 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Today we're talking about the new book, Why Not Capitalism? And we're joined by the author, Professor Jason Brennan of Georgetown University. Welcome back to Free Thoughts. Hi, thanks for having me again. So your book is a response to a fairly famous little book by the philosopher G.A. Cohen called Why Not Socialism and in that book Cohen makes a form of an argument that a lot of people tend to find pretty plausible and that's that capitalism may work and it may deliver the goods but it doesn't hold the moral high ground over socialism. The idea is that if we were all just better people we'd be socialists but we're not so we aren't. And Cohen's contribution to this though is to tell it by way of an analogy to a camping expedition. Can you tell us what? Yeah, that's right. You hit it on the head. So I want to respond to Cohen but I think of him as really even though he's a Marxist he's onto something that almost everybody thinks. Like this idea almost everyone believes that that sort of utopia would be capitalist. If we were – I'm sorry, utopia would be socialist. If we were good people we would be socialist. When people say like nice great theory wrong species or something like that. That's right. They're saying this is a good idea but – Yeah, but we're just not good enough for it. So he says like you know imagine you're on a camping trip among friends and you're really genuine friends with one another. He's like you might all bring different objects there that you personally own but you wouldn't like sit there and assert your rights against one another. You wouldn't try to make a profit off of one another. Rather you'd have kind of a common goal of everyone having a good time. You'd try to share the duties in an equitable way. You wouldn't free ride off of one another or take advantage of one another. You wouldn't try to hold power over the other person. And you would just kind of share everything in a sort of egalitarian way. And he says and now if you imagine like that same camping trip with people acting the way they do in capitalism it would be really awful. So he says you know imagine there's a person who has special knowledge of how to crack nuts and he's willing to crack more nuts for people but only if he gets a bigger dinner than everybody else or imagine there's a person who's good at fishing and she's willing to do extra fishing but only if she gets out of doing latrine duties. And there are all these other kinds of behaviors like that that we see in capitalism. He says if the camping trip had the behaviors that we see in the market it would be a disgusting camping trip or a repugnant camping trip. You wouldn't want the camping trip to be like that. And it's clearly right. The way that he describes the socialist version is definitely a better camping trip than what he's calling the so-called capitalist version. So then he just says okay wouldn't it be better if the whole world were like that like the socialist version of the camping trip? Like leave aside the question of whether it's possible. Wouldn't just be desirable if we could do that to do it. Is that a I guess accurate picture of socialism though? I mean does it make sense to make the move from so we've got a camping trip where all of us are sharing things to now socialism which is… I'm sure the Soviet Union was just like a camping trip. Well but not even like real world socialism but just socialism ideally still isn't everyone sharing everything. It's turning over ownership to a group of people who then tell us what to do with it or putting it in the hands of everyone voting which is effectively the same thing because it's still an impersonal sort of thing that doesn't look much like the camping trip. Yeah he thinks it is. He thinks it's like in the camping trip you're effectively relinquishing your control rights to the group. And you still have a say and it's not like really interesting to the government. It's really anarchistic but sort of a democratic anarchistic. Like we decide together how the burdens are going to be distributed and how the benefits are going to be distributed. And he says like look in the real world if we do that kind of thing people will take advantage of it. They're going to be nasty. They'll free ride on one another. They'll be moral hazard. But at least ideally speaking if we were good, if we were the way that like everyone thinks we ought to be including the capitalists and the socialists then those problems wouldn't exist. So he says effectively it would be socialism because everything would be owned in common. So Cohen seems to think that basically all the people who weren't fully buying into socialism are most the predominant theorists including Rawls. I know he would are just making concessions to the fact that we're not as good as we wish we were. So in pure theory we need to be doing socialism. Yeah that's exactly right. So he thinks Cohen at the end of his life with this book and another book he published called Rescuing Justice and Equality. He says basically the reason that all other philosophers are so sanguine about markets even people who are on the left like Rawls is that he thinks they're dumbing down justice to accommodate bad facts about human nature. So as a matter of fact in the real world when we create institutions we need to do that. But when we're talking about what justice requires he says a just society is one in which everybody is just and is motivated by moral norms. So if you're in a world in which people are raping one another there's a world of injustice you're not talking about a just society anymore. If you're in a world in which people are stealing from each other abusing power it's an unjust society. A just society is one in which everyone does the right thing. So he says a lot of the arguments that people use including Adam Smith including Bernard Mandeville including my mentor David Schmitz arguments that people use on behalf of private property markets are based upon the fact that people are bad. So like take for example my mentor David Schmitz. He has this famous paper called The Institution of Private Property and he basically says the reason we have to have private property is because if we don't we'll lead to something called the Tragedy of the Commons where people will overuse and exploit and destroy the resource and we won't leave enough for future generations. It's like that's a really good economic argument but it only applies in a world full of bad people. In a world of morally perfect people you wouldn't have any use for that. That would not be a justification. It wouldn't matter anymore. You think so Cohen would say the way we look at justice should be is this pure thing and work to get it. So we believe that the best world is the one where no one gets murdered and that's what the perfectly moral world and with other things too and we shouldn't make concessions to people murder. We should be like no it's always one to murder. Stop murdering. And notice he's not talking about you might say like let's define terms like heaven is a world in which everyone is morally perfect and also there is no limits to physics perhaps. Like you can change anything about physics if you want to just what will be the best possible universe from a moral point of view. But he's talking more about what we might call utopia. Utopia is you keep the facts about human beings their abilities the same. You don't give them superpowers. You don't change their brains or anything like that. However you just imagine that everyone has perfect moral motivation. It's like you're not asking them to do things that they like in that world that the world is in some sense easily attainable even though it will never happen because you're not asking people to do things they couldn't do. You're just asking to do things they don't want to do. Like people could be nice. They're just not. They could be less cruel. They're just not. They could do the right thing. They're just not willing to do so. And so you know people might think he's very utopian in some sense but you know calling him utopian concedes the moral high ground. And that's the problem. If you say you're utopian he's like yep and I'm right. Like this is what morality requires. You've already admitted these right. Yeah. Is this included in this perfect morality then? Is there something like perfect knowledge? Is he moralized knowledge? Because none of that even perfect morality isn't going to get around say the socialist calculation problem. Because we've got say we've got the camping trip. The issue with the camping trip is we all have that really immediate knowledge of each other's needs. And so we can kind of share and coordinate. But one of the powerful arguments for markets is when you expand outwards we don't have that sort of knowledge. And so we need something like prices to coordinate goods. Yeah. That's really good question. You know there's two questions about knowledge here. One is could you be mistaken about morality in a non culpable way. And Cohen just seems to assume without much argument not that like the people in the in you know his utopia will always do the right thing for the right reason and know what they're doing. And they'll never sort of be a mistake about what ethics requires. However and there might be philosophers who can test that. I don't contest that. I just let him have that. But actually on his like you know to his credit he accepts the socialist calculation problem. He says elsewhere not in this book that what he calls bourgeois economics what the rest of us just call economics is basically sound and he says like you can't have wide scale central planning. There's no way that's going to work like wide scale democratic planning the entire economy is not going to work. So he says what he thinks. However he's not convinced that market socialism won't work. He says a lot of people especially the kind of people inclined to listen to this think that market socialism isn't going to work. But he says people like Romer and what's the other guy at Toronto whose name I can't remember. Like but there are a number of like economists out there like a small number of them who think that they've overcome the objections to market socialism and Cohen doesn't say for sure that they're right. He just says we are not right now in a position to know for sure that market socialism won't work. So he says maybe what we really need is market socialism instead of some evolutionary attempt to figure it out. For people who aren't familiar with the term what is market socialism. Yeah you know I've read a lot of the market socialist stuff and I'm not really sure either to be honest but it's something like in order to get the calculation to get economic calculation we need to have prices and so we're going to have private like kind of semi private derivatives that work together and produce things and then they're going to sell things on the market however and so there will be market prices and so on but then like the value the profit that's created from that is all going to be shared equally among everybody. So it's kind of it's supposed to be a halfway house between pure socialism and markets. It's supposed to get the benefits of both. I guess that's about as good as I've ever heard of a definition. Yeah now functionality is a little bit different than that too. Okay so he gives this story of socialism on a camping trip and then you counter with a story of your own about friendly mice and ducks. Yeah that's right. So I have a towards the end of the book I have like an explanation a philosophical explanation of why I think he's wrong but I start with a parody of it and I use the children's TV show the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse not the Mickey Mouse Club with the Netfune Cello in the 1950s but the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse which is a CGI animated cartoon that's on TV right now and what I realized was going on was like Cohen was basically imagining a sort of perfect cute like a morally perfect social society and then comparing that to real life capitalism and I said what he needs to do is compare utopian socialism with utopian capitalism but is there such a thing as utopian capitalism what would it look like and I was literally watching TV with my my younger kid who was two at the time and I'm watching the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse show and I realize wow it's utopian anarchist capitalism. So it's a society in which Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse and so on all live together in a village they have common goals and private goals they do some things as a group they do some things privately they have common property things like amphitheaters and certain roads are collectively owned and maintained but they also have private property like literally Minnie Mouse is a capitalist she has a boutique it's called the boutique it's a bow making factory and a store Claire Bell cow has a sundry store and a muffin factory Willie the giant and Donald Duck owned farms Professor von Drake has nanotech machinery Mickey Mouse has this like house that people come hang out on and so on and they buy and trade and sell things and yet there's no principled objection that a socialist can have with what they do so in the book I describe the way that they live together it's all accurate to what actually happens in the on the TV show they buy trade and sell things and they live by principles of benevolence social justice and so on and everything that socialists want is there and yet they have private property anyways and then to kind of parallel Cohen's book what I do is I describe it going socialist so what would happen if the Mickey Mouse clubhouse were socialist instead of capitalist and I make it realistic socialism so I haven't become very much like the Soviet Union or Cambodian Donald Duck starts murdering people there's mass famine and so on and then what I end up kind of doing is taking a lot of Cohen's paragraphs like you know he'll be complaining about how he's like capitalism is a system of predation and I'll say socialism every social system that we see is a system of predation and you know what capitalist want to do is take you know ideas of benevolence and make them universal and so on and it as a parody it's interesting how easily you can just take his argument and just rearrange the words and it becomes as good of an argument or even better of an argument for capitalism but I'm saying to readers is like if you're a socialist you're gonna think what and you're right there's a sense in which when I'm trying to show you that Cohen's argument for the moral superiority of socialism is bogus the argument that's presented in chapter 2 where I'm parodying him by using the Mickey Mouse clubhouse is kind of equally bogus but if you take our two bogus arguments and combine them and you reflect upon what went wrong what you realize is actually no the Mickey Mouse clubhouse capitalism is actually utopia that is the way people should live I'm curious about how socialism and capitalism emerge from these two stories as far as private property goes because I can imagine someone saying what you're describing isn't really capitalism as far as the Mickey Mouse clubhouse and the way that people interact and that the private property is still compatible with the camping story in the sense that we don't need for the camping story to still work we don't need to say like all of this stuff like I bring a fishing pole and I catch fish and you bring stuff to start a fire we don't say that's all communally owned we could instead say like you own yours and I own mine but where we have a hyper-pensity to share if you come to me and say I need a fish that I'm perfectly willing to give you one but it still is my fish and on the other side this clubhouse thing that they have private property but so long as they have sufficient sharing then it looks indistinguishable from the camping trip because what we don't want is they may exchange dollars and cents for muffins when everything's fine but if Donald Duck shows up to is it Minnie Mouse who has the muffins? Claire Bukow, yeah. She shows up and says I really need a muffin I'm hungry she'd probably in this situation just give him a muffin right? Yeah that's right well I think you're on to something and I think but I think what you're showing is like what is maybe going along with Cohen which is that he frequently sort of equivocates or I'm sorry not equivocates but treats socialism as if it were just equal to sharing benevolence and community spirit and a lot of other people do that too and that's problematic it's bad like psychography it's bad it's sort of an ideological way of defining things I mean socialism and capitalism are distinguished in principle and like their definitions not by attitudes people have but by control rights in socialism by definition the means of production are collectively owned in capitalism by definition the means of production are individually owned. Probably there's nothing about beneficence or anything in those definitions. Yeah that's right imagine if I said like oh well if I said to Cohen you're describing socialism but people are nice together to each other that's not socialism and socialism by definition people murder each other like we see in Soviet Russia he'd go that's not built into the definition of socialism you're just like so similarly I want to say the same thing about capitalism it's like he wants to define capitalism in terms of selfishness and greed and so on but that's not part of the definition so what I say to Cohen is it's really an empirical question to what degree socialism causes good feelings or bad feelings what degree it causes good motivations or undermines them same thing with capitalism it's an empirical question whether capitalism promotes good motivations or undermines them whether it makes us more selfish or not but in principle you can take people who are perfectly benevolent and perfectly concerned with social justice and other kinds of left-wing concerns and have them live with private property in the means of production so what the burden I kind of take on to myself here is to explain if people were so good and nice that they could make socialism work what would be the kind of additional value that they would get out of being capitalist what would be the point of it and so what you seem to get if you kind of eliminate the definitional he tries to define socialism as this kind of beneficence really what his argument is it's really nice when people are nice and I will define socialism as niceness and it's better than when people are mean and I will define capitalism when people are mean it's almost that simple I have a so basically in chapter three of the book I go through what I think are the two fallacious arguments he's making or the two kind of fallacies based upon and by the end of chapter three what I think I've done is undermine his case for socialism but I haven't yet fully made my case for capitalism and so he does what I call the Cohen fallacy I want to make that a term that people use and the Cohen fallacy goes like this you say socialism with morally perfect people is better than capitalism with real people therefore socialism is better than capitalism and it's like when you drop out that modifier with perfect with less than perfect that doesn't work so imagine if I said as people might know if they've run my other stuff I'm not the world's biggest fan of democracy so imagine I said I wanted to have monarchy instead and I said well imagine a world ruled by an omnibenevolent omniscient all wise philosopher king and then compare that to dysfunctional real life democracies like France and I said therefore monarchy is better than democracy you say hold on okay I'll admit that sort of your utopian monarchy is better than real life democracy but that leaves open the question of whether monarchy with good people is better than democracy with good people and whether monarchy in the real world with the real kinds of people we have is better than democracy with the real world and that's really the problem so Cohen is just all he's saying is that socialism plus kindness is better than capitalism plus selfishness and that's the comparing the ideal to the real and it's fine to say that the ideal is better than the real I'm not a beef with that like some philosophers do think that's a problem I think he's right I think he's right that idealized socialism is better than real life capitalism I just think we don't learn very much about capitalism from that because the thing that's doing all the work is the stipulation of perfect benevolence it's not the socialism and then the other Cohen fallacy which you bring up is the identifying regimes with values or motives which you kind of touched on a lot of people want to say things like well yeah it's not really capitalism if people are nice to one another and it's like that is the most ideologically motive like loaded you could possibly argue and to their credit I mean Cohen's dead I don't get to hear his response but to philosophers credit I presented this at the APA in a bunch of other places and some philosophers will start to say that and they'll go no you're right like we can't build in nastiness into the very definition of capitalism you're really capitalism and socialism are distinguished by control rights not by the motives that people have well couldn't you say that couldn't someone make the argument that those very sorts of control rights so private property and the exchanging of goods for something else as opposed to just giving them away or sharing them yeah is builds in bad moral motivation in the sense that like you wouldn't it wouldn't even occur to you to do those kinds of exchanges if you had moral perfection yeah that's right so here here again if that's correct I don't think that's correct but even if that were correct it wouldn't matter for the argument because we're supposed to be doing I'm giving Cohen all of his way of thinking about philosophy and the way he thinks we should think about justice when we're doing political philosophy is not to worry about people's moral flaws so the fact that you respond that way if capitalism did that to you and you responded that way to it if you were made a worse person by buying and selling well I'm not saying you're made a worse person I'm simply saying that what if it were the case that the very mechanisms of capitalism would only even occur to people who weren't morally perfect because if it's true that like ideal socialism is everyone just sharing and that's what morally perfect people do then morally perfect people simply wouldn't engage in market exchanges in the first place you know there's a question of would it occur to them and I don't really know how to answer that it's hard to know like if you had people who are morally perfect what would they think of however I think what I can do and what I try to do in chapter 4 is say here's why they would get additional value out of being capitalist even if they didn't have to but that's not simply saying it would occur to them so that's the coming back up with your own utopia which is chapter 4 why capitalism is utopia so can you expand on that a little bit? yeah that's right so once again utopianism here I mean imagine a world where people have the same abilities that we have but their moral motivations are perfect they always do the right thing for the right reason so what institutions would that world have so what I have to in order to argue that as capitalist you have to prove two things one is that they have some reason to prefer private property over purely collective property and in others that they have some reason to prefer markets and the kinds of arguments that I'm going to use here are not the standard economic arguments you get from Adam Smith or like your standard economist because those are all based upon you know the fact that people are bad and what like you know even when Adam Smith is saying you're taking selfish behavior and channel it into public benefit it's not from the benevolence of the butcher or the baker so I can't use that I can't use questions of moral hazard or anything like that has to be so they're going to be kind of sentimental type arguments but that doesn't mean that they're false it's just all you have to do is show that you get additional value out of capitalism and then capitalism wins so some of the there's a number of them I'll just go through a couple one is you know people are not the Borg we're partly private there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing to complain about I don't know who are the Borg in Star Trek there's this group of aliens called the Borg and they everyone has a hive mind and no individuality at all right so there's in the real world we're diverse we have individuality we don't all care about the same things we want to do some things in private not because we don't like other people but just because that's part of what it is to be human we have projects that we want to pursue so I end up saying to my readers like somebody who are going to be left-wing it's like look you can understand why you'd want to write a paper by yourself say an academic paper by yourself rather than have it being written collectively by your entire department or the entire world you can understand why that would be important to giving meaning to your life you can understand why an artist would want to paint a picture by himself or herself rather than having it being painted by a collective if you can understand that then you can empathize with Willie the Giant who wants to farm a certain way by himself or many who has just a certain way she wants to do bow manufacturing and and so that's one reason to have private property another thing has to do with just being able to count on things being where they are and the way that you left them you know imagine like everything were collectively owned it's like you couldn't put a guitar down because someone else might use it and then it won't be the same way that you left it and like there might be reasons not to do that in the world of scarcity or so but in a world we have enough like why not just let people have their own stuff they have exclusive access to there's even things about sentimentality like it's I want to have this particular stuffed animal because it had meaning in my life given like some interaction I had with my kids and so I want that to be mine and there's all these kinds of arguments like that they're not the kind they're not things where I would say like they're meant to be knocked down arguments for why we have to have capitalism versus socialism in the real world because but here we're talking about in a utopian system in which there's not like the problems we see in the real world so it's like whatever reasons they have for having collective property they also have additional reasons for wanting things to be privatized you know their project pursuers they have long term goals they want to see these things through they want a private sphere of autonomy they control for themselves and in addition what about having a market there's a number of arguments for having a market I won't go through them all now but one of them has to do with just the fact that they're benevolent so Cohen concedes the calculation problem of socialism he concedes that in order to have cooperation on a massive scale you know bigger than 120 people we need to have markets so by hypothesis Mickey mouse and Minnie mouse and so on are motivated by benevolence they don't want to just benefit themselves they want to live in a world in which everyone has as much prosperity as possible in order to make it so that other people have the highest chance possible of realizing their conception of the good so way of thinking about this is imagine had a magic wand in which if I wave that magic wand it makes everybody 30 times richer Mickey mouse being morally perfect would want to wave the wand now imagine instead of having a magic wand I have a philosopher king who comes up with a plan for an economy and he says if you're a doctor and you're a lawyer and you're when they would have lawyers in this world you're a doctor and you're a farmer and you're a mechanic and maybe give them some options or something like you could be a mechanic or a doctor it doesn't matter but pick one of those if you do these things it'll be like we all collectively wave the magic wand effectively that's what Cohen wants he would say socialism in its ideal conception is waving the magic wand the problem though is the calculation problem says that there is no philosopher king however at the same time economics tells us that the market is the philosopher king the market does that job so if if Mickey mouse were well informed and Minnie mouse and so on were well informed about economics if they got an economics textbook and read it they would want to make use of the market in order to bring about greater benefits for other people this makes you think there's a part in the book where you discuss research on the actual moral effects of markets because I can imagine someone responding to what you just said by saying okay sure maybe markets are like waving the wand but at what cost if markets turn us against each other if they make us greedy and miserly and just awful people it may not be worth it for the 30 times increase yeah so that's right so here we have to think about levels of theorizing so if we're doing what Cohen wants us to do which is talk about the institutions for perfect people we don't have to worry about that because in the same way like if I said to Cohen we don't want collective property that will cause moral hazard people will free write on one another he would say no no no that's what evil people do good people don't do that and so similarly I could say if he said to me we don't have markets that'll make people more selfish he'll go no no by hypothesis we're talking about perfect people and perfect people don't respond to temptation in negative ways and he'd have to say oh yeah you're right you're playing by my rules I can't make that move however it is interesting to ask what effect markets have in the real world and for some reason Cohen complains continuously throughout the book about how markets corrupt us he says leaves to a hypertrophy of greed and so on but he never actually looks at the empirical research it turns out there is empirical research on what markets do to us and the research not only invalidates his claim but shows its backwards now there's not an overwhelming amount of this research but it's by people like Herbert Gintis Joseph Henrich Paul Zach and others a list of bunch of them in the book and what they find is that the single greatest cultural predictor in the real world that you will be kind sharing benevolent towards strangers trustworthy towards strangers and trusting of strangers et cetera it's tolerant and so on is the extent to which you come from a market oriented society people from social societies as a matter of fact aren't very nice and people from traditional and conservative and tribal societies are not very nice niceness correlates with markets it's not undermined by it now it's possible there's not so much of this research that we can be as confident in this as we can be and say like the theory of evolution but given what research there is it shows these mistaken and I had a couple things in there I say like you know like this test things like how corrupt are societies so you I run a graph in that in the book I say like here's transparency international's score of corruption for different countries and then here's the Fraser Institute which is a free market think tank in Canada here's their ranking of countries by economic freedom and their economic freedom score and I put them on a graph and plot it and then run some tea tests and put the line up and there's actually a very strong correlation where the more market oriented you are the less corrupt you are you know and so on and so forth so I say it's like Cohen basically his argument is very much armchair psychology it's like markets are by definition based upon exchange for the purpose of profit therefore markets make us more selfish it seems like this is just the predominant view of markets based on a Hollywood movie and your average capitalist in any given movie is of this ilk so maybe this is so ingrained in thinking that it's not even thought to be argued for it's just obvious capitalism makes people worse people but evidently that's not true. Yeah you know philosophers do this all the time and I'm kind of a person who tries to work in the intersection of politics, philosophy and economics and I think I'm more aware of this problem than many of my colleagues are it's like they all recognize that you can't do social science from the armchair that what causes what is not a philosophical question it's a social scientific question it might be that we don't know how to do it but in principle it's something you answer with data and regressions and statistics and experiments and things like that and despite knowing this in their heads a lot of my colleagues fail to look into these questions so they'll just make straightforward causal claims without looking at any of the evidence and often there's a huge body of literature that shows that they're mistaken and they just don't pay any attention to it and Cohen unfortunately does that too. Why might that be I mean what is it about markets because if I I could say people don't armchair theorize about say cancer cures sit there and be like you know I orange juice actually I think that they do but generally if you posited something like that you'd say well I'm gonna go check but the markets causes people to behave immorally is for many people it feels so obvious that they don't even need to yeah I think it's not just about markets I think it's about politics in general I think I mean I bet you probably agree with this actually it's like when it comes to say something in physics like how many different types of quarks are there and do they even exist your average person's gonna say I completely willing to defer to the physicist on this when it comes to things that the people don't care about that they have no concern for it when it comes to politics people either don't care and just don't know anything and don't pay attention or they care a lot and then they like have their theory that they basically formed at age 15 and they do everything in their power to rationalize that against all evidence so I think I think this is just an extension of the fact that people are irrational about politics and so whatever they happen to think they just make up arguments for it and they don't even it's like they don't even realize that they're making this mistake it is it is weird that I mean people don't they'll have very strong opinions about politics without having you know say taken courses yeah public policy or whatever but like 18th century German literature people don't tend to form strong opinions about unless that's what you study but why I guess the quit what is it about politics that makes us do this in a way that we don't for well seems it's very much wrapped up with our concept of ourself as a person so there's an identity element there and I'm sure you know people do not fight about math I mean but they probably do that's a general statement but I bet math well they politicize math and then fight about it true but I bet mathematicians in universities who are maybe known as being the non Euclidean guy versus the the other Euclidean guy they they if their identities are very much wrapped up in being the non Euclidean guy they probably getting some really heated discussions at mathematician of conferences and so as long as it's not wrapped up with your identity which for most of the math isn't then it probably is easier to have a more calm discussion about would be my theory yeah I think that's right and the other thing you bring up here which I think is an interesting point about sort of the values that maybe philosophers might have in their inability to understand why capitalism might be useful say it's not just that this is a quote from the book it's not just that many donald and willy want exclusive use rights over objects they also want to be able to use give away, sell and in some cases destroy these objects as part of the pursuit of their visions of the good life it means something for many to be able to sell bows to others that others are willing to buy from her because they like the bows rather than as a favor to her it means something to claire bell that she can choose to sell her muffins or instead give a free for free to a sick friend and so on some philosophers themselves having never owned a business or a farm might have a hard time understanding these kinds of desires well that was a point I think essay by zizek where he makes that point about Rawls and he says if you look at all the things that Rawls thinks the actions and rights that deserve absolute protection they happen to be all of the things that John Rawls would like to do that some professor at Harvard in this time period was doing a lot of but if you weren't a professor at Harvard then it falls into this other category yep I think that's right even the things like Rawls is like well it's a basic right to own a car and a house but you know I Rawls have never owned a factory I don't see why that should be a basic right you know that's right yeah it's a failure to empathize with with what business people are doing or what some of their motivations they could have and you know the argument the argument for capitalism interestingly under utopian conditions is largely very aesthetic it's artistic it's an artistic endeavor we want people to be able to have factories for artistic reasons we throw out a lot of the economic reasons because those are based upon flaws in human nature but these other things remain and I just want them to empathize I want them to see that running a factory can mean the same thing to Donald Duck I should say Minnie Mouse Donald Duck doesn't have a factory it can mean the same thing to Minnie Mouse as it does for them to write a book and so they're not going to prohibit private book writing they shouldn't be prohibiting private factory owning unless they have some principled objection and given the rules that Cohen has set out about how we're supposed to theorize about philosophy he has no objections and most what he has is like he wants universal socialism because he has a socialism fetish and the cool thing actually about this is the final argument that I end up giving on behalf of capitalism is to say well if you had to choose which would you choose would you rather live in the Mickey Mouse clubhouse world say with real people rather than Mickey Mouse or would you rather live in Cohen's socialist camping trip when I ask people what I usually get is like about 8 out of 100 want Cohen's camping trip and the other 92 want to live in the Mickey Mouse clubhouse world and I say it's actually a trick question because you don't have to choose the Mickey Mouse clubhouse villagers being really tolerant and nice are totally fine with the smurfs coming in having a little smurf commune in the middle of the village as long as the smurfs are okay and tolerant of Minnie Mouse having her factory not to live in a commune go for it and so what's interesting about this is Cohen's first really really big book was a critique of libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick's Anarchy State in Utopia and at the end of Anarchy State in Utopia Nozick says what would Utopia be it would really not be just one thing there's no reason to think that there's one form of life or one set of institutions which is best for all of us in all of us at our best so instead what it would be is a framework sort of a libertarian framework that allows for different kinds of organization and economic organization provided everyone who lives in this organization these different kinds of economic regimes is there voluntarily not they're not conscripts that would be utopianism that's what utopia really is and what I think Cohen has done inadvertently is his life's work his first major book was criticizing Nozick and but his life's work was a sustained methodological critique of how people do political philosophy and what I think is that if we actually accept his critique and do philosophy the way that he thinks we should which he fails to do himself we do it the way that he sees he thinks we should we get is a vindication of Robert Nozick you know so that's I think that's ultimately Cohen's legacy with a little help from me is to show that Robert Nozick was right about utopia utopia is libertarianism I hate to drag us backwards but I I'm just struck by that disparity of eight out of a hundred people wanting only eight out of a hundred people wanting to go camping which just seems I mean I would have predicted something closer to you know 40% of the people prefer camping because people like camping that just seems do people give explanations for what they find so much less appealing about the notion of a really happy camping trip over a small village yeah you know they have different things that they say I remember this one philosopher who's a very left-wing philosopher was discussing this with me and he said man I would hate to go camping with Jerry Cohen like he's like that guy must never have gone camping and actually says he hasn't he must never have gone camping that's not what camping is like at all so that's part of it is like they like camping but they don't actually camp that way it's like when I camp with friends that's not how we do things it's not just everyone shares everything all the time and we all have the same duties and it's like and there's not a problem there so actually speaking of Nozick again it's funny that I keep getting that number because Nozick had an essay I figure it was originally published but it ended really late where he asked the question who would choose socialism and he says the best way to know that is to look at Israel in the 70s because you have a tradition of like a culture in which socialism has long been thought of as a really good thing people can be socialist and live in a kibbutz and not have to suffer any real cost of living loss in fact the kibbutz at that time at least were very successful so they're like the choice to live in the sort of mostly capitalist structure is really just a preference it's not about money or anything else and he says even in that society depending on how you count it at most 9% of people are choosing socialism so maybe it's just like some small set of people want to live a socialist lifestyle and why not let them and the rest of us don't the rest of us are more like Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck and why not let us be like that the things that Cohen complains about real life capitalism that's full of exploitation and that's also true even more of real life socialism but none of those complains apply to utopian capitalism so he has no principled objection to it the other thing the fact that you bring in production functions kind of into the capitalist system is that discussed in Cohen's camping example production functions how did we ever get the stuff in the first place or is that an illegitimate bringing something into the equation that shouldn't be brought in yeah you know Cohen just assumed that we have a fishing rod is it illegitimate to say there are no fishing rods there are no useful fire pits or anything yeah you know Cohen's not trying to say something like well what if I created ex nihilo a bunch of human beings and put them on a planet and they all were perfect what would they do he's like it's hard to know exactly what they would do there's questions about where they would learn and so on but he does want to say something like in his sort of utopian socialism everybody voluntarily chooses to work really hard or as hard as people should work and everybody voluntarily chooses to take an equal reward and people will have talents and they'll innovate the same way that anyone innovates but rather than being like I innovate because I want to get greater status they innovate because I want to help people rather than being I want to innovate because I'd like to have a Mercedes S class rather than a C class it's like I innovate because I want everyone to have a better plate of dinner so for him it's like they they're motives for innovating are supposed to be benevolent motives rather than sort of selfish or self-angriotizing motives and that's something that's different in yours because many may be innovating in the boutique but she may doing it to make herself feel better about herself well you know there's a number of things that like she might have as motives one is she genuinely wants people to be better off so she if she understands economics and I just say wouldn't they then she'll say when I innovate then I make other people better off you know the market is a system of extended social cooperation and when you understand how the market works you might want to participate in the market for civically virtuous reasons so she has that she has a genuine desire to produce a product that other people admire for its own sake I mean you quoted me before it's like you know if someone you know like a what's the Dickens novel great expectations where the guy thinks he's a good artist but then it turns out that all the artwork is being bought by someone who thinks I was in favor how disappointing would that be as an artist it's like you don't actually like the art you just like me I don't want you to just like me I want you to like the art right that's what I want I want you to crave my art not because it's me and I think you know people who produce things can want that too and it makes sense to I want you to buy my computer because you think it's a good computer not because you're doing me a favor so there's that motive too but also you know she has a sphere of self-expression it's like she has a problem that she wants to solve and even Cohen accepts that like people have a desire to confront challenges and overcome them to sort of express themselves and build themselves and and that will be the reason he thinks in a socialist society and many can have that too so I don't have to posit any kind of form of greed that he would find objectionable to make it work I don't have to posit any kind of status seeking that he would find objectionable and that's really the trick here it's like there might be people at home who think why use this as a test of what counts as a good society like that's not the right test maybe they're right I think Cohen is good arguments for using this test but maybe that maybe the objections right and this is a crummy test the interesting thing though is even if we give this use this as a test it doesn't work for socialism like that's it's like you can concede everything about morality you want to the socialists and it doesn't justify socialism it justifies Mickey Mouse Clubhouse capitalism so at the end of this did you find yourself believing in capitalism in a different way than maybe you you had before you thought about this yeah yeah I definitely did I think you know what I like to say is that Cohen is a Marxist and most people aren't Marxist I explain his argument I say you the reader probably aren't a socialist even like my like the left wing readers in philosophy can read this aren't most of them aren't socialists they're just you know kind of moderate democrats like you're probably not a socialist but you probably believe what he believes which is that the main arguments for capitalism are instrumental it's that people are kind of selfish and are inclined to take advantage of one another and capitalism tends to make those produce good results despite that and socialism tends to produce bad results because of that and a lot of the reasons that I was for the market were largely instrumental like that I had some you know dental logical reasons having to do with like rights and duties and so on but even they were they're still kind of based upon the fact that people are sort of mean to each other and so when I was like thinking about this I realized like no I can kind of get rid of all these sorts of pessimistic or sad arguments arguments that are based upon flaws of human nature and still justify capitalism despite that so yeah I really did change my view really at this point I really do think it's like well how should we live what's the right way to live making us club us capitalism does that mean that we're going to live that way in the real world no we're not people aren't good enough to do that they could be they're just not so when I want to I want to argue but why should we be capitalism be capitalist in the real world full of bad people you bring in new kinds of arguments but I think the goal the thing we should aim for is that I'm curious what I mean I realize the book is very new but if there has been a response to it and what that looks like from people who were inclined to agree with Cohen yeah so I'm glad you asked that you know I was kind of worried about that too because some of the arguments I make against Cohen like the flaws that I think I uncover like the illicit comparison of and so on it just seems like they're so obvious how is it that no one noticed them including people who don't like Cohen how is it no one noticed this but I've presented this in a number of places a number of universities at the American Philosophical Association there was a big meeting and there were like a 70 people in the room including a lot of people who completely accept Cohen's critique of Rawls and so on and this has been the normal reaction holy cow you're right like left-wing professors go have been like said to me like in person like in front of other people wow you're right utopia is capitalist you're right and you're right that his argument doesn't for socialism doesn't work and that you're right that there be reasons to be capitalist in utopia so that's been the norm that has been a common response sounds like kind of a big deal yeah yeah I mean it's one of those things where you know it's not like a paper like I presented papers before and people go yeah obviously that's true why would you even write about that but it's not like that this is more of a wow now that you put it that way it seems obviously true but it wasn't obvious until you put it that way so that's been the I mean I'm sure you know three months from now someone will write some sort of sustained critique of it and maybe someone will come up with like a real objection but so far I haven't had a serious objection to it in fact this is actually the only real objection that I've had which is some Marxists think that all employment all employment relationships are inherently bad that selling your labor to somebody even if that person is morally perfect like Minnie Mouse selling your labor to somebody ends up alienating you from your own condition and that's a bad thing I don't in the book I don't respond to that because I can basically just say if you're right about that then fine you can imagine as a capitalist society of entirely sole proprietors there's no employment it's not essential to capitalism that there be employment that's really it I mean if I did too much of that stuff if I got rid of too many of these kinds of things it wouldn't be capitalist anymore but that's really the only serious objection and it's something I can just wave away it doesn't really matter it seems like now we can stop apologizing maybe for capitalism stop saying it's the best of bad alternatives and maybe it's actually the best one we have that's the point it's everything that most I mean the typical arguments for capitalism can seed the moral high ground and I think there's a problem with that there's people like Ayn Rand who tried not to do that but she does it by coming up with a view of morality that a lot of people find repulsive whether she's right or wrong doesn't matter like a lot of people think that's a repulsive view of morality so what if you could capture the moral high ground using common sense morality common sense moral ideals ideals about benevolence and kindness and so on and that's what I want to do is take the moral high ground back and now what I like to say is the socialists are to my right I am the radical left wing when you get really really left wing as left wing as you could possibly get what you get is anarchist capitalism socialism is sort of a conservative view with a desire to return to tribal times so in the same way that your average socialist looks upon conservative republicans with some degree of moral disdain believe men I can kind of see them that way now thank you for listening to Free Thoughts if you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod that's Free Thoughts P-O-D Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks to learn more about Libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org