Great interview! Agreed with Tyler that positive/negative is the key distinction, though I also think negative freedom tends to have priority.
One distinction I’ve been pondering is “more free to do things” versus “free to do more things.”If McDonald’s expands their menu, you can buy new stuff—you’re now free to do more things. But you’re not more free to do any of the things that were possible before.
This seems to be the essence of “positive freedom,” i.e. having more opportunities. You’re free to do more things. Negative freedoms, by contrast, just protect you with respect to some options you already had—you’re more free to do the same old things.
Also I love that panpsychism and Berkeley came up. Tyler really is a philosopher at heart!
So for Tyler, the value of freedom is instrumental. It is a means to the end of prosperity (or whatever), and if unfreedom somehow led to greater prosperity, he might value unfreedom instead. But luckily, he claims, freedom empirically leads to more prosperity than unfreedom.
I think it's a bit epistemologically unfair to say we cannot trust metaphysical inquiry into freedom but we can act as though empirical inferences about it will always hold. And if his determinism admits of no objective value in freedom, then it denies the same to prosperity.
So he's ultimately left with intuition or a common sense assumption that prosperity is better than non-prosperity. But by that point, he loses most of the normative force for valuing prosperity (or freedom, or anything) in the first place.
no caste-system or speaker-based laws, no school uniforms, no licenses, no background checks, no waiting periods, no excise taxes, bodily autonomy--no conscription
Interesting dynamic in this social exchange. Can't help but conclude that Rebecca and Tyler were talking past each other. Not unexpected when the exchange is purely ideational. Would be different if both parties were confronted by a collective problem and had to engage in a cooperative social act to resolve the problem. Am referring here to negotiation of meaning that must occur to generate a pragmatic truth that is purely time and context bound...unlike a Truth that is believed to be universal. The discussion of consciousness could then have been considered in terms of self-consciousness...perhaps as GH Mead would view the mental process (involving an I-Me dialectic within self and between selves during the social act). Tyler is on the right track that most of life is lived in a non-self-conscious manner (determinism?), self-consciousness arising only when significant problems are encountered where choice (freedom?) enters the picture.
Great interview! Agreed with Tyler that positive/negative is the key distinction, though I also think negative freedom tends to have priority.
One distinction I’ve been pondering is “more free to do things” versus “free to do more things.”If McDonald’s expands their menu, you can buy new stuff—you’re now free to do more things. But you’re not more free to do any of the things that were possible before.
This seems to be the essence of “positive freedom,” i.e. having more opportunities. You’re free to do more things. Negative freedoms, by contrast, just protect you with respect to some options you already had—you’re more free to do the same old things.
Also I love that panpsychism and Berkeley came up. Tyler really is a philosopher at heart!
So for Tyler, the value of freedom is instrumental. It is a means to the end of prosperity (or whatever), and if unfreedom somehow led to greater prosperity, he might value unfreedom instead. But luckily, he claims, freedom empirically leads to more prosperity than unfreedom.
I think it's a bit epistemologically unfair to say we cannot trust metaphysical inquiry into freedom but we can act as though empirical inferences about it will always hold. And if his determinism admits of no objective value in freedom, then it denies the same to prosperity.
So he's ultimately left with intuition or a common sense assumption that prosperity is better than non-prosperity. But by that point, he loses most of the normative force for valuing prosperity (or freedom, or anything) in the first place.
no caste-system or speaker-based laws, no school uniforms, no licenses, no background checks, no waiting periods, no excise taxes, bodily autonomy--no conscription
I don’t like you using the “mortem” here because nobody, indeed, died but, instead, you have given life to a very nice
podcast. Can you therefore, please, refer to the brackets of the podcast as “foreplay” and “afterglow” going forward?
Interesting dynamic in this social exchange. Can't help but conclude that Rebecca and Tyler were talking past each other. Not unexpected when the exchange is purely ideational. Would be different if both parties were confronted by a collective problem and had to engage in a cooperative social act to resolve the problem. Am referring here to negotiation of meaning that must occur to generate a pragmatic truth that is purely time and context bound...unlike a Truth that is believed to be universal. The discussion of consciousness could then have been considered in terms of self-consciousness...perhaps as GH Mead would view the mental process (involving an I-Me dialectic within self and between selves during the social act). Tyler is on the right track that most of life is lived in a non-self-conscious manner (determinism?), self-consciousness arising only when significant problems are encountered where choice (freedom?) enters the picture.