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

1) Last week, I read a load of things about The Declaration of Independence, in preparation for an event and a podcast. Most of all, however, I enjoyed reading the text itself. My first deep philosophical interest was social contract theory, and I find it hard not to see The Declaration squarely within that light.

The SCT guys (or the good ones, anyway) tell us that political authority rests on the consent of the governed. The DoI includes reference to “just powers” being derived “from the consent of the governed”. You can read my extended thoughts on this crossover, here. And watch out for a podcast episode — starring my excellent friends and — soon!

2) Over the past week, I’ve been slowly reading Siri Hustvedt’s new book, Ghost Stories. Regular readers might remember how much I liked her novel What I Loved (2003). Somehow, Ghost Stories has so many of the same qualities, even though it is a memoir. Today’s post will be short on words because all I want to do is go finish reading it. Though I also don’t! It’s the best book I’ve read in ages.

3) I found this recent Galen Strawson post on mortalism very frustrating. I found it frustrating because it takes the form of Strawson addressing some excellent philosophical problems — questions about mental persistence following bodily death — via the text of a conversation he’d had with Claude.

Regular readers will know that I love talking with and thinking about AI. But I subscribe to Strawson’s substack because I want to know what Strawson thinks about philosophical problems! I’ve written here about his views several times over the past year. Ok, sure, the couple of small contributions Strawson made to the Claude conversation did some work in directing it, to some small extent. But I found that I just couldn’t be bothered to finish reading the post, even though the topic remained high in my mind for some hours.

I really can’t see the publication of AI chats — or, at least, AI chats like this one — taking off as a standard form of philosophical inquiry. As I’ve argued before, philosophers are particularly well insulated against AI ‘taking our jobs’, because there are many special reasons why humans are keen to read other humans doing philosophy.

4) I recently watched the ‘Before’ trilogy. These three movies, Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013), follow American guy Jesse and French girl Celine, occasionally, across several decades. First, they spend a day and night together, after meeting on a train on the way to Vienna. Then, they meet in Paris nine years later, and go on a little boat trip. Finally, we see them on holiday in Greece, another nine years after that.

It’s rare to see the substantive conversations of a couple presented on film, which surprises me. I found this phenomenon particularly lacking in recent ‘romantic movies’ that I otherwise quite enjoyed — not least, Oh Hi! (2025), Materialists (2025), and The Drama (2026).

5) While we’re on movies, I really loved François Ozon’s L’Étranger (2025), which I saw at the cinema a few weeks ago. I think it’s a pretty great novel, though I’m not into Camus’s philosophy. Ozon, however, never fails to impress me.

My favourite Ozon movie is probably Swimming Pool (2003), which — even though I haven’t seen it in maybe 15 years — must be one of the movies I’ve seen the most times. His L’Étranger is totally captivating and visually fantastic. (I had to check back to see if I was correct that it was in black and white!) He should turn to Houellebecq next.

I’m going to admit something to you, openly and freely. I’m going to admit that I love America.

This is hard for me — not because I’m an English person! But because I’m just not into the love of countries. I don’t buy the idea of patriotism. And, more generally, I’m a reluctant supporter of the state. I do think the state can be a force for good, but I’m persistently anxious of the overbearing state. I’m a pretty much a classic classical liberal, to this end.

I would never say that I love England! I’d never say I love the UK. So it’s kind of surprising to me, but here we are: I love America. How does this work? I was thinking about it today, and I have three brief points to make.

The first one is something like this. I love a load of stuff in America, which makes me want to live here, rather than in any other country in the world. Particularly, I love the pursuit of excellence. I love the enthusiasm. I am done with British cynicism and pessimism! So there are these things, these facts about America — particularly cultural norms — that I really love. And that means that I love living here, and I want to live here.

The second point, which you might tell me makes what I’m saying kind of trivially true, is that of course I love living here, because I’ve chosen to live here. I didn’t choose to live in England. I had it thrust upon me — like the rain there, every day! So maybe it just doesn’t really mean that much that I love America.

That said, this point about me choosing to live here brings me, I think, to my most important point.

I love America in large part because I love the social contract theory tradition. This is the theory that John Locke, I think, is the best exponent of. I find social contract theory exciting and interesting. It was the first thing I really got into in philosophy. I also think, though, that it’s good, and I think a lot of it is right. Particularly the John Locke stuff.

The central idea in the social contract theory tradition is that political authority rests on the consent of the governed. Or, as it’s put in the Declaration of Independence, “deriving just powers from the consent of the governed”. Now, I don’t want to be another of those English people coming here and telling you that your great founding document is actually just the work of John Locke! But he’s everywhere in it.

That fantastic phrase “the pursuit of happiness” doesn’t come from the Second Treatise of Government or one of the other political works. It comes from the great epistemology tract. It comes from Locke’s wonderful Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

But you see him everywhere in the Declaration of Independence. It’s got the natural rights talk. It’s got the right to revolution — I reread that bit in the Second Treatise last night, and it’s, like, practically word for word. I mean, guys, this is John Locke, all over the place!

I want to emphasise something, however, rather than going on about John Locke, anymore. Because in a similar way to how I don’t love countries, I don’t love particular philosophers. I want to emphasise that, yes, John Locke wrote about these things. But they are not John Locke’s things. Any more than they are America’s things.

The values underlying the Declaration of Independence — freedom, equality, justice — don’t belong to any place. Yes, you might find them here in America more than you find them in other places. That’s one reason I live here. And you might find them in John Locke’s work more than you find them in other people’s works. But they reflect truths about humanity; about what it is to be human. They reflect moral truths. So they are John Locke’s, and Americans’, only in a loose descriptive sense.

I love America, and I love the Declaration of Independence, not because of great phrases like “the pursuit of happiness”. But because America and the Declaration of Independence represent a commitment to the pursuit of moral truth. And there’s nothing more important to me — or for all of us.

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

1) A few days ago, I read some polling reports on attitudes to factory farming, thanks to discussion on Substack about this recent Our World in Data piece. As the writer of the piece, Charlie Giattino, argues, it seems “[t]here is a clear gap between what people want — meat produced without suffering — and what the food system delivers”.

Except, it’s not so clear. Yes, the chart in the piece shows that a large majority of UK adults claim to find certain “common farming practices” to be “not acceptable”. But it’s also the case, as Giattino emphasises, that “[a]t a global level, meat consumption is not only high but also increasing.”

Okay, we can assume that not everyone who claims to find the system’s practices unacceptable also eats the system’s products. And maybe it’s just that the UK’s an odd place? Nope. A subheading in the OWID piece clarifies that: “Surveys worldwide show that most people find common animal farming practices unacceptable, even where meat consumption is high”.

To go back to the ‘there’s a gap’ claim, therefore, the people do indeed suggest they want “meat produced without suffering”. But the people also continue to eat “what the food system delivers” — more and more of it!

Sure, we could conclude that the people have a loose understanding of “unacceptable”. Or we could conclude that they’d prefer a system that wasn’t so vile. But whichever way we cut it, we’re going to have to face the fact that expressed concerns about animal welfare simply aren’t enough to prevent many, many people from eating meat. That the gap is a dream!

It would be nice if we could conclude otherwise. But it would be cheating. Just like eating the meat, when you think you shouldn’t. Like I do.

As I’ve written before, I think it’d be wrong to eat the dead bodies of animals even if they’d lived the best possible lives and had the best possible deaths. And as I said during my recent podcast episode with , I continue to eat meat, even though “I think the welfare thing is […] a sufficient problem in itself. It’s a reason in itself not to eat pretty much any bit of meat you get served.”

I did quit meat for a few months, a while back, but all it took was one fantastic steak, and I was back off the animal wagon full-time. Sure, I choose the ‘highest welfare’ products on offer, and happily — how horrible to say ‘happily’! how horrible to say ‘products’! — pay the higher prices for them. And as of this week, I’m trying to quit chicken and pork. But, of course, I know this is nowhere near enough.

There’s a horrible truth to be accepted here. A truth that often makes me wonder what other bad things we would do to meet our basest desires.

2) A few days ago, I wrote about three podcasts I’d enjoyed appearing on. But the most fun I’ve recently had on a podcast was when and I appeared on our friend ’s Qualified Opinions. There was a lot of laughing. Here’s a link to the episode, and here’s the summary on the site:

“Vero is joined by colleagues Rebecca Lowe, a political philosopher, and Henry Oliver, a literary critic, to discuss their new project, The Pursuit of Liberalism. While the liberal order—built on free markets, free speech, and the rule of law—has delivered more for human flourishing than any other system, many feel it is currently “losing the argument”. The trio explores whether this is because the defense of liberalism has been narrowed down to economics and legal theory, neglecting the deeper questions of meaning, dignity, and the human soul.”

Vero is one of my very favourite people, and everything she writes is worth reading. Last week, I really liked the National Review column she co-authored with Gary Leff on the then-possibility of a state bailout for Spirit Airlines. I would summarise their arguments for you, but the piece is so clear and well-structured that they do this themselves, near the start:

“This is a bad idea that deserves to be called what it is: Washington nationalizing a problem it partially created with a misguided application of antitrust, for a company that consumers don’t want, at the expense of its competitors, and handing taxpayers the bill.”

The piece powers on. Unlike Spirit Airlines.

3) A few days ago, I finally finished reading Alan Hollinghurst’s most recent novel, Our Evenings (2024). It’s nowhere near as good as The Swimming Pool Library (1988). It’s not even anywhere near as good as The Sparsholt Affair (2018) or The Stranger’s Child (2011).

Hollinghurst is one of those previously, if inconsistently, excellent British novelists, who’ve gone off the boil over the past twenty years. This is a trend exemplified by Ian McEwan, whose novels can be divided in two at the Chesil Beach (2007) point. One common argument runs that these novelists have been driven crazy by British politics. The treatment of the Brexit debate in Our Evenings provides strong support for this argument. I hate the word ‘cringy’, but there’s no alternative here.

That said, I pressed on with Our Evenings, because somewhere — amid the silly political commentary, and even at the silly political commentary’s height amid the ‘old age’ section which, more generally, required some serious editing — there’s something there. It’s not the something I assume Hollinghurst would want us to take from this novel. That’d be something deep about race and community. Instead, it’s probably just the well-developed skill of basic readability.

4) Last week, I read a load of things about Benjamin Britten in preparation for recording an episode of The Street Porter and the Philosopher. In particular, I enjoyed thinking about the claim, made in this short translated extract from an interview with Jonas Kaufmann, that Peter Grimes is autistic.

“I feel so sorry for him. I don’t think he’s a real killer. Today you would say: autistic or Asperger’s or whatever. Modern expressions for the fact that in this place where he is arrested, he is simply being crushed by the many, many intrigues that are being spun. And of course it’s tragic that the first boy dies of thirst in a storm because they somehow drift too far and can’t find their way home.

But we also have to put this in the context of how it was, so to speak, back then: Children from the orphanage were kept as cheap slaves for centuries. That is an unfortunate fact. Whether they worked in the mines because they were nice and small and could dig their holes there – and that was no different here in Bavaria – or whether they lived on the coast and then helped the fishermen. And Grimes says himself: I can’t afford it. I can’t afford a second fisherman, an adult, to take with me, that’s impossible. It can only be a child who has to work 24 hours a day for board and lodging, so to speak, and is available. That is very tragic and of course reprehensible from today’s perspective. But you can’t really blame Grimes for that….”

As you might have guessed, I don’t like Kaufmann’s relativism. But I think his claim about autism is worth considering. Minimally, it makes an interesting change from the common, but surely incorrect, take on which Grimes’s ‘otherness’ is a sign that he’s gay.

5) On Sunday, I saw fantastic paintings by (mostly North-Eastern) Americans, including Andrew Wyeth, John Henry Twachtman, George Luks, William Merritt Chase, Charles Alston, William Glackens, Stuart Davis, Beauford Delaney, Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, and Georgia O’Keeffe, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Best of all was this catfish piece by Jacob Lawrence:

1) First, the second episode of The Street Porter and the Philosopher, which is the podcast and I run through our joint Substack, . Here’s the summary from the site:

“This episode features our guest Cass Sunstein, the leading legal scholar, bestselling author, and one of the most influential thinkers on liberalism, law, and public policy. He joins Rebecca Lowe to explore the relationship between the arts and liberalism. They discuss what makes a work of art “liberal,” the representation and role of choice in music and popular culture, the moral and aesthetic limits of political messaging in art, how liberal societies shape and are shaped by the culture they produce, and much more.”

Here’s a link to the transcript and audio. And here’s the video (beautifully made by our Mercatus colleague, Melody Hansen):

2) Second, my second appearance on the Planetary Society podcast, Planetary Radio, discussing philosophical space matters — ranging from the aesthetic value of the Artemis II mission, to the moral status of non-human living things in space — with my excellent friend Casey Dreier. Here’s the summary from the site:

“In this episode, Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, sits down with Rebecca Lowe, philosophy senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, to explore the deeper meaning of humanity's return to deep space. Drawing on philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and theories of value, they unpack why human presence in space feels fundamentally different from even the most sophisticated robotic mission, and why that difference matters.”

Here’s a link to the episode. And here’s a link to the previous episode I appeared on with Casey, entitled Locke, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (in space).

3) Third, I appeared on Matt Teichman’s excellent philosophy podcast, Elucidations, to discuss my theory of speaking freely. Regular readers might remember that I’m writing a short book about this. Here’s the (substantial!) summary of the episode from the site:

“Last episode, we talked about free speech, and this time, we sit down with Rebecca Lowe (Mercatus Center) to discuss the related but slightly different topic of speaking freely.

Speaking freely: the thing you feel entitled to do when a superior says to you: “you may speak freely.” But although speaking freely is the phenomenon our guest is interested in characterizing, rather than trying to characterize it directly, her approach is to get granular about what it means not to speak freely. What are the different ways you might be blocked from saying what you would otherwise say, if you were fully unfettered?

Rebecca Lowe discusses three broad categories of failing to speak freely. Type 1 is where you lack the capacity either to utter words or to determine their content, e.g. because you have laryngitis, or because someone put their hand over your mouth, or because an evil demon controls everything you say. Type 2 is where you’re able to speak, and you’re able to control what you say, but something is preventing you from communicating in the way you’ve decided to, e.g. when you want to call your friend, but your phone battery is dead. Type 3 is where you’re able to speak, you’re able to control what you say, and the situation allows you to communicate in the way you’ve decided to, but you refrain from speaking your mind because of some perceived risk, e.g. when you want to suggest your friend dump her boyfriend, but hold back because you’re worried she’s going to get offended.

One subtlety of these categories is that they are not logically independent. If you’re blocked from speaking freely in the Type 1 way, you’re thereby also blocked from speaking freely in the Type 2 and Type 3 ways. And if you’re blocked from speaking freely in the Type 2 way, you’re thereby also blocked from speaking freely in the Type 3 way. The converse doesn’t hold: for example, as our bad boyfriend example emphasized, you can be blocked from speaking in the Type 3 way without being blocked from speaking in the Type 1 way. Indeed, as Rebecca emphasizes, it’s only people who can speak in the Type 1 way who can be blocked from speaking in the Type 3 way!

In this episode, our guest argues that the public conversation about a person’s right to speak their mind would go more smoothly if we tried to keep these distinctions in view. That is, whenever we feel indignant about someone’s ability to speak being suppressed, we should consider the details of the situation. Which of these three types of obstructions was it? Was the person able to speak their mind in the situation? Then, we can consider whether they were entitled to do so. Generally we are, but it seems there are certain exception cases. The hope is that by breaking down what is at issue in any particular case we’re discussing, we’ll arrive at a better understanding of what its moral lessons are.”

Here’s a link to the episode:

4) As a bonus, here’s a link to a short interview I recently did as part of ’s excellent ‘Why Philosophy?’ project.

Here’s one of my answers:

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

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

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

Here’s an extract from the former piece:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or as a Reuters piece describes it:

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

Insane!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TERESA: Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: No, that’s nice! [laughter]

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yes, it’s a good book.

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

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

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

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

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

TERESA: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yes, yeah, that makes sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yes, I assumed —

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

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

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

REBECCA: No, no, I know.

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

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

REBECCA: Yes, that’s right, because —

TERESA: And that seems important.

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

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

REBECCA: Making law great again!

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

REBECCA: Yes, right.

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yeah, great point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yeah, that’s a great point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TERESA: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yes, I think that’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TERESA: No…

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

TERESA: I ought to have read these!

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yes.

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

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

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

TERESA: Aristotle’s dialogues. Can you imagine?

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

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

REBECCA: Yes!

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Yes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Nice.

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

REBECCA: I like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBECCA: Nice. Being on a level.

TERESA: I think that is really important.

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

TERESA: And the Levellers.

REBECCA: And the Levellers.

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

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

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

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

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

TERESA: Thanks, Rebecca.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a little extract:

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

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

OLIVER: That, do you read a book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the lightly edited, 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.