated. You work very hard. You get a lot done. And in some sense you are happy in the doing of the work, even while you’re simultaneously unhappy.

And this is what always gives me pause, is that ability to be both. And then
you’re forced to say, well, it’s happy in a kind of way. [laughter]

REBECCA

I think I’m asking a micro version of that. I agree with what you’re saying, and I think that’s important, and it is an interesting thing about happiness. But I think what I’m saying is could you have any of that sense of general happiness — bearing in mind that it might conflict with some other feelings that you have — if you don’t have some of these just pure moments of the overwhelming state of mind of happiness?

HENRY

I assume that those people do have some of those moments. But it’s not at all clear to me that they have them at work, or in a way that’s related to the happy thing.

REBECCA

So would it be funny, then, to say that you’re happy about something if it never gives rise to these states of mind? That seems to me odd.

HENRY

It does seem odd, but also we’re happy to say it all the time, right? It doesn’t present a problem in everyday language.

REBECCA

Okay, so just as a starter — because as you know, the joke of this podcast is we’re philosophers coming up with a product. [laughter] This is funny because we’re not generally known to be productive. But to bank a starting working definition, we could say something like, happiness is an overwhelmingly positive state of mind.

We don’t have to both agree with that, but is that a starting point?

HENRY

I would remove the word overwhelming…

REBECCA

But then, positive, I mean —

HENRY

I think happiness is a gradient, and it can be overwhelming, or it can be really quite muted.

REBECCA

Okay, that’s very interesting. Because I do think there are these — somebody might want to say — thinner ideas of happiness, where it’s more like contentment or peace. If you look back to Epicurus, I think there’s also this idea of happiness as an absence of the bad things.

HENRY

You’re happy doing this podcast right now.

REBECCA

I feel very happy!

HENRY

But you’re not overwhelmed by it.

REBECCA

I think if I were to separate out the happiness from the other things like contentment, I do think that the happiness bit is quite an overwhelming sense. I’m not sure — I agree with the gradient, I think — but for instance, if we go to that super-thin idea of just happiness is the absence of bad things. So I’m not in pain, I’m not disturbed in some mental sense…

HENRY

It’s almost neutral.

REBECCA

Yeah, it’s almost neutral. You see, I’m going to have a problem with that, because I do think that if I have a broken leg, I could still feel happiness. If you come and give me my favourite chocolate bar while I have the broken leg and I’m in a load of pain, I still think it would make sense for me to say it makes me happy.

HENRY

Yes, I think that too. I just don’t think it’s a reliable or guaranteed thing. That’s my reservation. So you came to my office to say, are you ready to do this podcast? [laughter] And we had some chocolate.

REBECCA

I did give you chocolate.

HENRY

That was great, right? That chocolate worked.

REBECCA

I saw the look on your face, Henry Oliver!

HENRY

It works every time.

REBECCA

You liked that chocolate.

HENRY

But if you’d come in and I’d been like, let me just finish writing this email, and I’d eaten the chocolate while writing the email, I just don’t think it would have worked in the same way because I’d have been too in the email. I didn’t want to do the email.

REBECCA

But then that’s the distinction again about what it is that makes us happy. It’s not what is the sense of happiness...

HENRY

Happiness is so easily mingled with unhappiness. That’s why it’s hard to define.

REBECCA

Let’s think a little more, then, about what this feeling is. So, some people probably just want to say it’s the same as pleasure.

HENRY

Yeah.

REBECCA

I think I’m broadly happy — partly because I do want happiness to have some
quite distinct place within the sets of states of mind. I think I’d have a concern if it overlapped too much with contentment. I think contentment often will overlap with, maybe even contribute to happiness. But I think I could be happy in a state of great anticipation.

I was excited about doing our podcast. I’m excited about the opportunity I face next week. I don’t think that’s very peaceful. I think that anticipation is playing a role in my happiness here. So I don’t think I want to say, for instance, that happiness is an overwhelmingly peaceful state of mind. Or indeed that peacefulness is a synonym with happiness. I want to be able to make distinctions, I think, between these things.

HENRY

It seems well recognised to me that there is a particular form of happiness that comes from being at peace.

REBECCA

Interesting.

HENRY

It is not a form of happiness that I am pursuing, or that I necessarily put a lot of stock in. But an awful lot of people regard that as the happy state to which they are aiming, or to which they wish they could aim at, or whatever.

REBECCA

Yes.

HENRY

So maybe you could make a formal distinction. But it doesn’t, to me, seem to accord with what people want or what they do.

REBECCA

That’s very interesting. Again, I do think this comes back slightly to what the things are that make us happy. And there’s going to be different things for each of us.

Somebody who’s more, for whatever reasons, they desire peace more than someone else — maybe somebody living in a turbulent nation. Peacefulness might necessarily be, or peacefulness might be a necessary component of any moment in which they feel happy. Although I still am going to want to say that they’re still going to have this more anticipatory sense of feeling happy…

HENRY

Yeah, I’m surprised. I think anticipation is a big part of happiness. Samuel Johnson basically thought that anticipation was all you were going to get. You weren’t going to get the actual happiness.

REBECCA

So you never get there.

HENRY

Happiness is just looking forward to things. [laughter] You just have to learn to live with that.

REBECCA

Some people do feel happy looking forward to things, though.

HENRY

Oh, I think probably most of us do. But again, it is surprising how happy some people are to not have a lot to look forward to, and to sort of dwell in their peace.

REBECCA

Yes.

HENRY

And to me, they don’t seem unhappy all the time. They don’t necessarily seem fulfilled. They don’t always seem to be living full, flourishing lives. But it’s very hard for me to say, no, no, they are unhappy people.

REBECCA

So you mentioned fulfilment. I think another interesting question — sometimes people think that happiness is quite a thin notion, it’s just about pleasure seeking, or desire satisfaction, something like that...

HENRY

I mean, to go back on the pleasure point, I think that’s just shunting the problem. What’s pleasure?

REBECCA

Yeah, I agree. I think that’s right.

That said, I think when people say something like, no, happiness must be bigger than that, it must be fulfillment, I think they’re answering a different question. I don’t think they’re answering necessarily ‘what is happiness?’. I think they’re answering ‘why is it important?’.

Because some people want to say happiness is the same as pleasure and that’s the central component of a good life. Some people even want to build moral theories from this. Other people want to say, no, that should not be the central feature of the good life. It needs to be something more like fulfillment. It needs to be something more like living in line with the good ends of being a human being. And now we’re getting on to this Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia.

HENRY

Yeah. I mean, I think this is an important part of happiness. And I think the problem is that philosophers have been — I’m not saying they’ve done a bad job as such, but they’ve tried very hard to think separately about what we’ve been calling psychological happiness, and this fulfilment happiness. And I just don’t think you can. And then you run into the trouble of how difficult it is to deal with such a mingled,
messy concept.

REBECCA

I think one thing I’d just be happy to do is separate out happiness and fulfilment. And I’d say when Aristotle talks about happiness or eudaimonia, he’s talking about this thicker sense of fulfilment. That to me seems like a more important — maybe even central component of a good life.

Whereas happiness qua pleasure, that seems to me like a distinct thing. I think it’s important. I feel like it’s necessary to a good life. But I’m just not going to afford it anywhere near the central component role that I think something like this bigger sense of fulfilment should play.

HENRY

So we are saying that the man who’s happy in his work, but not at his work, maybe is fulfilled even if he’s not happy.

REBECCA

Sure.

HENRY

And we’re happy with the idea that fulfilment is what matters.

REBECCA

I think fulfilment — I’m not even sure I’m willing to say fulfilment is the only thing that matters…

HENRY

No, no, no, but in the fulfilment / happiness division.

REBECCA

That’s right. I think so. So I think I’d probably want to say something like happiness qua pleasure — that psychological state — seems to be necessary to a good life. I think if nobody has ever experienced that…

HENRY

That’s right, yes.

REBECCA

…then they’re just not, they’re missing out on something central to being a human. They’re missing out on something that I think is good. But I certainly don’t want to say it’s sufficient to a good life. I mean, if you were happy all of the time, there’d be something wrong with that, because there are some moments when you shouldn’t be happy. And also there are some other feelings that you should experience.

HENRY

Yes, and I do think a lot of people optimise for happiness, as it were, in a way that I think is — I’m not going to say immoral. But certainly some kind of intellectual mistake or emotional mistake to optimise for happiness.

REBECCA

I think optimising for anything, to my mind, is a problem.

HENRY

Sure, I’m just using that as shorthand.

REBECCA

But you’re right, many consequentialist theories, in which what it is to do the right thing, or the right state of affairs, they take conception of the good — and utilitarians in particular take some pleasure-based notion of happiness — and they think, look, we can evaluate states of affairs or evaluate actions, and determine if they’re
right, if they maximise that narrow sense of happiness.

That seems to me — I’ve talked about this on this podcast, and in my Substack, many times — it seems to be crazy. [laughter] I don’t think we necessarily have to cash all this out again, but...

HENRY

Well, this is why I like Mill.

REBECCA

Yeah.

HENRY

My reading of Mill is that he — some people say he tried not to be a utilitarian, but he always was. My reading of Mill is that what he was really saying was, look, cultivating a noble character is the ultimate way to be utilitarian.

REBECCA

Right.

HENRY

And there are such things as higher pleasures. There is such thing as Aristotelian fulfilment. And the real utilitarianism is to take all of that into account, and have this expansive, flourishing notion of life. And that is how you will maximise your pleasure.

Now, you might say, well, it’s a bit of a fudge and he’s just jamming everything together and trying to dodge the problem. But I think that’s life.

REBECCA

I still think though…

HENRY

Life is a real fudge. And he kind of came up with the right answer, which is, yeah, you should try and be in a happy state of mind as much as possible. With the massive caveat that the way to do that is to often take the unhappy route, and do the fulfilling thing.

REBECCA

I still think the problem for me is going to be if this is contributing to, or if this is the substance of the moral theory, in the sense of evaluating things for whether they’re right or wrong, I think it’s going to miss the point. I think maximising even a thicker notion of happiness or fulfilment is going to lead to some problems.

So, for instance, it’s not going to take people’s reasons into account sufficiently. It’s going to focus just on outcomes. I think outcomes — consequences — are clearly important within morality. But they can’t be the only important thing, unless you’re willing to trade away people’s lives, people’s rights, all of these other notions that are important just beyond some aggregative sense of happiness.

You know, counting up your happiness, my happiness. Jamming it together. Taking it away from us, individually. It’s not only going to permit some horrible things, it’s going to require some horrible things. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t think that a fuller sense of happiness plays an important part in a good life.

And I think you can see that in Mill. I think Mill does a great job of coming to some excellent answers about all kinds of things, in spite of this utilitarianism which was indoctrinated in him since when he was a little child.

HENRY

I think utilitarianism has something very important and true to offer us, and Mill understood that, and was trying to ameliorate it with other theories and other insights. Whether or not he reached a fully coherent form of utilitarianism that modern utilitarians can agree on, to me, is just thoroughly beside the point. [laughter]

Of all the philosophers who’ve written about happiness, he comes, I think, closest to telling you what you should do in a way that probably is going to work pretty well.

REBECCA

You see, I’m just not going to agree with you on that. I also don’t think Mill or Bentham are really telling us that utilitarianism is a guide for life.

HENRY

No, and Mill’s quite clear about that.

REBECCA

Yeah, I mean, there’s also this hilarious bit in Bentham where he sets out this six-part set of directions for applying utilitarianism. You’ve got to assess the fecundity of the pleasure against the deprivation of the pain. [laughter] And you have to do this about 70,000 different ways. And he ends up by saying, look, I’m not even expecting the judges to do this.

HENRY

No, no, no.

REBECCA

It’s not a guide for life. It’s a post-hoc evaluative mechanism.

HENRY

But Mill makes it a guide for life by basically just throwing all of that out. And he sort of says in one line — somebody says, obviously, you don’t actually have to sit down and work this out. That would be insane. What you need to do is cultivate a spirit that’s capable of achieving this. So he’s kind of a half utilitarian, half romantic. And that, to me, seems like a great trade-off.

REBECCA

I mean, so I just hold this pretty hardcore view that you can’t pick and mix moral theories.

HENRY

That’s insane!

REBECCA

I’m with Stuart Hampshire on this. I think it’s not a pick and mix matter. You can’t be a little bit of a utilitarian. You can apply some consequentialist reasoning, but it’s a totalising moral theory, Henry! It’s a way of evaluating what’s right and wrong.

And maximising anything is not going to — it’s just going to lead to some horrible outcomes, which is bad for the consequentialist. And it’s going to miss out some important facts that we should take into account when we do evaluate things, like people’s reasons for actions. And the fact that we’re not just some blob, where you can count up our happiness over us…

HENRY

Sure, sure, sure.

REBECCA

You have to take us into account as separate persons.

HENRY

I just think, you know, we’re talking about two different things. What’s the philosophical theory of happiness? And what is it that you will be doing in your life? And on the second one, you will just pick and mix from different philosophies and that’s fine and there’s no avoiding it. And you’ll be a consequentialist about, you know,
economic calculations.

I knew someone once, and she was a vegan two weeks and a vegetarian two weeks, and she would swap like that. On the basis that she just couldn’t not have a latte sometimes or whatever.

REBECCA

Then I just don’t think she’s — this is the thing — I think these are totalising moral theories. I don’t think you can...

HENRY

But she was living in a much better way. She was happier with her, you know. I mean, God knows how many...

REBECCA

Again, consequences are important — It doesn’t make you a consequentialist!

HENRY

No, no, but I’m just saying sometimes she thought a bit like a consequentialist. Sometimes she thought a bit like something else. She didn’t have a theory. She would have rolled her eyes at everything we’re saying.

REBECCA

So then we’re talking about — so I do agree with you that then we’re talking about something different. And one of my problems, indeed, with consequentialist moral theories, and many other moral theories — so Kantian moral theories, too — is I just think they try to give a cookie cutter, a scientistic way, of approaching morality. And it’s really hard because doing moral stuff is really, really difficult. [laughter]

Anybody who thinks that you can just outsource it to some kind of calculation, I think is not only getting it wrong, I think they’re also making this mistake of over-delegating. And it’s bad for us, because one of the things we can do, and we should do, as human beings, is reason. Probably brings us back to Aristotle again…

HENRY

We can reason. And I’m obviously not against the use of reason. But I think that our reasoning is done as a sort of practice exercise. And when we’re actually faced with things, you know, and you have to make a decision... [laughter]

REBECCA

You need some kind of heuristic.

HENRY

Yes. And you can then look back at the decision, and say, I need to do some reasoning about what I did there, and try and improve your heuristic. And this is basically what Mill’s saying — is just cultivate a better spirit, cultivate a nobility. Improve yourself as much as you can across as many dimensions as possible. And then you will — you simply will be a better utilitarian, when you have to sort of make those choices. But you can’t actually, when confronted with a choice here and now. It’s very rare that you get the opportunity to really reason about it.

REBECCA

So I think another reason I have a problem with putting happiness at the centre of some kind of moral theory, or overweighting happiness in a moral sense, is you can be happy about bad things.

HENRY

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think most people are, right?

REBECCA

Yeah, this seems to me problematic. I think it’s particularly problematic if the kind of state of mind that we started talking about is, in all instances, you being happy about something. So I think usually when we’re happy, we’re happy about something. I think this is a little different from the kinds of — some of the other kinds of good things, where the feeling is like directed at something.

So if, say, for instance, I’m friends with you, my state of friendship is directed at you. It’s very reciprocal, but it’s directed. Similarly, I don’t know, say, I love my cat. Sadly, I don’t have a cat. [laughter] But if I had a cat, I would love the cat. The love would be kind of directed at the cat.

I think when I’m happy about something, it has some kind of directionality — like it’s kind of causal — it’s the chocolate bar that’s making me happy. But it’s not like I’m happying at the chocolate bar!

HENRY

No, no, no, exactly.

REBECCA

So, it seems to me quite problematic that the chocolate bar is playing this really central, quite causal, role. But if that was a bad thing. Say that the thing that made me happy was torturing people. Say that the thing that made me happy was bullying people. It seems to me quite problematic to say that happiness has this important moral place, when the bad things are causing me to be happy.

HENRY

Well, and also, I mean, for me, a much more pertinent example is going to the zoo.

REBECCA

Yeah. Yes, great.

HENRY

I think zoos are probably so immoral that they ought not to be legal. I don’t quite...

REBECCA

I agree.

HENRY

I don’t fully know what I think on that.

REBECCA

I think so. I think I hold that view.

HENRY

But obviously, most of the people in the zoo are happy. Or a lot of the...

REBECCA

That’s right.

HENRY

These days, I suspect, people have much more mixed feelings. But it’s not clear that you can be unhappy about something obviously morally wrong.

REBECCA

And actually, if we think of other examples of entertainment — so we think about bear baiting, we think about gladiatorial combat, horrific examples when zoos included humans at one point.

HENRY

Well, you know, they would go to the mental hospital at Bedlam, and they would laugh at the inmates and poke them. And they thought this was a wonderful day out.

REBECCA

So I think one way — I wrote a piece about this recently — if I was trying really really hard to find a sense in which happiness was objectively valuable, it seems to me very very problematic that we could be happy about bad things. But I think if there was some kind of sense of just general happiness — feeling happiness as a state of mind, when it didn’t have to be about something — then I would have less of a problem with that.

Do you think you can ever just be generally happy?

HENRY

Not happy about anything?

REBECCA

Yeah. So, I mean, Aristotle says something like we find pleasure in things. We are happy when we seek the other virtues. But he wants to say happiness can be happy in itself. Does that extend to saying you can just feel that kind of general happiness you might have across your life? Can you have the general happiness in the moment — in the, just the particular state of mind?

I’d like to think I could, and I think it might solve some of these moral problems. But I struggle to get there.

HENRY

Yeah. I mean, one of the first things I said was that I think happiness is very contextual.

REBECCA

Yeah.

HENRY

And I think — no, I think probably it’s very hard to actually get there. This is, in a way, what you’re asking is, like, is Buddhism true?

REBECCA

Wow, that’s a big extrapolation! [laughter]

HENRY

Can you, like, clear your mind, and just reach that peace, contentment, happiness?

REBECCA

Just be happy.

HENRY

It’s not about anything. It’s not in anything. It’s a just a pure —

REBECCA

And also, I want to go further than the peace and the contentment. I want to have this overwhelmingly positive state.

HENRY

Exactly — you’re asking a much bigger question!

REBECCA

That’s right. It seems to me quite hard.

HENRY

And I think, I shouldn’t say this, I think Buddhism’s a lie — I don’t think that’s really possible —

REBECCA

To have that state?

HENRY

Yes, I think a very very small number of people can get there. I think the whole thing is just — but the Buddhism, as we have been interpreting it, in the West —

REBECCA

Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know enough about Buddhism —

HENRY

I’m not saying the actual Buddhists. But what we do here —

REBECCA

That particular notion. That seems to me —

HENRY

It’s all nonsense.

REBECCA

I think that’s right. I’m not entirely convinced that’s a good way to live your life, anyway, because I think you should attend to stuff.

HENRY

Exactly.

REBECCA

So the reason why I think it wouldn’t be good just to be happy all the time is because there are bad things happening in the world. And we should know about them, and we should be concerned about them.

HENRY

I just think if you’re happy, you’re happy because of something to do with the conditions that you’re in.

REBECCA

I think that’s generally —

HENRY

Even if that is purely contained within your own mind, and you’re, I don’t know, let’s say you’re in a sensory deprivation chamber. So it isn’t possible to attribute it to the feeling of the sun on your skin, or any kind of other stimulus. It’s just, no, no, something purely in your mind is making you happy. I think that’s still quite contextual and it’s still very contingent. I don’t really know what it would mean for an emotion to be detached from its source.

REBECCA

Thinking about this kind of psychological sense, another thing that strikes me that’s quite unusual about happiness is that I don’t think you can be mistakenly happy.

So if, for instance, somebody achieves something, and they don’t realise that they have. Say your kid — you go home today, and your kids are both very smart —
say one of them has just accidentally solved this really important mathematical problem. Having met your kids, I could well imagine one of them might have done. [laughter] And you might say, hey, what a great achievement. And they’ll be like, well, it made me happy, and I felt some sense of fulfilment. But they didn’t have any idea that it was an achievement.

So, I think you can be in a state of achievement — that’s a weird way of putting it — without knowing about it.

HENRY

Sure.

REBECCA

But happiness — I think every time you’re happy, you know you’re happy. I don’t really think it makes any sense to say, you know, your kid is doing something, and you’re like, you’re happy! And he’s like, oh my goodness, I’m happy! That seems to me quite odd, unless he’s actually feeling happy. Whereas, I don’t think you have to know that you’ve achieved. I don’t think you have to be aware of achievement to achieve.

So happiness seems more contingent, then, on your awareness of your feelings.

HENRY

I suppose mistakes of language aside, that might be true. Because obviously children do often say things that they don’t mean, because they don’t know what the word is.

REBECCA

Sure. But if we’re taking the word away — we’re just thinking about the concept.

HENRY

I do think, though, that might be true in the short term. I do think a lot of people talk about their past lives, and say, I thought I was happy, and then I realised that I wasn’t. So, they’ll often say this about when they’ve had a breakup, or a divorce, or left the
job or something.

REBECCA

I still think it’s true to say that they were happy, because I think if you feel happy, you’re happy. The thing I think I’d say is that maybe they look back, and they think that thing shouldn’t have made me happy, which seems to be different.

HENRY

I think there’s a confounding in what they’re saying of happiness and fulfilment.

REBECCA

Right.

HENRY

For sure.

REBECCA

So one thing I’d make a distinction between those things — I think you could think that you’re fulfilled by something, but people might say you’re not really fulfilled. So somebody might say, you know, I’m fulfilled by counting the blades of grass. And you might want to say, I’m not sure you understand what fulfilment is!

HENRY

That means you haven’t listened to Mozart yet. [laughter] Yes, exactly. Yes.

REBECCA

Or if they said that they were fulfilled by torturing the cats. I think again, you might just think that again, it’s some kind of ‘misfire’ happening. Whereas, I think I’m happy to go as far as saying that feeling happy is both necessary and sufficient to being happy. So when I feel happy, I’m happy. And I can’t be happy unless I feel happy.

HENRY

So, no, I think I disagree with this.

REBECCA

It’s a big claim, I know!

HENRY

Well, if it’s possible to think that you are fulfilled, but then to go on to have a new set of experiences that make you realise that, okay, now I’m fulfilled.

REBECCA

Or just not to understand what fulfilment means, which is a slightly different thing.

HENRY

But normally you’ll discover that by going on to a new set of experiences, and saying, oh, gosh, that was nothing. This is what I really meant. I think the same thing must be true of many other emotional states, including happiness.

REBECCA

So I think this is, for me, a distinction between happiness and fulfilment. Because I think in the instance where the person is torturing the cats, and they claim they’re fulfilled… Now, you could just say, no Rebecca, you’ve got a misunderstanding about what fulfilment is. I just want to say I think fulfilment has to track the good in some sense.

HENRY

But this matches…

REBECCA

I don’t think that with happiness.

HENRY

But we talked earlier about how it’s a gradient. And I think what I’m saying is...

REBECCA

Being a gradient doesn’t mean it needs to include all things, though.

HENRY

No, but I think what I’m saying is once you start moving up the gradient or experiencing different parts of it, you can then look back and say, well, that wasn’t really happiness. This is happiness, that wasn’t. Maybe this is taking a very subjective view of things. But I think probably something like that is possible.

REBECCA

Okay, I think we may differ slightly on this one, which is totally fine!

Just going back to our original aim of what happiness is, do you have a kind of competing answer, if the kid in the street comes up to you and says, hey, Henry, what’s happiness? So one answer we had is something like this overwhelming — or not overwhelming! — positive state of mind, which seems like to me a good starting point.

HENRY

Hobbes says — he talks about a sudden invasion of glory.

REBECCA

Nice. That seems pretty similar to what we’re talking about.

HENRY

That’s very similar. And there’s a literary critic called Helen Gardner who stole that phrase from him, and said, when I read Dickens, I get a sudden invasion of glory.

REBECCA

Sounds to me pretty overwhelming!

HENRY

That’s the happiness of reading literature. It is, but you know — and I know exactly what she means about Dickens.

REBECCA

Yep.

HENRY

But you can then read the next chapter, and have — you know, Dickens actually does all the types of happiness. You can feel jolly...

REBECCA

Jolly! [laughter]

HENRY

You can feel amused. You can feel contented. You can feel like this is running along very smoothly. You can have a sort of wicked, vicious happiness. [laughter] You know what I mean? And actually, so I think there’s this great difficulty with it. And to the child, it’s a bit to me like trying to define love.

REBECCA

Yes.

HENRY

You can say lots of things that sound very noble and sound very good. And which you do in fact believe, and want to hold yourself to, and want to hold other people to. And say that love is a kind of paying attention, love is about taking care of a person, love is all these different things. But honestly, love is what it feels like to love. Happiness is what it feels like to be happy.

It’s a terrible definition, but isn’t that as good as we can do?

REBECCA

So when I was thinking about happiness in comparison to some of these other good things, like achievement and fulfilment, the one I came to the conclusion that, to me, it seems like happiness is the closest, is love, for this reason.

So even if you just compare love and friendship. I think if you think you’re friends with somebody, but it turns out they’ve been really nasty behind your back — they’ve been totally acting against your interests — I think it would probably be fair to say that that’s not actually friendship.

HENRY

Correct.

REBECCA

Whereas, I think if you love someone who is bad for you, who’s a bad person — or you love doing something that’s bad — I think you can still say that love obtains.

HENRY

Yes, yes, yes.

REBECCA

So I do think this, again, is coming back to this kind of inner knowledge, or this subjective experience, playing such a big role. I think, I don’t want to go as far as this, but I think you could make a good argument that maybe happiness is a type of love.

HENRY

Oh, I’m fully persuaded of that. And I think love has got many many different forms. Iris Murdoch’s very good on this question. It’s very hard to wrangle her into any sort of acceptable philosophy to the philosophers. But to the rest of us, it’s easy enough to get along with.

REBECCA

I love her novels. I don’t get anywhere with her philosophy. I have to say the bits of the novels I don’t like…

HENRY

Are the philosophical bits! [laughter]

REBECCA

So I think The Sea, The Sea is one of my top five novels of all time. But the bit about the sea monster, oh my goodness, the philosophising. I hate that bit!

HENRY

I would call the sea monster passage — I think there’s a very distinctively Murdochian mode. [laughter] I love doing that! Pretending to be a real lit — it’s Murdochian!

REBECCA

The look on your face when you said that as well!

HENRY

You have to self-ironise.

REBECCA

It’s Henry qua literary critic. [laughter]

HENRY

You can’t just do that in all seriousness. But she’s very good at mingling the philosophical, the psychological, and the literary ways of trying to fathom those problems. And I think the Sea Monster passage is like that. And she’s very intently, very consciously saying, I’m not really being a philosopher. I’m being a bad philosopher about this. [laughter]

And there is a constant strain through her books where she’ll put a Freudian, or a therapist or someone of that nature, and a philosopher, and then maybe like a little mystic person, and then an artist. And the book is saying, which of these people can help you?

And she’ll pretty clearly say, you know, the therapist, absolutely, they’re right about a few things, but forget it they will ruin your life. The philosopher, this is an emotional landmine, just don’t even touch it, you know. [laughter] And then she’ll go on to the artist, and say maybe they can do something for you.

And I think the sea monster passage is like, so what you don’t like about it, she doesn’t want you to like that.

REBECCA

From memory, I don’t think she’s using the sea monster to give us an example of a philosopher. I feel she’s suddenly like, all right, I’ve done this 300 pages of great novelistic skill, I’m going to jam in some explicit philosophising! That’s what — I just don’t think it’s good philosophising.

HENRY

But that’s what I’m saying.

REBECCA

Wrecks that part of the novel for me!

HENRY

She’s trying to mingle it with other ways of doing it.

REBECCA

I think you’re being very kind!

HENRY

I think it’s very highly accomplished when she does those things. [laughter] And it’s what makes her distinctive as a novelist. And it pervades the non-philosophical and philosophical parts of the work.

REBECCA

Well, in terms of happiness, I can tell you I wasn’t very happy at that bit. [laughter] I was particularly annoyed because I really found that novel addictive reading.

HENRY

Oh, yeah. Well, okay, but how do you feel about the idea, this is all very basic, but the sea is his unconscious mind.

REBECCA

Oh, wow.

HENRY

And his problem is that he’s living on the edge of his unconscious. [laughter] And he’s really unable to understand that that’s what he’s doing. He’s unable to fathom that he has any unconscious desires that are propelling him forward. These are the demons that she instigates at the end. And the sea monster is the kind of the bursting out of whatever these deep driving forces are.

And she’s sort of saying in a way, you can kind of philosophise that, but you can’t really. And that’s the way things are. And it’s a bit of Freud. And it’s a bit of this. And you just have to muddle through.

REBECCA

It’s maybe 20 years since I’ve read it. But if I could give one more attempt, I think, at making my case. I think the bit of that novel that sticks in my mind the most, actually, is the bit with the chair, the empty room. Looking through and seeing the chair, and having this sense of dread at what this chair might represent.

HENRY

Oh, yes, yes.

REBECCA

This seems to me like a deeper, more skillful kind of psychological writing — and more philosophical writing, I might even go as far as to say — than the much more explicit, hey, here’s a sea monster, so I’m going to bring in some of this! Maybe that’s unfair.

But I think that when I like philosophy in novels, I like it when it’s subtle. When it’s not, hey, I’m now going to give you a bit. So actually, Knausgaard — we’ve talked about this, I know we have very different views about this — the sections I don’t like are those little essays on the philosophy of time or something.

HENRY

Absolutely dismal.

REBECCA

I hate that. And I’m obsessed with the philosophy of time, but I hate those bits. Whereas I love the rest of that first book. I’ve only read the first one.

HENRY

Are there any novelists who do good philosophy?

REBECCA

So actually, a novelist you and I both like — who I know we’re both in this state of great anticipation because her next book is coming out. [laughter]

HENRY

Oh, yeah.

REBECCA

So, Solvej Balle. So the third book of her — at least in the English translation —

HENRY

The time traveler —

REBECCA

The time travel books. The On the Calculation of Volume books. The third one’s coming out. In fact, you messaged me just the other day to say, hey, Rebecca —

HENRY

Eight days!

REBECCA

Eight days time! [laughter] So we’re both looking forward to this. I think that that is both excellent literary fiction in a technical sense, and I think it’s great philosophy. I think it’s brought back this over, what I think until then was probably this overdone problem, this idea of the Groundhog Day idea.

I think it’s a brilliant but non-explicit discussion of the container theory of time. This idea about whether time is independent. I think that’s fantastic. And I think it’s better for not being, like — she doesn’t make the character suddenly go off and give a little lecture. Or just come out of the kind of novel, and give us a little paragraph explainer. Instead, it kind of, it imbues the novel. The novel instantiates it.

HENRY

Do you ever like it when a novelist is explicitly philosophical or lecturing?

REBECCA

Very rarely.

HENRY

George Eliot? Tolstoy?

REBECCA

I think they do good philosophy. I think someone like J.M. Coetzee does good philosophy. But I like it most when it’s less explicit.

HENRY

But he’s probably the best.

REBECCA

So there’s the Paul Auster book Baumgartner, which was quite philosophical. I really hated this one page where the character gives us the precis of his philosophical essay. I just thought it was really bad. But maybe that’s just because I didn’t think it was good philosophy, as opposed to thinking that was a good way of doing philosophy.

HENRY

Mmm-hmm. So Coetzee, that’s all we’ve got. [laughter] The rest of them should stop.

REBECCA

So actually, okay, there’s a great example. The Lives of Animals, which is his short little novella.

HENRY

Oh I haven’t read that one.

REBECCA

Oh, it’s awesome. About why we shouldn’t eat animals. And it’s very explicit. It’s about a lecturer who’s going to give a lecture about why we shouldn’t eat animals. [laughter] I think it is one of the most compelling bits of moral philosophy I’ve read recently. And it’s also fantastic writing. And yes, that does break that kind of explicit barrier.

HENRY

Stoppard?

REBECCA

I like Stoppard. I think Stoppard’s overwritten. I find the bits, again, which are overly ‘I’m doing some philosophy now’, annoying.

HENRY

Even in Arcadia?

REBECCA

I love Arcadia, but yes.

HENRY

Really? I think Arcadia is a pretty good example of not overdoing it.

REBECCA

I don’t know. Let’s finish by thinking about comic novels, okay? So you and I talked a little about Kingsley Amis recently. Is this a good example of happiness as an art object? Is that going too far?

HENRY

Happiness as an art object!

REBECCA

Yeah, I mean, that sounds to me like the kind of thing a literary critic would say! I would not say that as a philosopher.

HENRY

I would never say that. Maybe I’m not a good literary critic. [laughter] I would hate to use the phrase art object, for one thing.

REBECCA

Oh, you see, I use ‘art object’ all the time. This goes back to when I studied aesthetics.

HENRY

Exactly, exactly. A big mistake, a huge mistake!

REBECCA

Yeah, I mean, there’s very little good 20th-century aesthetics, anyway! [laughter] But I do have this hangover, in that I say the word ‘art object’ quite often, and people look at me like I’m a crazy person. It’s a bit like when I say other philosophical things. One of my friends once introduced me to someone as, this is my friend Rebecca, who starts sentences ‘it is the case that’. [laughter] I get the same look for ‘art object’.

HENRY

I mean, Amis — it’s interesting to think about what does he think makes someone happy.

REBECCA

Great point.

HENRY

Because he is quite a conflicted writer. He loves drinking. [laughter] He loves having an affair. He loves running around making fun of people. He quite likes music, but I don’t know that he writes as intently — it’s surprising to think this — he does write very well about music. And in The Anti-Death League, I think it is, C.P.E. Bach.
He writes very well about it there. I might be getting that novel wrong.

REBECCA

Oh, man, I haven’t read that one in a long time. As you know, I think there are only two good Kingsley Amis novels: Lucky Jim, Take a Girl Like You. Take a Girl Like You is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. You need to read it.

HENRY

I’ll read it. I don’t doubt you.

REBECCA

Lucky Jim is one of the funniest novels ever written.

HENRY

The Old Devils is a much better book.

REBECCA

It’s okay.

HENRY

Much better book. And The Old Devils is really about happiness.

REBECCA

I’ll reread it.

HENRY

Lucky Jim is a novel that evades the question of what it is that makes you happy.

REBECCA

But there are some bits — that bit where he goes to the Neddies house and sings the madrigals. [laughter]

HENRY

No, it’s very funny and it makes us happy. But in a way, Kingsley Amis was putting aside important questions in that book, in order to be rude about people for comic value. Now, that’s totally fine —

REBECCA

I think this actually matches quite well with my, I’m very happy to start off thinking of happiness as this thin, kind of morally neutral, psychological state of mind. [laughter] That scene makes me very happy. Maybe it shouldn’t because, yes, you pointed out to me the other day about how you think it’s less funny because you think he’s being nasty to people —

HENRY

And so I think that The Diary of a Nobody —

REBECCA

Oh yeah, that’s right, that’s — we were comparing it with that! You thought that even more of that. Which I think, again, is — that maybe the only novel I think is funnier than Lucky Jim. Possibly Our Man in Havana.

HENRY

My view of this book is it is very funny. It is particularly funny to English people, because it’s about all the weird snobbisms.

REBECCA

I should just clarify — this is The Diary of a Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith.

HENRY

That’s right. It’s Edwardian. It’s just more than 100 years old now. But the way in which the main character is mocked by the narrator is now very socially unacceptable. And I don’t think — you can begin the novel by laughing — but I don’t think you can any longer end the novel without feeling a little bit uncomfortable that this poor man is basically being mocked for being lower-middle class.

And that is because our standards of social realism have changed. Because it’s been 100 years, so different things apply.

REBECCA

But then maybe finding things —

HENRY

Whereas Kingsley Amis we can still laugh at, because we still somewhat live in those social parameters, but we’re getting away from them. And as we do, I think more and more we’ll look at Lucky Jim and say, well, it’s actually mean to be that kind of a snob. And while it’s funny, it feels a bit like going to the zoo.

REBECCA

But don’t you think then, in some sense, finding things funny has this quite big overlap with being happy about things? Because we can find things funny that are bad, that are nasty. Subversiveness plays quite an important role.

HENRY

All the time, yeah.

REBECCA

And similarly, we can be happy about bad things. Therefore, in a descriptive sense,
we can say that’s what being happy consists in, or that’s what it’s like, or that’s the kind of thing we get…

HENRY

And this is a big debate in the last few years —

REBECCA

…without jumping into this moral…! And this should caution us against using these kinds of things, affording them too big of a role in our moral theories, or in our sense of the good.

HENRY

Well, okay, what do you think about jokes? Because there’s a huge cultural debate. It’s probably over now. But the last, say, 10 years: oh, you can’t say anything anymore! You know, we used to make mother-in-law jokes! We used to make these jokes! [laughter] Everyone was mean to everyone else! It was all just a bit of fun! Whereas we now say, you know —

REBECCA

Yeah.

HENRY

Actually, some things aren’t funny. It’s really uncomfortable.

REBECCA

But there’s a distinction between saying we shouldn’t find that funny, and finding it funny. I agree that over time, the more we think, oh I really shouldn’t find that funny, the less we probably will find it funny.

HENRY

I think some jokes have become very unfunny to a large number of people.

REBECCA

But I think it’s quite hard — in the same way as I think you can’t mistakenly be happy, you can’t suppress happiness if you feel it, it’s very hard to reason yourself out of feeling happy. I think similarly, it’s quite hard to — if you find something funny, you find it funny! And yes, then over time, when you realise, oh, I really shouldn’t have found it funny. But if I’m finding something funny, I’m finding it funny.

HENRY

Let me give you a good example. I saw a clip of a stand-up comedian. I have no idea who it was. Just a clip, I have no idea. And he was making a joke about what jobs people do. And he pointed to this woman in the audience. He said, what do you do?
And she said, oh, I’m the head —

REBECCA

I’m going to have to try really hard not to laugh now, otherwise I’m going to come across as — [laughter]

HENRY

Yeah, you are! No, no, it’s fine, it’s actually fine. And she said, I’m the head of diversity, equity and inclusion at a company — you can’t make fun of that, can you? [laughter] And of course, he was like, you know, he sort of paused. And then he said, I’m going to go ahead and guess that you’re a white woman. And the audience just completely fell about with laughter. [laughter] And it was very funny.

REBECCA

I think the actually funny bit there is her saying you can’t make fun of that!

HENRY

Exactly, right. And then he finds a way to make fun of it. And I think that shows you —

REBECCA

His joke is less funny!

HENRY

The audience loved it.

REBECCA

It would have been funnier if he’d said something else, because that was the obvious thing. Whereas her — that’s genius.

HENRY

It was.

REBECCA

Was it totally deadpan? Was she trying to be funny?

HENRY

It was a little snarky, but she was trying to be funny. But it shows you the great conflict, right? Both lines were felt to be funny. His joke was probably felt to be — it got a much bigger laugh — funny, because of the immediate context. But over time, you look at that joke more and more, and you say, you know, the fact that we were joking about that subject is just weird.

REBECCA

Similarly, the more you understand about animals, the less likely you’re going to be happy at the zoo.

HENRY

Exactly, exactly.

REBECCA

I think that’s right. But again, there’s a distinction between you’re actually feeling happy therefore you’re happy, and you shouldn’t be happy about this thing and your awareness of that means that, over time, your happiness about it is going to —

So I think, I anyway am happy to end this at least on having made some work towards a kind of quite thin psychological notion. Some kind of state of mind, where you’re experiencing pleasure. And that is at least some sense in which we say, ‘I’m happy’.

HENRY

I’m happy with the happiness is a form of love definition.

REBECCA

I like that one too. I’m not sure, I don’t think I want to go as far as to say it’s a form of love. But I want to think about that more. I certainly think it’s the other kind of basic good I would think of these things as being — I do think of love as a basic good,
I think, in my sense of it being irreducibly and objectively good.

HENRY

Yes, yes.

REBECCA

I’m not going to want to go as far as that with happiness, because of this problem about being happy about bad things. But I think if you, for instance, could be just generally happy —

HENRY

I like the happiness is love definition because it excludes the comedy and the zoos and other things. It helps us to narrow down.

REBECCA

Although we’ve also accepted, though, that you can love bad people and you can love doing bad things.

HENRY

That’s true, that’s true.

REBECCA

So I think they both share this problem. Anyway, Henry, I’m very happy that you’ve been on my podcast!

HENRY

This was fun!

REBECCA

This was fun. So thank you so much.

HENRY

Thank you for having me.