[This transcript was generated by AI, so while I’ve checked over it, it may contain small errors.]
REBECCA
Hi, I'm Rebecca Lowe. 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.
My guest today is Tyler Cowen. He's the Holbert H. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University, and I work with him at the Mercatus Center, the home of classical liberalism. With Alex Tabarrok, he's the co-author of the popular economics blog, Marginal Revolution. He's also written a lot of good books. I particularly like Stubborn Attachments.
Today, we're going to be talking about freedom. So, freedom is a very everyday notion, much more so than the previous concepts in this series, things like transparency and democracy. Clearly, the word has various ordinary meanings. People use it pretty clear of what they mean, even if they might struggle to formally define it. So one goal here, therefore, might be to find a definition which helps to bring all of those meanings together, whether by providing some core idea or some starting point.
So Tyler, you're a reasonably clever guy. Have you got a handy definition of this kind in your pocket?
TYLER
If we start with an ordinary language approach, what's striking to me is the bimodal nature of the distribution of how people talk about freedom. So they'll say, well, America is a free country. Obviously, it's not free for everyone. There are people unjustly in prison or laws you don't like.
But there's something about the country as a whole where you can say that. You can say Norway is a free country, even though taxes are high. And there's this whole set of countries where you're allowed to say they're free, and then other countries where you're really not allowed to say they're free or you would insist upon the opposite. So that it is not smoothly distributed, I take to be an important fact.
One of my fears for the future is that it will become more of a continuum. If you look at, say, recent UK hate speech laws, we won't quite be sure anymore which are the free countries or not. And that's a very unfortunate development because I think it is going to mean less freedom by virtually any definition.
REBECCA
Okay, yeah, I like that. But straight away, we've gone into something like, I don't know, a particular country is a free place. Are countries the kinds of things that can be free? Or is it that they're just conducive to certain kinds of things that can have freedom?
TYLER
The people living in the country can be free. But I think the point is, no one really has a very clear definition of freedom. But if so many good things are bunched together so tightly that the distribution of countries as free or not free is so bimodal, it may mean we don't need a fully tight definition.
We can simply look around and try to build up the elements of the bundle, which will have these other good effects like prosperity, right? Maybe greater opportunity, better aesthetics in some cases, other philosophic values, and that takes a bit of the pressure off freedom to carry the whole water.
REBECCA
I think that's right. I mean, I get that it could be a kind of bundle concept. But why don’t we have a think about what some of the elements of that bundle are? Like, are there some things that have to be there, some necessary elements?
TYLER
The most important element of freedom to me is what George Stigler called positive freedom, which he associated a little too quickly with wealth, but I think it's closely connected to wealth. And it's simply what opportunities do you have with your life and also in terms of purchasing power?
Now, negative freedom also matters. But I think in a pinch, people prefer positive freedom. And most definitions of negative freedom, in fact, turn out to be parasitic on other understandings of positive freedom and what really matters in terms of consequences.
REBECCA
So I think a lot of people want to start by thinking about freedom as negative freedom and positive freedom, whether those are oppositional things or whether they're something you tie together. Do you think that's really a very useful thing for defining freedom, though? Or are we talking about different kinds of freedom there?
TYLER
There are different kinds of freedom, but that may be the best starting point. So if positive and negative freedom go together, which I would say on average they do, you can't quite be sure that doing that is a good idea. But the chances that it's a good idea are very, very high. When they don't go together, you at least know right off the bat what kind of trade-off you're faced with. And then you can hope to make progress on the question: well, is it worth infringing on people's negative liberties a bit to get this additional increase in opportunity and wealth? And it may or may not be, but it forces you to ask that question right away.
REBECCA
So one person who came up with a different way of framing, or at least explaining what we mean when we talk about freedom, which is slightly different from saying what freedom is, is Gerald MacCallum. He came up with this famous tripartite approach, on which… People like Rawls buy this, I think Rawls describes it… I wrote this down… as, “This or that person or persons is free or not free, from this or that constraint or set of constraints, to do or not to do so and so”.
So you've got the agent, you've got the constraint, and you've got the action or the goal. So this is suggesting that negative and positive are simply not exhaustive. Even when you tie them together, you have this tripartite relation. Is that fair?
TYLER
I think there are many notions of freedom, more than just three, but positive and negative are by far the most important. And they're the ones you can at least try to build into political systems. A greater number of people understand what you're talking about. And if you can manage to take care of those two in a reasonably satisfactory manner, odds are you've just succeeded. And I wouldn't be too fussy about the others.
But I bet if you sat down, you could come up with 57 different kinds of freedom that are relevant. Look at Amartya Sen’s Paretian liberal paradox. Well, what would you choose if the choice affected only you? For him, that's a significant part of liberty. I think it's an insignificant part, but if he insists on putting it on his list, okay, it can go on the list.
REBECCA
Why do you think that's an insignificant part of liberty?
TYLER
People have evolved to want to make deals with each other, to want to respond to social context. And if, say, you get me to listen to a Benjamin Britten song and I get you to listen to a Bob Dylan song, it's weird to think that's an infringement of some very relevant concept of liberty because maybe neither of us would have done it on his or her own. Like, okay, if that bothers you, and maybe there are other contexts where it could or should bother you, but in terms of ranking it on the list of social problems, it's not in my top 20,000.
REBECCA
So I think, to my mind, one of the things that the Sen paradox shows is that you can't just reduce freedom down to preference satisfaction. And I think even framing it in terms of ‘it's bad if you don't want to listen to the Benjamin Britten song that I propose that you listen to because I think you’d get value from it’. I feel like this again is just reducing freedom to something too thin. Is that fair?
TYLER
I don't want to reduce freedom to preference satisfaction. But that said, I don't feel that example is a very good counter to identifying freedom with preference satisfaction. The notion that preferences themselves come from somewhere and are part of a broader social process to me seems much more important than am I getting the choice I would have made if only I were making the choice. So I think he's just focusing on something not very important.
REBECCA
But there's another sense in which you can infer that he's getting at something like what's important is you deliberate on your choice. What's important isn't just that you're allowed to go along with what your base preference is in some first-order sense. It's that you have to have the freedom, the right even, which is the other kind of horn of the paradox, in order to be able to determine how you live your life, even if it doesn't match what your preferences are.
TYLER
But that will typically collapse into positive freedom. So the sheer or mere right of deliberation, even very bad systems, would give you a lot of that. The Soviet Union, you could deliberate all you want. People there, I think, deliberated more often than Americans do. But at the end of the day, you couldn't choose the thing.
So I don't view the Paretian liberal paradox as being about deliberation at all. That might make it more interesting, but it's just about can we find a reason why we might object to what are in fact practical gains from trade? And Sen being more or less anti-market is wanting to do that.
REBECCA
So when you talk about positive freedom, I think maybe what you're talking about is something like an agent-focused framing of freedom. So I think one of the problems with the kind of negative framings generally, so if we think about the classic, particularly on the kind of liberal/libertarian side, people might want to say something like freedom is non-interference, freedom is non-coercion. The republicans might say it's non-domination.
One risk with these things is I think it avoids centring the person who it is who's doing the free thing, the person who has freedom, the agent. Is that fair?
TYLER
Yes. One way to think about it is let's say you can either be killed by a lightning bolt from the sky, which is not libertarian aggression against you, or you can be killed by a robber. Now, you might prefer to be killed by the lightning bolt because you couldn't say your rights were infringed. And if your rights were infringed, there's something extra bad about that. But at the end of the day, you're dead either way. And if you're too focused on that as truly the big deal, the constituent important part of freedom, I think you're just missing the boat about what people actually care about.
REBECCA
I think this is right. I think libertarians who say, look, your freedom is only being infringed if your rights are being violated are missing the point.
TYLER
Right.
REBECCA
But I also think there's a sense in which you think about, if you think about something as freedom as non-interference, then you could say, well, I don't know, the field isn't being interfered with. Or you could say the moon interferes with the tides of the sea. This seems to me to be crazy in an ordinary sense: we don't talk about the sea being free or not free. It seems like you need some kind of agent, some kind of, I don’t want to go as far as to say person, but some kind of living thing that has this capacity. I think this is the advantage of an agent-focused conception of freedom.
TYLER
I don't know. This talk is making me nervous. So maybe I think more in relational terms. So I don't agree with George Stigler and the purely consequentialist view that all that matters is wealth or opportunity. I think if, say, someone comes along and murders an innocent baby, to choose the simplest possible example, there's something wrong with that above and beyond the GDP impact or the suffering of the baby. There's something relational about treating the baby that way, that above and beyond the lost happiness is deeply wrong and bad.
REBECCA
That's right. But we also, I mean, I don't think it makes sense to say freedom is the only element of the good anyway. So just when we're thinking about is this a good or a bad thing, the idea that we're going to be able to determine that just in terms of whether freedom has been lost seems to me overly thin anyway.
TYLER
Yeah, I agree.
REBECCA
So I guess there's two criticisms here. One is, is freedom just about rights? And the other is, is the good just about freedom, even if the conception of freedom goes beyond rights.
TYLER
But practically speaking, I think Stigler's approach, looking at positive liberty and wealth, it gives you the right answer in virtually all cases. Done as a rule at the societal level.
REBECCA
That's right. So I think in a descriptive sense, you might want to say something like, if we're considering whether country X is freer than country Y, you want to think about things like opportunity. This seems to me to make sense. The question for me, the deeper question is, why do we care about opportunity? We don't just care about it in terms of, hey, counting up GDP. We care about it because the kinds of creatures who are in that society are the kinds of creatures that have the capacity to be free. Is that fair?
Like, why does it matter? Who does freedom matter to? Freedom doesn't matter to the sea. Does freedom matter to your dog? Does freedom matter to you? There's clearly a sense in which it makes sense to talk about you as free. I think there's a sense in which to talk about your dog as free, at least if you compare your dog with a little electronic dog. But talking about the sea as free doesn't make sense. Talking about Belgium as free only really matters if we're talking about what are the conditions that conduce within Belgium for the kinds of things for which freedom matters.
TYLER
Sure, the Belgians will be happier with a fair degree of freedom.
REBECCA
But again, happier. Is it just about happiness? No, I think we've already addressed that.
TYLER
No, but that's the single biggest and most important component is human well-being, that people flourish…
REBECCA
But the risk then is that...
TYLER
… and then sustainability. So free societies appear to be pretty good at defending themselves against their enemies. And that's critical. So you need enough wealth and GDP to buy defence and have alliances. And that's going to trump most other considerations, because if you're enslaved by someone else, it's just the end of the line and the debate, so to speak, is over.
REBECCA
So one of the objections, the republicans, these people who want to see freedom broadly as non-domination…
TYLER
You mean the philosophical republicans...
REBECCA
Yeah, I mean, that's right, the people like Tim Sellers, and Philip Pettit, Quentin Skinner. These people want to see that the notion of freedom that's operative or should be operative within the society is the idea of non-domination. So this is going further than non-interference. It's saying something like a lack of arbitrary interference.
And one objection they would have to the non-interference idea is something like, you've got the slave and the slave master, and the slave master seems terribly benevolent. Maybe the slave has all of the opportunities they want. Maybe they live a happy life in the sense of gaining access to the goods and services that they want. Maybe they can get married, all of these things.
But the republican objection is: any day now, the slave master could just on a whim, because they're having a bad day, impose some arbitrary restriction on the slave. One thing you could take from this objection is the suggestion that it's not just about how good your life looks. It's also about the power you have to determine stuff for yourself.
TYLER
It's too loose a concept. I also would point out it cannot handle what you might call children's rights at all, and especially in earlier societies where life expectancy is not long, being a child is a significant chunk of your life. Arguably, it's the most important part of your life. There's no way to avoid the sense that in some significant regards, children are dominated. You don't have to believe in hitting them or even spanking them.
But at the end of the day, their parents tell them what to do and discipline them and bring them up and sort of induce or force certain views on them. And that's inevitable. You could even say it's desirable. Maybe today we don't even do enough of it. And if you start with non-domination as fundamental, I just think you hit a huge mess. And a very important question.
REBECCA
I generally think that the children objections aren't as strong as people think they are. Largely because you can just deal with it by saying, look, a child isn't yet a fully reasoning creature. A child isn't yet the kind of creature that's capable of all of the things that we think, therefore, they should be treated as a free individual in themselves.
TYLER
I think they're incredibly smart. And none of us or few of us are willing to take the reductio that therefore say people with Down syndrome are not fully reasoning or have fewer rights. So we're pulling things out of a hat that we don't really need.
REBECCA
I totally agree. But I think you can deal with those problems by saying the person with Down syndrome, you can even go as far as to say the person in the coma, has rights qua being the kind of thing that has these capacities, whether they're just kind of potentially held. If you separate out the capacity from the exercise of the thing, which is one way I think you can get into thinking about what freedom means in terms of having freedom, as opposed to doing things freely or being free. So if you separate out the noun from the adjective or the adverb. Then you can deal with these objections by saying, look, the person in the coma is still a person. A person, with these capacities. And that's why you need to respect their rights. The risk...
TYLER
The word qua makes me nervous there. [Laughter.] I think I prefer the Straussian view that we're not sure what are the rights of people in comas, especially if they're probably never going to come out. But for slippery slope reasons, and because we want these strict lines around human life as a value, we're going to treat it that way. Though deep down, we're really pretty uncertain about the finally correct philosophic answer. That's how I would handle people in comas.
The word qua, you're getting into metaphysics. You're not going to win that battle. And then there's plenty of other intermediate cases. Like try considering abortion. It's a very tough issue. You inject the word qua into an abortion debate, you're not going to get anywhere.
REBECCA
Every time I say qua, Tyler, from now on in the rest of our lives, and as you know I think we're going to live forever, please just assume I'm meaning as, or in the state of, or something like that.
TYLER
But there's a reason why you pick the word qua. And this Aristotelian sense of these hidden potentialities that maybe, in no feasible universe can be realised, but you still want to invoke them. I'm probably opposed to that, but at the very least, it makes me too nervous to want to embrace it.
REBECCA
Okay, so if you just take a really simple approach in which you compare the person in the coma with the rock, there's a sense in which the person in the coma is much closer to the person outside of the coma than the rock. What are the qualities that these two things share? One way of approaching it is that they are the kind of thing that has these capacities, whether or not they exercise them. So a human being is the kind of distinct thing, like ontologically, that has these capacities.
TYLER
That’s so Aristotelian, come on. [Laughter.]
REBECCA
What's wrong with that? Isn't Aristotle the greatest thinker of all time?
TYLER
I'm more or less a nominalist. So the rock is an extreme example. But if you compare the human in a coma to a non-human animal, probably the non-human animal does better. But we do not completely protect their rights, or try to police nature, or promise never to take away their homes by building our homes and so on. So I think you'll find other examples that will defeat that attempt at a counter.
REBECCA
That's right, but if we're really strict in separating out the kind of definitional work, working out what kind of thing the human is, what kind of thing the dog is, what kind of thing the rock is, that seems to me a good starting point to thinking…
TYLER
There's just more Aristotelianism. I think one has to accept the fact, especially as biosciences advance and there's more genetic manipulation, more human evolution, different branches of people may change in different ways, there’s people with disabilities, we just need to accept some of these fine lines aren't there.
Then we need to decide where do we need to draw them. I would be pretty strict with that, because I worry about the actual logic and dynamic of coercive power as I observe it in the real world. But I don't want to rely on Aristotle there. I want to cite public choice theory for these strict lines.
REBECCA
OK, so let's take a step back. What kinds of things does freedom matter for then? You don't want to divide things up neatly into humans and dogs and rocks. Can we say something, though, like there are certain kinds of things in the world that it doesn't mean anything to say that freedom matters for those things?
TYLER
Freedom for rocks does not matter. Agree.
REBECCA
Why is that?
TYLER
What's a rock? It's a rock, right? Until we learn more about rocks, there are a few panpsychics running around out there, but they haven't persuaded me. And in the meantime, you can just kick a rock.
REBECCA
Why can you kick a rock? It seems to me like...
TYLER
Isn't that how they refuted Bishop Berkeley? [Laughter.] I refute him thus and he kicked the stone. It's fine to kick the stone.
REBECCA
Why is it fine to kick the stone, and not to kick the person in the coma or not to kick the baby or not to kick the dog? I think pretty quickly we're going to get onto something like it's living, and then we're going to want to make some kinds of distinctions like having intentions or being conscious.
Even you accept we're conscious, right?
TYLER
Right. Sure. Even I, except we're barely conscious, but we are a little bit. There might be some arguments in the biodiversity direction, but with the environment, where kicking the stone can be this big mistake. I'm still not persuaded of them, but I wouldn't rule them out entirely. I could imagine, you know, three years from now, maybe I'm persuaded by them. But that would still be viewing the rock in terms of some larger ecosystem. And the rock per se is not carrying the value.
REBECCA
Just one more attempt, though, at thinking about the kinds of things that can have freedom. Can a non-conscious thing be free? Does it mean something? If you compare your dog with the electronic dog, the little battery-operated dog running about, you might want to say something like, if nobody's constraining it, if nobody's interfering with the direction it runs in, you might want to say it's free. This seems to me crazy. Why is this crazy?
TYLER
I'm inclined to agree with the common sense intuition on intuitionist grounds, but part of me feels I don't understand consciousness well enough to hold that view too dogmatically. When you just ask, practically speaking, what is at stake? What's the actual decision we're trying to make? I think the problem will become more manageable.
So consciousness is maybe a matter of degree. Well, how conscious do you need to be? If someone's in the proverbial coma, as you cited before, well, what if there are some sputters on the EKG, but not very much? Are they conscious? That's going to push you back to a let's start with the concrete problems and work our way back from those. Where again, slippery slopes and public choice considerations will probably solve it better than metaphysics will.
REBECCA
So just sticking with metaphysics one last time, if you think about the person in the coma who responds to some kind of stimulus, the doctor hits their knee with a little hammer…
TYLER
And they will, right? Unless they're in very, very bad shape.
REBECCA
Presumably you don't want to say that's free action. Similarly, the little electronic dog with the battery operating it. It seems to me that if you're just responding to something, if you're passive in this sense — if the stone is rolling down the hill, or you're rolling down the hill because I push you at the top of the hill — I want to say that there's something about the kind of way in which you're moving, which can help us to determine whether it's free or not.
A classic answer would be here would be something to do with determining or causing. If you have immanent causation, if you can cause things for yourself, then this is necessary to freedom — at the extreme.
TYLER
You want to bring in more metaphysics, more Aristotle. I reserve that privilege to you, but I'm not personally inclined to do it myself. I think it will confuse us. And instead, to just focus on concrete questions like, what kinds of decisions can an actual legal system produce and sustain? That's how I would prefer to do it. But the philosophers are welcome to their Aristotle.
REBECCA
I still think there's a sense in which if we aren't the agents of change, if we aren't capable… I mean, you started by talking about positive freedom. So one reason people might care about positive freedom is they say, look, it's just not enough for there not to be barriers in the sense of interference or coercion or domination. You have to be able to control what you're doing for yourself. Whether that's in terms of project formation, whether that's in terms of having your own preferences that can be satisfied.
This to me speaks of being an agent in the sense of having some kind of capacity, some kind of control, at the extreme some kind of power to determine things. How do you have… Why does this positive sense of freedom matter if you think that the kind of thing that has it isn't something that can cause stuff?
TYLER
Well, people have a biological nature, and there's certain kinds of societies they're going to choose and others they won't choose. And if you're setting up a society that hardly anyone wants to choose, I don't think it will survive that well. I don't think it will defend itself. I don't think it will prosper.
REBECCA
But I think what I'm saying is this wanting to choose speaks to me of having some kind of power, being some kind of agent, being able to determine things for yourself.
TYLER
But your own choices are in turn determined by the preceding states of affairs. So I'm a determinist, you could say. So I'm not going to put a lot of stock in your freedom to choose as some autonomous being…
REBECCA
But you started off by talking about positive freedom, which has these implications.
TYLER
I don't think it does have the implications. It's just, where do people have good lives? They can choose professions they want, marry the people they want.
REBECCA
But what does it mean to choose if choice doesn't mean, if you don't have open choice in the sense that you could have gone for the other option, what does it mean to…
TYLER
You're part of the causal chain. But say if you live in the United States, there's 30 brands of ketchup on the shelf. And if you were back in old school communist China, there wasn't ketchup at all. And that's a big difference. And it really matters to people.
REBECCA
But does it matter at the level of you choosing? That's the question. It's not, are you going to have the better life? It's not, are you passively going to be the recipient of the better life…
TYLER
… no, it is are you going to have the better life? And will the society be stable? The you truly choosing it as some kind of intrinsic good, I'm like, eh, like you can all have that. You can put it on your list. It won't contradict what's on my list. But I'm not going to try to defend that in debate because I give some kind of priority to scientific knowledge. I think that supports some notion that's closer to what is usually called determinism.
REBECCA
It just sounds to me like you could have your whole world, this whole world, in terms of what there is and why it's valuable, without freedom.
TYLER
I don't think there's libertarian freedom of the will. So in my world, that does not exist under any system. That's right. I'm not a voluntarist in that regard.
REBECCA
So what work is this idea doing? When you say that you think about freedom in terms of positive freedom, are you just reducing it down to the good life? And if so, is that an objective sense of the good life?
TYLER
The word reducing, you're injecting in there. I'll say it's a cluster concept, and the good life is a very, very important part of it. I don't want to say that I'm reducing anything to anything else.
REBECCA
OK, so sometimes when people talk about positive freedom in terms of project formation, I think you can make a distinction between people who imply that the project can just be anything you want, anything goes. I think you could probably take Nozick as saying this. I mean, he talks about the socialist utopias, even though he doesn't value socialism. And then you have some other people, someone like Joseph Raz, who thinks autonomy is about having a good set of options, a reasonable set of options. Where does the objective good come into this idea of positive freedom?
TYLER
Objective good. Again, you're bringing in all these concepts. I would just say we have some core intuitions. One of them might be something like, America today is better than Albania used to be. They're catching up a little. I can't prove that. I can't ground it in metaphysics. I just feel if that's the weakest point of my argument, then I've won.
So if America today is better than Albania used to be with all those concrete bunkers, and you then work backwards from that, you'll get a lot of pretty concrete recommendations. And you can say human lives are better. People will prefer this. It's where people will migrate to. A bunch of very practical arguments for it. And I'm just going to stop there because I don't trust the metaphysics.
So I don't want to inject libertarian freedom in the philosophic sense as an argument for any of this because I don't believe in that freedom.
REBECCA
You could imagine a kind of zombie society, though, where people go around having what seem like more options, having what seems like better access to the bundle of goods, but without having any kind of these other concepts you're talking about, like choosing. Is that fair?
TYLER
I think it's an open question how much we are right now in any country, that kind of zombie society. We may be to a fair degree.
REBECCA
And this is because you think we only have a small amount of consciousness, or this is because you think we're overly constrained by certain bad things?
TYLER
All of the above. We're not sure how much real consciousness we have under either libertarian or determinist points of view, but I wouldn't want very much to rely on it. And people who do neuroscience, people who are neurosurgeons, they typically don't believe in much consciousness at all, and they deal with these matters directly. So...
REBECCA
When you're talking about consciousness, you mean the kind of classic phenomenological sense of consciousness?
TYLER
Yes.
REBECCA
In the sense of what it's like to be you?
TYLER
You know, the common thought experiment. Sometimes you walk or drive to work in the morning, and you feel when you got there, you weren't even aware that you were doing it, but you arrived perfectly well. And then you start to wonder, how much of my life really goes that way anyway, and I just have this gloss on top of things that made me feel like I was in control for some evolutionary reason. And we don't know how much of actual human existence is actually feeling you're in control, or just the illusion of feeling you're in control, not even feeling that at all. So just put that all aside.
REBECCA
I feel you're at risk, though, of conflating free will and consciousness.
TYLER
I'm a little skeptical about both, or a lot skeptical about both.
REBECCA
So, I'm with someone like Galen Strawson, I don't think you can know the answer about free will by thinking about your interior state. So, I don't know, since I was a kid, I like to do that thing where I'm going off to do something and I change my mind at the last minute, and it gives me some sense that I have free will. I do this all of the time. Going to some place for lunch, and I decide to go to another place for lunch. [Laughter.] And one reason I do that is because it gives me this sense that I'm free…
TYLER
That was instilled in you early, right…
REBECCA
…but I've also known since I was a kid that that's ridiculous. You cannot know that you have free will just because you make a choice at the last minute.
TYLER
That’s right.
REBECCA
What you can know, however, from your interior state, from your access to your interiority, is that you are conscious. You can't know that about anybody else. This is the great cost and the great benefit of having access to consciousness in that sense. You can only know it about yourself.
But you can't then take the same approach to free will. Because even if it's the case that the evil demon is controlling everything you do, and the things that you experience are not the things you think you experience, you're still experiencing something. So this is the response to the illusion objection to the interior knowledge of consciousness.
The same stuff just simply doesn't apply to free will. The only way we can think about whether we have free will or not is to make philosophical arguments about it of the kind you don't wanna make.
TYLER
It's true, I don't want to make them. The word consciousness or conscious makes me nervous. I view it as a matter of degree, and at what margin? The Cartesian argument or the transcendental argument that you can't deny consciousness altogether because you have to be conscious to do it, I accept that. It's a contradiction. But how much consciousness is there really? I think it's very much an open question.
REBECCA
You mean consciousness in the sense of how much awareness of yourself?
TYLER
Yes, yes.
REBECCA
Or what do you really mean? Because to me, the important thing seems to just literally be the threshold thing. Are you conscious or are you not? And I struggle to think that you can be a little bit conscious or a load conscious.
TYLER
You're a little bit conscious and it's a very little bit.
REBECCA
I feel like you're then creeping into other things like self-control, again coming on to the determinism thing. The question is, are you conscious or not? Is the rock conscious or not? Is the dog conscious or not?
TYLER
This is where we disagree. I think your inner brain is probably making these decisions before you have any awareness...
REBECCA
…but then again, we're on to free will…
TYLER
…and that same inner brain…
REBECCA
This is not consciousness. Again, again, we're onto free will again. Free will and consciousness are different things.
TYLER
I agree they're different, but I'm not talking about free will here. I'm talking about consciousness. You hardly have any. You get these bits of the epiphenomenon that are granted to you as a gift by nature, and they're quite small relative to all the decisions that get made.
REBECCA
Is this because you don't think that consciousness is a persistent thing? Is this because you think you're only self-aware some of the time?
TYLER
You're barely self-aware some of the time. And a lot of the time, you're probably not self-aware at all.
REBECCA
So what's going on in your mind most of the time? Are you not constantly aware of stuff?
TYLER
I'm not aware of it.
REBECCA
But surely you're aware just purely in the sense that, I don't know, you're eating the apple, you taste the apple. You feel the pain. It's not just when you fall down the hill that you get a scratch on your arm. You feel the pain. You feel stuff all of the time. Even if you're not thinking about it, you're still feeling it.
TYLER
I see the tiny corner of my mind that nature allows me to. And that you reach for pain as your example, I think supports my point, that it's the evolutionary process that decided, well, pain's one thing you'd better be aware of, or you might perish, and it doesn't let you be aware of much of the rest.
REBECCA
Yeah, but again, you're skipping the question, or you're changing on to a different question. This is why are we conscious, not are we conscious.
TYLER
It's how much are we conscious, and the answer's probably not that much. But a bit, and it's all we've got, so let's treasure it, right?
REBECCA
So trying to return again to freedom, what does this matter for freedom?
TYLER
Well, when you say this, what's the this?
REBECCA
Consciousness. How conscious we are. Would we be more free if we were more conscious?
TYLER
We might be.
REBECCA
What would that mean? What would that look like?
TYLER
Some people claim they can expand their degree of consciousness by meditating or by pondering Buddhist truths or by taking psychedelic drugs or doing all kinds of other things. You know, I'm very much for a competitive process and that kind of experimentation. I don't dismiss those claims. But at the end of the day, we still have to deal with the world where maybe most people aren't doing those things and they count too. And then you're back to these macro comparisons and there's better and worse societies and let's choose the better ones.
REBECCA
OK, so let's let's go back to this idea of societies. In which country do you feel the most free?
TYLER
The most free… Depends which freedom you're talking about. There are quite empty countries where, as a tourist, you would feel very free, but you wouldn't say the country's that free for people who live there. So if you're a white male in East Asia, you are remarkably free by a whole bunch of definitions. You can get away with breaking norms or even breaking laws. But the people who live there are not in the same position. So I might feel I'm most free, say, in Tokyo, but I wouldn't want to generalise that too far.
REBECCA
Yes. I mean, you spend time in the UAE or Saudi Arabia…
TYLER
And I'm pretty free in those places, though, again, not everyone is.
REBECCA
But if you're a woman, for instance, maybe you wouldn't feel so free.
TYLER
Yeah. Or, you know, a guest worker or whatever. Yeah.
REBECCA
Similarly, if you were a wine drinker…
TYLER
Well, I don't know. It depends where you are. But yes, possibly.
REBECCA
Is one reason you don't drink wine because you think you'd be less free?
TYLER
I'd be less productive. I wouldn't equate that with freedom, but I want to be more productive. It's one way of realising capabilities, and it gives me freedom longer term in other ways like earning income. So that's why I don't drink. I think red wine is very, very good, in fact, but I'd rather be productive.
REBECCA
Right. Because you can see I'm trying to smuggle back in again this idea of control, right. [Laughter.] Like, why is it you're more productive? Why is it you don't want to drink the wine? Because you would come up with worse outcomes. Your work wouldn't be so good. And I think one way of interpreting that is saying you'd have less control over your stuff.
TYLER
But just the simple empirical fact that people who've had two glasses of wine do not go back to work at 10 p.m., and I do. Whether it's a matter of deep metaphysical control, I'm not sure, but I observe the reality and the regularity, and I'm just not going to drink.
REBECCA
So continuing on about societies and freedom, there's a big tradition in political philosophy about thinking that the biggest constraint on our freedom is the state. Is that a good starting point? Has that changed with the rise of, I don't know… you think about big AI companies that have the power to have a large amount of impact on our lives, for instance. Is it still the case that we should be focusing on the state as the central constraint on our freedom within society?
TYLER
I don't think it's a good starting point. I think it's often the correct conclusion. But there's plenty of things that can make you less free. Crime would be an example. So if I'm in parts of Brazil or South Africa, I'm really not that worried about the state. I'm very worried about crime. I'm pretty sure that's rational. Pandemics, which sometimes could be the result of state behaviour, but in general they're not. And those can be big restrictions on your freedom.
But that said, there's a long list of countries in world history where, yes, the state is the greatest danger to your freedom.
REBECCA
You could reduce even though some of those things down, you could say crime is a result of state control. If you want to say that…
TYLER
But it's lack of state control, not in every case, but in many cases.
REBECCA
And what about economics. Do you think it makes sense to talk about economic freedoms? To separate out economic freedoms from, say, political freedoms? Is that a…
TYLER
I don't know what the phrase separate out means. They're different things. They're roughly correlated. It's very important to have both, I think.
REBECCA
Do you think that a place that some people might describe as economically free is truly economically free if you have a reduced amount of political and civil freedoms?
TYLER
I would say it's still truly economically free, but there's other important things you're missing.
REBECCA
So for instance, if you take economically free to be something like having a sure sense of your property rights, maybe having opportunities to work, these kind of core economic activities…
TYLER
…to start a business.. Right.
REBECCA
If that could be taken away at the whim of the government, and you have no chance to hold the government to account, is it really the sense that you're economically free?
TYLER
Well, when you say that could be taken away, I would reframe the question as, what's the probability it will be taken away? If there's no political freedom, or even if there is political freedom, typically it can in fact be taken away. And often in politically free societies, it is taken away. So for economic freedom, I think just how secure is it? Like how would the asset be priced, would be the question you would ask. And there are political tyrannies that are fairly predictable and reasonably economically free. And they have some good features and then a lot of very bad features.
REBECCA
Is it fair to say that some libertarians and many socialists are brought together by focusing too hard on freedom as access to financial resources?
TYLER
I don't think that's the wrong focus, so I would be one of those people. It's correlated with many other good things. There have been some studies about GDP figures, how well do they predict other humanitarian goals and outcomes, rights of different groups, and so on. And the correlation depends on your data set and so on, but it can be like 0.95 or higher.
So it's a big mistake to say that's the only thing that matters. But again, as a practical decision-making guide, it's way underrated. GDP is way underrated as an indicator.
REBECCA
So when we talk about things like what matters, there's a broad sense in which we're talking about what's valuable. Some people think about freedom primarily as a moral concern, as some kind of abstract normative notion like equality or justice. If we want to say what is its core concern, you might want to say something like, look, equality is about distribution. You might want to say justice is about rights recognition. Just to go back to the original question about what freedom is, what is the kind of core concern of that normative notion when we talk about freedom as a value?
TYLER
There's so many different kinds of freedom. You want a set of bundles of freedom that will give you high human well-being and sustainability, would be my answer. Which parts of freedom are important for that will depend on questions like, do you need to crack down on crime? Are you in the midst of a pandemic? Are you fighting a war against Nazi Germany?
But for a given situation, I think you can reasonably well figure out which matter. But look, sometimes you need things like a military draft or treat children a certain way. I don't think there's ever much justice in any penal system I've ever seen. There probably never will be. And at some margins, you have to accept some of that.
REBECCA
Are military drafts ever justified?
TYLER
Sure. When you are fighting a tyranny that otherwise will beat you and would take away far more of your liberties.
REBECCA
What about constraints on freedom, as types of punishment? Is prison justified?
TYLER
Not usually. I think it's justified to put Charles Manson in prison because he very clearly was intending to kill other people. But I've never bought the Lockean notion of rights forfeiture just because you've done something wrong.
But nonetheless, there are practical reasons why, at least so far, it's been hard to dispense with prisons. I'd like to think we'll have a future where there's a manageable form of surveillance that does not have a slippery slope problem. I'm not convinced there will be. I have a very open mind on this. I might just decide, no, that'll never be possible.
I think a lot about exile. But when you study the empirics of exile, it's not as neat and clean as it sounds. And often you're throwing people into a situation worse than prison. But sometimes exile has worked. So I'm willing to entertain exile. If you simply send someone to the older Australia, that may have been the best solution in a lot of those cases. But simply, oh you know, you robbed a bank, so we're putting you on a rocket ship to Mars, and then there you asphyxiate… Exile's a bit overrated by people who like to talk about it, I would say. But I'm all for it when it works.
REBECCA
So you're for it when it works. I think what you mean by that is when the person is no longer able to harm the other people that they were intending to harm, or something like that.
TYLER
And it should be less of a punishment than something like jail.
REBECCA
Yeah. So I mean, I have this view that I think you can separate out prison as punishment from prison as self-defence.
TYLER
I don't think we can do that yet. Again, we might be able to in the future with surveillance. But there's just a lot of petty criminals that if you don't lock them up, they'll keep on committing crimes, and you'll end up in the longer run with even more people in prison. Because voters hate crime and ultimately they're willing to do a lot to get rid of it. And you can't just bend that constraint in ways you might wish to.
REBECCA
But again, if you're locking them up in order to prevent them from stealing from people, that doesn't have to be done for a punitive reason.
TYLER
Right. Yeah, in my view, it would be a utilitarian reason, not a punitive one. I don't really believe in punitive punishment at all. So I wouldn't have put punitive punishment on Charles Manson, but I would have locked him up.
REBECCA
Okay, so you brought up utilitarianism. I'm going to try and keep this a bit brief because I get a bit obsessed talking about these things. Can you be a utilitarian if you really value freedom?
TYLER
If you're a pure utilitarian, you do not value freedom. But you can value freedom and think utility and well-being are the most important goods in most circumstances.
REBECCA
Is that because utilitarians don't really value anything?
TYLER
Well, they value utility.
REBECCA
Do they?
TYLER
But I think they're confused as to what utility means. There's not a single thing, utility, like you read off a thermometer. It's a bunch of different values which you aggregate by making value judgments outside the scale of mere utility. So it's itself parasitic on non-utilitarian moral philosophy.
REBECCA
So I think parasitic is a really great word to use when we talk about consequentialist theories because generally they take some moral concern, even some moral theory, and they instrumentalise it to come to particular ends, in order to determine what the right is, or what is right and wrong. So on that sense, I don't think even utilitarians even really truly value utility.
TYLER
But the word truly, I mean, that makes me nervous. Truly! Really! I don't know. They say they value it. They would pass a lie detector test. Are they inconsistent? Yes. Do they miss the fact that their theory is parasitic on considerations they want to exclude? Yes. But I think they truly value it.
REBECCA
There’s a risk that that ends up thinking about utilitarianism as something that people do, rather than a theory that is supposed to tell us truths about the world. I mean, most of the classic utilitarians, if you think of someone like Jeremy Bentham, they don't really think that utilitarianism is a practical guide for living.
TYLER
Right.
REBECCA
They think it's a way that you can assess what people have done.
TYLER
There's some Strauss in Bentham. And to me, it also makes more sense as a way of just ranking social outcomes. When it's instructional… everything's game theory, right? And then there's an infinite or near infinite number of solution concepts or equilibria, whatever. It's just a mess. You don't really know what people should do because it depends what others should do.
REBECCA
Yeah, so there are some practical criticisms to this end. We just don't have the epistemic power to be able to look into the future and know what the outcomes are going to be, but...
TYLER
But even with that epistemic power, there's interdependency. Like, who should make the sacrifice? Well, does everyone have to play random Nash? Or what if there's this large number of equilibria? You know the whole structure of the game, but you still don't know which is the right equilibrium. You're still stuck.
REBECCA
Before we move on to one final question, I just want to ask one last question down this value line. So a controversial view I hold is that I think it's valuable to do things freely. I think freedom is intrinsically valuable in the sense that whenever you do anything freely, there's some value there. One obvious objection to this is that it risks assigning value to doing something awful. So if you say, hey, look, there's value always in doing things freely, you have to say there's value in freely torturing somebody.
Is this a wrong view?
TYLER
I don't think it's wrong. I think it's a good contrarian view to hold. As you know, it was quite common in late 19th century, early 20th century, philosophy that there was something exhilarating about great crimes. The great crimes are still terrible. They're great crimes, they're completely wrong. But to think there is some good in them because people are being real or free in some way, I don't reject that. I want to cover that truth up. Though I'm not doing that right now, I suppose. But there's an argument to be made for it.
But it's again one of these cases where what really matters is the slippery slope and the political economy considerations. And you don't want anyone believing that. But if you want to say it's true, I'll just sit here and, like, smile.
REBECCA
So again, you're going to criticise me for being a metaphysician [laughter] but the reason that I think this is the case is because I think you can separate out doing something freely from not doing it freely. Therefore, the value of the thing you do freely doesn't have to be contingent on the value of the thing itself.
TYLER
It could just be humans can be all sorts of different things, and there's a diversity of human experience. And it's somehow a more beautiful world, though it can be more terrible, if that full panoply of human possibilities for expression are realised to some degree. And there's a way of giving it some value, not net value to be clear, but giving it some value without relying on some very specific metaphysical notion of freedom.
REBECCA
Okay, so one final question. If we've exhausted, I think we probably have exhausted, some of these philosophical attempts to strictly define freedom, are there any art objects that do a good job of telling us what freedom is?
TYLER
The entirety of art as a whole does an incredible job of telling us what freedom is. But if you're asking me to get more specific, I would find much of that in Beethoven, for instance, or the German romantics. Not all of their notions of freedom being entirely happy are good ones, but nonetheless different notions of freedom in German romanticism. More in music than in painting, say.
Let me give you a sense of where I think we've arrived at, and tell me if you agree. See if this is some kind of constructive progress. You want to defend societies based on freedom with some kind of metaphysics and you want to build up that metaphysics. I want to defend societies based on freedom, which are roughly the same societies as you want to defend, with a minimum of metaphysics. I'm always trying to push the metaphysics out the door. So a lot of this conversation has been Rebecca drags in the metaphysics…
REBECCA
This is my life! You know this!
TYLER
… and then Tyler… the baseball is thrown at him, he sort of quickly has it in his hands, and then tosses it to the other side of the room. Metaphysics, get away! And then Rebecca is frustrated because the metaphysics are gone and she throws more metaphysics at him. And that's what we've been doing. Is that a fair characterisation of, you know, the show so far, as they call it?
REBECCA
Yeah, I think it is, because I don't think it makes sense to talk about freedom unless you're talking about the kinds of things that have freedom or that freedom matters for.
TYLER
I don't think we'll ever settle metaphysics, and I doubt if current humans are smart enough to settle metaphysics, even if it can in principle be settled, which I'm not sure of.
REBECCA
But there's a difference between settling metaphysics in the sense of determining what the truths are about metaphysics and saying, hey, this is a metaphysical notion that we need some space for in our description of the world.
TYLER
Again, I'll let you put it on your list. But the fact that most humans clearly prefer the freer societies when they have the choice, and they're not aware of these metaphysics, to me suggests there's some considerable independence for the case for freedom without needing much metaphysics.
REBECCA
I think you're then confusing metaphysics with epistemology. You're saying are people aware of what it is to be free rather than are the people free? I think you can be free without being aware that you're free. We come back to the kind of KK problem. Do you have to know something to know that you know it? It's the same thing about freedom.
TYLER
But people simply know they and their kids, grandkids, will be better off in one set of places than another. And it's not that metaphysically laden. I don't want to say there's zero metaphysics in that judgment.
REBECCA
I just want to say, though, there's something particular within the notion of being better off as the kind of creature that has the capacity to be free, as opposed to the kind of thing that doesn't have the capacity to be free.
TYLER
I think we want to look for the most metaphysically stripped down notion of that that we can manage to create, not the more metaphysically laden notion. And on that, we still probably disagree.
REBECCA
I think that's probably true.
So to finish off in that I have promised, and I know it's, I find it amusing to have a philosophy podcast in which I'm trying to produce some kind of product. What is the answer in one sentence that we should leave our listeners with? It doesn't have to be one you agree with or I agree with, because I think as free creatures, we're going to keep disagreeing about this forever. What would you say is a good starting point for someone trying to get into this complicated conversation about what freedom is?
TYLER
To consider the notion of how much...
REBECCA
This is already too long, no, no, no! Freedom is… It's really, really hard, isn't it? It's really, really hard.
TYLER
But it's the wrong approach. So if you ask GPT-5 or Claude or the next generation of models, what's freedom? They'll give you an answer you can't beat, because they're good and smart and they've read a lot…
REBECCA
So what would that kind of answer…
TYLER
…but the answer doesn't tell you much.
REBECCA
So for instance, I would be happy to just simply go with something like: to do stuff of your own accord.
TYLER
I think it's just question begging. It's assuming all this metaphysics that makes me nervous. And I think that the critical point is…
REBECCA
But there are other concepts, core concepts within philosophy, that I think you would be happy to come up with some working starter definition. I think if we were talking about fairness, you'd probably say something about, I don't know, the relational concept of burdens and benefits, or something. But you're not happy…
TYLER
Oh! No, I'm not happy with fairness. I'm less happy with fairness. [Laughter] Nothing's fair, in my view.
REBECCA
But saying nothing's fair means that you have an idea of what fairness is! [Laughter]
TYLER
Under any notion of fairness, nothing's fair. I'm going to be brutal on fairness.
REBECCA
But I'm just saying in terms of if somebody, if a kid came up to you and said, hey, Tyler, you're a smart dude, what is fairness? I think you probably have some bash at saying some answer to that. Whereas it seems like you're not willing to get off the ground on the freedom thing…
TYLER
No, I think I have pretty symmetric attitudes on a lot of these metaphysical concepts.
REBECCA
Symmetric attitudes! [Laughter] I mean, I love this stuff, you know I do. But this is not helping the poor kid! The kid's like, Tyler, Tyler, what is symmetric? And then you give him an answer to that. But you're not willing to give him an answer on the freedom thing.
TYLER
My goal isn't really to help the kid. I would go to the kid and say, start by reading Plato. [Laughter] Ask GPT-5 for additional reading lists.
REBECCA
Okay, so what is GPT-5's answer? You said you think GPT-5 would come up with a good answer to this. What is that if you said, give the kid the simplest answer, which is going to help them get off the ground thinking about freedom, as opposed to thinking about justice, as opposed to thinking about potatoes, as opposed to thinking about bananas. Freedom is...
TYLER
It will give you a survey answer with a lot of branches that is hard to beat but hardly tells you anything. And I don't intend that as a criticism of the models. I think in a sense they're giving you the right answer. I once said to an interviewer, I'm not that interested in the meaning of life, but I'm very interested in what other people think about the meaning of life. And I think there's some wisdom in that.
REBECCA
But why are you interested in what they think about it if you're not interested in it?
TYLER
Because it helps you understand the social world. And if you understand the social world a bit, you can improve it at some margins.
REBECCA
I feel like this is just going to reduce down though, because the reasons you care about the social world is because you care about these things… [Laughter]
TYLER
I have an intuitive notion of human well-being. It's somewhat intuitive. I try to strip it of as much metaphysics as possible and I feel most people will choose it, and I prefer it, and I'm willing to act on that basis.
REBECCA
But you're not willing to say that well-being is the same thing as freedom.
TYLER
Correct. I'm not willing to say that. I would be willing to say the contrary…
REBECCA
…why not?
TYLER
…because I'm not even sure what you mean by freedom. But it's a list of things with 57 different notions. And Amartya Sen’s is sitting at the bottom of the list at number 57, but is still on the list. And it's not identical with well-being.
REBECCA
Can you be a liberal if you don't care about freedom?
TYLER
Again, so many concepts! Don't care about, care about at what margin? If you don't care at all about it, probably not. Like how liberal do you have to be? I would say you will typically find liberals who at some margins are willing to sacrifice freedom and that can be okay.
REBECCA
Well, I think for a podcast on freedom, we've had a pretty free discussion. So, Tyler Cowen, thanks very much.
TYLER
Rebecca Lowe, thank you.
POST-MORTEM
REBECCA
I forget what Sam said to do…
TYLER
I think he said he'll be back or something.
REBECCA
Oh, man, I'm really sorry. I feel like I'm not on top form.1
TYLER
No, I thought it was a good episode.
REBECCA
Yeah, I think it was actually.
TYLER
I don't know what you're aiming for, but…
REBECCA
No, I think that was good. I mean, my goal basically with these episodes is just to show people what doing philosophy is.
TYLER
Yeah.
REBECCA
And I think there are many different ways of doing that. So when I had Tom Hoenig on, and he basically talked about his topic, which is transparency, in terms of his personal experiences, in terms of what the expectations were for him to be transparent — that's one route into doing this. And then I had Josh Ober, and Josh Ober totally played my game of necessary conditions and definitions. But I think also what we did is also another way of doing philosophy.
TYLER
For people to see how a more metaphysically laden view contrasts with a metaphysically minimal view is... part of what it is.
REBECCA
I think that's exactly right.
TYLER
And we each represented those views, right?
REBECCA
This is right.
TYLER
Yeah.
REBECCA
I also think it does speak to the kind of the flaw in the concept of my podcast. If my concept of my podcast is working together to come up with a definition, one obvious objection to that is, well, what if you don't agree about the thing?
TYLER
Right.
REBECCA
But I think that's absolutely fine. Like, it's just a way into doing some philosophy. That's my goal. I don't know any other podcast where people actually do philosophy. I know podcasts where people talk about some other person's view.
TYLER
Yes.
REBECCA
I'm really glad that we didn't do a whole, you know, Nozick says this, this person says this. I mean, there's a world in which we did that…
TYLER
It's just taxonomy.
REBECCA
That's right. But it's also just less interesting. This person said these things about this important topic. Like, so what, on some level? What matters, again you're going to criticise me on this [laughter] but I think what matters is whether they're right, whether it's true. But you're absolutely right to criticise me for doing that, because this is where philosophers get it wrong, thinking that just because they've thought about something, they know the answers, or thinking that they can have some...
TYLER
As a nominalist, I'm less focused on definitions and more wanting to turn questions into what measurement of which variable could settle this.
REBECCA
Exactly. Whereas I think philosophy for me is thinking about things in relation to other things. Like what is the thing? How does it relate to this other thing? What does it tell us about our experience in the world? But obviously there are some pretty serious constraints on this. If you're a skeptic… If you think we don't really know anything about the stuff around us…
TYLER
But I'm not a skeptic. I think in a way you're more of a science skeptic than I am.
REBECCA
I think you're a skeptic in the sense of thinking we don't necessarily have access to truths…
TYLER
Through abstract reasoning, right. But I'm not skeptical about science per se. Like the bridge will stand up or fall down.
REBECCA
For sure. But that’s different…
TYLER
…you can include this discussion in the podcast if you want, by the way! It's fully up to you, but I think you should include this post-mortem. [Laughter]
REBECCA
Okay.
TYLER
I think all of my podcasts would be better if I could include the pre-mortem and the post-mortem. And listeners would like it a lot because people are talking like real people.
REBECCA
All right, so we should totally include this! Is there anything else that we haven't covered in our postmortem?
TYLER
Well, I don't think anything you said surprised me, per se. Would you say I said anything that surprised you?
REBECCA
That's a great question. No, I think I pretty much could have been you, actually. I think I could have done this.
TYLER
And do we take that as a good or a bad sign?
REBECCA
I think it's quite a good sign in the sense, I think, for two reasons. One, your point around, I think it's valuable for people to see different approaches. Also, because I think there's a sense in which… I'm going to sound like some woke person… we're being authentic. [Laughter] The reason, of course, I care about that, though, is because I do buy into that kind of project pursuit thing. I do buy into the sense of us determining what the good is for ourselves, of having some sense of there is a Rebecca-ness. If Rebecca just parrots what other people say, or if Rebecca doesn't say what Rebecca's thinking, there's some loss there.
TYLER
But should podcasts really just be recorded hour-long, whatever-long, lunch conversations? And then ex post you decide whether or not you can actually release it. But you try to have the genuine lunch conversation and don't record a podcast at all.
REBECCA
Yeah. So, actually, I do think this podcast would have been better if I had just focused less on the things that I was aiming to get us to talk about.
TYLER
I'm not sure. It could also be you need the structure, the semi-phony structure up front…
REBECCA
Yeah, that's right…
TYLER
But then when you mix that with the post-mortem or possibly pre-mortem, then maybe that's what works the best.
REBECCA
I think this is right. I do think one difficult thing about hosting a podcast, which you don't have so much just in a free-flowing conversation, is this need to constantly be aware of what is the audience getting out of it.
TYLER
Right. And if you look at market tests, like take an NBA game, which has announcers, they don't say to each other what they would say if they were watching the game casually.
REBECCA
Yeah.
TYLER
Because the audience might think they want that, but the audience doesn't want that. So the market test is saying we do need to do podcasts. But maybe at the margin, if I can reintroduce my favourite concept [laughter] we need a bit more spontaneous postmortem. But now that we know it's going to be used, it's not spontaneous anymore, is it?
REBECCA
That’s right. So I think if we'd just been having this conversation over lunch, I might not, for instance, have brought up the republican conception of non-domination... [laughter] Personally, I think that the use of arbitrary in there is kind of stupid. I don't really think there that the concern is with arbitrary power, I think it's with unaccountable power, for instance. But I felt as if our listeners should have some idea of that pretty important conception of freedom within political philosophy.
TYLER
I also understood all of the words you said. And I wasn't sure I would, given accents and the like. Because when I watch British television it's helpful to me when the subtitles are on.
REBECCA
You said a while back that you had improved your understanding of the things I say by two percent. This sounds like it's gone up by loads…
TYLER
No, my interpretation would sooner be that when you're doing a podcast, you put on a bit more of a BBC style accent or voice. [Laughter] Not that my understanding of anything is…
REBECCA
You're absolutely right. I grew up in a house where Radio 4 played all of the time.
TYLER
Yeah.
REBECCA
And when I listen back to these things, I'm like, man, I'm trying to be a Radio 4 person.
TYLER
Anyway, end of postmortem!
I’ve had horrible hay fever all week.
