bob dylan, aliens, and free speech

and other things i've been discussing

I enjoyed appearing on three podcast episodes that came out this week, so I thought I’d share them with you here.

1) First, the second episode of The Street Porter and the Philosopher, which is the podcast Henry Oliver and I run through our joint Substack, The Pursuit of Liberalism. 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 Céline Leboeuf’s excellent ‘Why Philosophy?’ project.

Here’s one of my answers: