 Welcome to Free Thoughts from libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. I'm Trevor Burrus. And today we're joined by our colleague Matthew Feeney. So between the three of us in this room right now are four philosophy degrees, which, if you ask around, is about the most useless degree out there. Obviously all three of us disagree not just because of sunk costs. We disagree in part because philosophy is so embedded in what we do here at Cato. In fact, here's Cato's mission statement. The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. All of these ideas have their foundations in or motivated by philosophical principles. To talk about them means to talk and to think philosophically. What do we mean when we think philosophically? Matt, I'll let you answer that. Well, you know, I like that we start with the small questions. But I think when I think about what it means to think philosophically, I think of when I was starting out at university and what I think made philosophy different from a lot of the other subjects that people were studying. And for me, that was the study of the structure of arguments and fallacies and rhetoric and things like that. And that really did seem to set it apart from humanities. And it's funny that philosophy seems to get this reputation for being a little wishy-washy when it is actually a discipline that does teach real clear and structured thinking. As long as we're not speaking about critical theory or Derrida or French postmodernists or along these lines. See, this is Aaron has this history of having a too high of a esteem for French postmodernists. I had to be that of him. It's terrific stuff when you're trying to study a poem that's six lines long. Last week, we did an episode with Professor Andrew Cohen on Applying Philosophy of Public Policy and his new book on that topic. And when it was posted to Facebook, some of the comments that we got were, of course, we shouldn't think philosophically. Like what philosophy that the argument goes, philosophy basically is either just talking for the sake of talking. It's not very productive. Or it confuses more than it clarifies. And so the argument was like, look, we don't need philosophy. What we need is pragmatic thinking. And we need to, I think as one person said, we need to just apply the laws that exist and not worry about thinking about what they should be or moral principles or whatever else. And so in response to that, I mean, does philosophy, it certainly can confuse more than clarify. I mean, the history of philosophy is the history of, yeah, that's not a very good answer to that question. And here's why. But is that a genuine knock against it? That seems like a semantics question to some degree. The question of one sort of, I guess it was to be kind of trolling answer to that statement is that they've stated a philosophy without even knowing it. They've stated a philosophy of pragmatism or they've stated that we need to have applied philosophies and we need fewer angels dancing on ahead of a pen type of questions and more questions about what do I do next? And maybe that's the most important philosophical question is what do I do next? In terms of an existential ethical kind of mandate for living your life? Well, I think a good follow up on these sort of Facebook discussions is, well, you are really having what we think at the heart is an ethical conversation when we talk about policy. So we can get economists to talk about the effects of the war on drugs, for example, something that is expensive and maybe inefficient. But that's a different sort of question to is the war on drugs moral? And is it a worthwhile policy to pursue? And in Cato, we have economists and we have political scientists and people are engaged in answering different kinds of questions that are very, very important to the mission. Although I know like Aaron said earlier, it's very difficult to detach political theory and moral theory. One is a subsection of the other. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that sometimes drives me nuts about economists is that the thought that what is being done when you're doing economics is somehow distanced from philosophy, from moral questions, from political questions, and it's a philosophical. I mean, a few years back I was in the little kitchen room where we get coffee on the sixth floor at Cato and a colleague who's now moved on to other things, but was an extremely prominent extremely talented and skilled economist came in and asked me what I do at Cato and I said I run libertarianism.org and he didn't really know exactly what that meant. So I said, well, I do political philosophy stuff, intellectual history, libertarianism ideas. And he looked at me and he said I understand that there are people out there who do that, but I guess I don't understand why because it just, what's the point of having these conversations? What matters is look, we can add up the effects of these policies and we can look at how much it costs, what its effect on GDP is, the cost curves over time and that's what matters. But I think the point that we're trying to make is that even assessing those sorts of things demands first having a framework in which to evaluate them. Like why does it matter that this costs more than that? How do we weigh the effects against each other? Are there certain costs that we shouldn't bear no matter how much good stuff we get out of them? Well, for me the value of philosophy has always been trying to achieve some sort of rigor in what you're talking about and how you're discussing it. I often say that there's only three philosophical questions which are what is there, how do I know about it and what do I do about it? So let's start with the first one. So let me describe all the things in the universe. The question of what sort of things there are would be a metaphysics question and where those things reside. So you kind of have a question. A classic one would be, is something actually a color? Like is it actually green or is the green being put onto a thing by your brain? Where is the greenness by in the world? Where is it? It does something actually smell bad. Does a dead body actually smell bad or is that just your perception? Where is that in the world? Metaphysics is also where the big question of does God exist falls within. Yes. Or as my dad always used to say, it's the study of what's really, really, really, really, really, really real at the end of the day. And then in epistemology, how would you know these things about the world? Kant famously sort of assumed through negation that there was a world out there that he couldn't know anything about, but there was just something out there, the new and the world. And then the ethics question is, okay, now you have a metaphysics component, an epistemological component, and then you have an ethics component, which is what do I do about it? Is there any normative elements? But this is important for any discussion of anything, whether it's a kind of party discussion with a hippie girl who is talking about crystal healing and you're trying to figure out what she's saying about anything or whether it's someone on TV talking about political rhetoric saying that these things are true about people or these things are true about ethics or morals or freedom or fairness or all these things trying to figure out what it means to say fairness, trying to parse out the language. When you say fair, what does it mean when you're saying fair and trying to make sure that we're clear about what we're disagreeing about or agreeing about? And that's often what the most productive element of philosophy is. Yeah. I think anyone who's seen cable news will see, even though the participants on these what are called debates might not... The shouting shows. The shouting shows. It strikes me as very often you're seeing two people who have very different concessions about what human beings are and how they act and what their role in the world should be and also how people, how their government can morally govern their behavior. But it's never couched that way and oftentimes I hope that people would take a bit more time to consider their prior assumptions on all of these things because they do matter when it comes to policy, especially on the so-called social issues, things about what we should eat and what we can consume and who we should be allowed to sleep with or marry and who we should be able to hire to do our gardening. All these things have philosophical foundations that ought to be examined. When we talk about this, I mean, Trevor, you just mentioned all these things that came under metaphysics like what is green? This raises the question of what does that have to do with policy? The issues we're talking about philosophy is both it's a body of knowledge, knowledge of what people have said green is from the ancient Greeks to today and then it's a set of tools, which is the same as science. There's a scientific method and there's also the various things that physicists have discovered over the years and are they separable is the question because what exactly green is doesn't seem very applicable to the kind of debates we have in Washington whereas maybe the questions of what sort of respect do we owe to people, why, what things matter when we're adding up the effects of policies, what's government allowed to do or not do, these moral theories, those seem to matter, but are the tools themselves, thinking abstractly or defining our terms or knowing what we're talking about, are those separable from the thousands of years of content? To use an example from a guest we had previously on Free Thoughts, Michael Humer, who argues about the sort of strangeness of the state being allowed to do things that normal people aren't allowed to do, but his theory is based off of, as a philosopher, his theory is based off of beginning his metaphysics of where he thinks morality is, which he thinks is in the world and that may sound like a strange thing. I think most people think that morality is in our head. He thinks that it's in the world in some meaningful sense in the same way that dogs and planes and Donald Trump are in the world. Laws of physics. Laws of physics that you can intuit and that matters to some extent, but the interesting thing is his argument is just sort of says the presumption is that when you see something is wrong, it's probably wrong. Right. And he has a very wrong argument for that. This is a weird thing to say about morality to some extent because what it means is if morality exists in the world, whether it's the kind of thing, whether it's an entity in the world like your dogs and collars and whatever else. Donald Trump, everything this week is Donald Trump. Yes. Most of what we're saying may not apply to Donald Trump. So of course not. His own thing. But that's different from, say, the laws of mathematics. And we can say, we can think that two plus two equals four, whether we exist or not. But to say murder is wrong or moral beings are owed respect or whatever in the absence of people. So to take it outside of our heads seems odd. It could be odd. It also might be the way the world is. The world might just be very strange and that's always a possibility. Even things that seem very strange like the fact that brains think might just be the kind of thing that brains do. Electric eels make electricity. That seems really weird to me and brains think. They kind of do these things together. But that's maybe a cop out. I'm not a specialist in moral metaphysics. But another example of when this stuff comes up is Kantian arguments come up a lot even without people understanding them. And that would be, I guess, we're getting kind of simplistic to say where does Kant think moral truths lie. But the categorical imperative of formulating something for rational beings to act on as if it were a universal law. That's probably the most common argument I hear for voting, for example. Very explicit. If I say I don't vote, I say, well, if everyone did that, then we'd have a problem. And they're kind of invoking the categorical imperative. Yeah, or even, I mean, the golden rule is a variant of that. The do under others is you'd have them do under you. It says like, if you're going to do this thing, you know, is this something you would want everyone doing? And we start there. We start with most people don't like to examine their premises. It upsets people a lot of time to ask them something like, why can't you sell babies or parental rights? I think the frustration might occur, at least in Washington, is that if you're at a house party or if you're at a bar, you can talk to someone for an hour and then eventually, yeah, I guess we're talking past each other, or I guess we'll agree to disagree. But two senators can't sit opposite a table and say, well, I guess we have different moral assumptions about the way the world works. Let's go vote differently on the bill. I would be stunned, but I would also, I mean, this is a great image to think of Elizabeth Warren and Rand Paul talking about Kantian ethics. I don't know if that's ever happened. Well, that brings up a question of why do people disagree and how do people disagree? Why is politics so, why is the thing you're not supposed to talk about at least one of the things is politics? Politics and religion, yeah. And I think one of the interesting questions about why people disagree, which I think you and I have discussed some on past episodes is this question of our disagreements, our political disagreements say about fundamentally different views of the world and fundamentally different views of what's morally permissible and what isn't, or are they about what we call the empirical questions? The factual disputes, yeah. Yeah, so we both think that you ought to help the poor, but what we disagree about is whether free markets and the sorts of charity systems that arise within them are more effective or less effective than state-run welfare programs, but what's really frustrating often in political debates, and I think this is one of the reasons that you don't talk about it, is, I mean, so the reason we say you don't talk about religion is because religion is like this central to a person's identity, their sense of self, and so to discuss it, which discussing it means to argue about it, I mean, that's what we're talking about here, is to to some level question a person's very identity. And the problem with politics is that in the way that we engage in politics in this country, it ends up looking like religion, right? Like it's not, we don't say like, look, we both agree on helping the poor is the right thing to do. Now let's talk about the best way to do that. What we think is that, look, if you say that the welfare state is bad for whatever reason, it must be because you are a moral monster, because you don't want to help the poor. And so political discussions immediately turn into the same thing as religion where we're questioning each other's moral character. And I think one of the things that thinking philosophically allows us to do, that the training yourself in having the kinds of arguments that follow along philosophical lines is to say, like, look, no, we can have this conversation without it turning into me judging Matthew as a bad human being or as fundamentally flawed or thinking that Trevor is a monstrous person or that only people who agree with me can be moral saints. But that brings up the question of the sort of performative element of politics too. Maybe most people who have political opinions haven't really thought about them philosophically. Yeah, I mean, that's a rather cynical view. I mean, maybe it's true, but the funny thing is, anyone who had done some sort of basic philosophy would hear a statement like, well, you don't support welfare because you don't like poor people, would immediately think, oh, straw man. Or if it was, there's a kind of a great list of things you're not allowed to do in philosophy. Can you tell us what a straw man is before we continue on? So straw man fallacy is misrepresenting the target. It's pretty much half of the word spoken in this town, I would imagine. Well, sure, yeah. I mean, it's a different fallacy to ad hominem, which is you're just insulting the person. That's the other half. The other half, right, exactly, yeah. And the thing is that you hope that if people were thinking philosophically that those sort of things would not happen, that these sort of basic fallacies would not occur. But anyone who has lived in this town or anyone that enjoys outside of the Beltway watching cable news will quickly come to realize that this is the norm, not the exception, which is a great shame. Let me... Then why is it... So you could say if people are going around not thinking scientifically, it's because in large part maybe they haven't gotten, they haven't been trained to do it. Just like if people are, you know, bad at playing the piano, it's because they haven't learned to play the piano, and if you taught them, they would. Is that what's going on here? Is that people are, from a philosophical perspective, arguing poorly because they haven't been trained in philosophical thinking, or is it because there's something about the debate in Washington or the nature of political debates that pushes us to not do it what we would call the right way? So that reminds me of something that was written by our colleague Brink Lindsay in his book, Human Capitalism, where he discusses this instance of an anthropologist or a scientist going to Soviet Russia and talking to a few peasants and he posits the following, you know, basic thought experiment, which is, well, there are no camels in Germany, Berlin is in Germany, how many camels are in Berlin? It's a basic logic problem, and I'm sure most listeners would immediately think, well, none. But it turns out that a lot of the illiterate peasants said, well, I mean, is Berlin a big country, a big city, or is, I mean, do they need camels there? And no matter how many times this was repeated, there was some sense in which they couldn't grasp it. So maybe it is the case, and that's obviously an extreme example, but maybe if you're not taught to think this particular way that it is difficult to come around to it, especially in a context where you're encouraged to dislike your opponents instead of just have an honest disagreement. Well, I think that there's partially true to that, but I think that there's a lot of costs to thinking philosophically about things, and there's a lot of social costs. There's a lot of social costs to saying in some circles that the other side has not bad arguments. You can imagine this in a religion, I mean, Aaron's analogy of religion was good if you're living in a southern Baptist community and you say it dinner because you've been thinking about the arguments and you're not, you're only thinking about the arguments, you're not attacking people, you're not trying to perform morality in a certain way to say, you know, there's a lot of arguments that has a lot of social costs there. People like to be part of a group that signals their participation in the certain sort of, I guess would be the commitments of the group such as, do you believe in the welfare state or do you not believe in the welfare state? And sitting down and being like, okay, well, it's a very complex issue and we have to look at all sides and analyze whether or not the arguments are good on these side, especially in this town, all the forces that you mentioned are being philosophically. They push towards performative morality which is performing the kind of the necessary genuflections to the things that your group thinks are important and matter and then rallying up the troops for your group on one side which is why it's very hard to go on Fox News and say, well, the Democrats have a really good point here, you're probably not going to be invited back. Performative morality is one of the most distressing things that we see playing out in, I mean, it plays out in political debates here but it's also a part of the bizarre anti free speech, free thought culture that's on American campuses now that this is this, I mean, if morality is ultimately about questions of what ought I to do or what kind of person ought I to be, what is the right kind of person, the best kind of person, the best action to take and what performative morality ultimately says is that doesn't matter at all, what matters is do other people think I am the kind of person who they think is a good person and so it's entirely based on just I mean, cultural conceptions that could be it says that we shouldn't evaluate those, that what matters is just being in line with certain expectations and so this is how you get there was a, I saw a news article just a week or so ago about hybrid cars and it said, you know, it looked at the lifetime amount of pollution they generated amount of energy they consumed from the manufacturing process through the life of the car and said, you know, that if you live on the east coast, because presumably the energy economics on the east coast are slightly different than they are elsewhere in the country, then buying a new hybrid car is actually worse on all these measures than a regular style car and what that ought to say is if you care, if what you actually care about is protecting the environment and we'll stipulate that, you know, this sort of emissions reduction all that is actually good for the environment long term or whatever, but if what you care about is protecting the environment, then you should stop having a hybrid car but of course no one who has a hybrid car is going to do that because buying the hybrid car is not really about protecting the environment, it's about at least for some of them. But it's what's motivating it is we want the people around us to think we're the kind of person who cares about the environment. And that comes back, I think, to libertarianism because that turns political beliefs at least to some degree into what I would call indexical or they're relative to your position and there's a thing about libertarianism where we're talking about philosophy here and we're prone to be thinking a little bit possibly more coldly, less group-oriented, less rah-rah-wah, red team, blue team, I think more awkward people at libertarian conventions and parties, something that we know a lot about maybe we are those awkward people and so we draw this in, but the question is is that merely a product of libertarianism's fringe element by itself that it draws a certain type of fringy people who like to be outside of the group or to tell all the other people that everyone else is doing is crazy and if it was in Soviet Russia the fringe people would be different so the fringe always changes where the fringe is, but maybe the fringe always attracts a certain amount of people who like to think about, who are less into the group dynamics less into the performance and morality more into the philosophical thinking more into the sort of like extreme counter-culturalism of saying, I'm just sort of saying, pox on both your houses and those houses would be. When I first came to Cato I was asked as a new hire to attend this series of intern seminars which is every intern class a couple of times a week all the interns go and listen to talks and have Q&A sessions with various Cato scholars on the topics that they do here at Cato and it's a good way for new employees to get up to speed on what everyone's up to and so I was sitting in, I'd sat in a handful of them and I realized that I felt uncomfortable. I couldn't I feel a little bit uncomfortable in this room listening to this conversation and after thinking about it for a while I realized it was because I was in a room where people were agreeing with me broadly speaking that that signaling was in line with my beliefs, right and that coming from Trevor and I both went to the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado and that is a place where they're, I mean, surprisingly are not a lot of libertarian students and so we were used to being the people with the weird views, used to being that guy in class who always had to argue about the particular topic because we disagreed and that was what I was used to and it's it was this very bizarre experience being around a bunch of people who agreed with me and I think that was I mean going back to what you said about the fringe movement, like I think that obviously the way you don't end up in a fringe movement we shouldn't say fringe movements doesn't, calling it fringe doesn't mean it's wrong I mean all of us think we're right like libertarianism is correct right but it is clearly a fringe movement in American politics. Well believing in markets and Russia was a fringe movement or in North Korea that's a fringe movement too. That you don't end up in a fringe movement unless you are at some level not all that concerned about fitting in, about having your beliefs applauded by everyone who's around you. Yeah, I think, I mean going back to what Trevor said about, and what you've said about the fringiness, I think libertarians have a notice of reputation as being logic machines who are very hard in line because I don't know a lot about a lot and sometimes here at Cato I'll walk around the offices to ask a question about something on policy or economics and I mean quite often the two honest responses I get from colleagues are things like it's complicated or I'm not sure or I'm not aware of the data and I think there is a certain humility in what, not just at Cato but I think most people in policy have is worrying about data rather than politics. But I think something that people have pointed out to me as far as fringiness goes is it's not just that libertarians tend to be fringy about politics, also a little fringy when it comes to music tastes or they're very into you know gaming culture and the like the subcultures if that's a fair way to describe them seem to coalesce around not just politics but other sort of things. So how do you, when you're doing your work at Cato or any of us are doing our work at Cato and we're taking our philosophical toolkit which we haven't totally explained yet about what that entails, something about clarity and thinking about what there is and how you know what you do about it and then looking at a problem that someone comes to you and says okay here's a problem that we have. You're doing body cameras and policing. Right. Which is currently what Matthew is working on. How does philosophy inform something like that when you're first asked to look at it? So I think I can start with an example from the philosophical toolkit which is the I suppose the best way to describe it would be argument from authority is that I'm very aware whatever I read I make sure to read widely and to look at data and I try and keep as objective as I can. I don't think I find what do people who I'm friends with say about this? What do people who I agree with say about this? What are the police saying about this? What are libertarians who have already written a bit about this saying? And trying to make sure that you know the view is wide and that the data is taken with as little bias as possible. Then there's also a philosophical baggage that you bring to the table to a certain degree which is you know given Cato's outlook what is given the data and given our outlook what's the best policy and that's you know just step one of what becomes quite a long process if you're engaged in a report or a white paper or something like that. But are there are there philosophical concerns at play or what sorts of philosophical concerns are in play in the question of whether cops should wear body campers? Sure, so that brings into the rights of citizens it also transparency and accountability the role of government when it comes to keeping people safe enforcing rights protecting rights not enforcing them there's also concerns about regulations of regulations as they relate to the making of these things and how much they cost and tons and tons of different things. Yeah, it reminds me of a similar thing for me is when I deal with labor union regulations for example I have to think back to first principles and especially in law that so much this is based on first principles philosophical principles about what labor unions are allowed to do and they're going to take this for granted that labor unions at least in non right to work states are allowed to take money from workers who are not members of the union in order to fund the labor unions activity and they can do that because they've essentially been delegated the power to tax by the government which is which gets us back to the role of government and the strangeness of what's going on that they're very there's a huge aberration here government has this extremely distinct and unique ability to tax we can talk about whether or not it's okay and all these sort of things but it has the ability to tax based on majority vote for your own good type of question and then the question is could they delegate that are they allowed to delegate that so we think about the first principles and say well the government can come down and take a group of workers and delegate to them the power to tax so they can better represent the workers and you look at the arguments on both sides well the union has to represent all of the workers so they should be able to take money from all the workers so the workers aren't free writing and you say well that doesn't really apply to other situations it doesn't really apply to the AMA or the the trade association of booksellers or something like that where you say so booksellers they do a lot of things to help a lot of booksellers but they are entirely a voluntary organization they have to raise money voluntarily through book sales and so they don't have the ability to tax bookstores that are not members of their union because they simply say well you're benefiting from our representation so therefore we're going to tax you you have to go back to these basic principles of why are they allowed to tax people and is that a justified use of state power in the role of government to start thinking about the question and I would say a proper standardized type of way I mean here I'm the odd man out because what I do at Cato when I'm not running libertarianism at work just is philosophy I don't do policy so I'm stuck in the first principles all day but I thought maybe what we could do is take a first principles argument we'll pick one that's popular among a lot of libertarians and talk about it philosophically to maybe give a sense of what this tool kit would look like and so what I have in mind is the popular non-aggression principle or non-aggression axiom as it's sometimes called and this is the for a lot of libertarians is the ur moral theory this is the foundation from which an entire political philosophy flows and it's one that functions to use Daniel Dent at the philosopher Daniel Dent's term as a universal acid it's you know you have this principle and it can address everything any question can be answered this way and what the non-aggression principle says is that it is morally impermissible it is always wrong to aggress against the person or property of another unless your life or rights are being violated yes yeah I mean but so that would be one of the questions what does aggression mean is aggression again that you know is it is responding to aggression itself aggression but the point is you we are always prohibited from aggressing against the person or property of another person and that's it and it's it's often presented as there there you go there's the foundational principle but we we've run a handful of articles over the years on libertarianism.org saying that the non-aggression principle isn't really an argument it's it it doesn't get there it doesn't quite work that way I mean I think our colleague Julian Sanchez had a piece where he said it's it's not even really a principle so let's start with if we've got this argument in front of us someone says look I'm going to justify my political beliefs by saying that it is always illegitimate it's always morally wrong to aggress against the person or property of another how do we start evaluating that well I mean first I have to the concepts there are not clear well that was the property so we have terms that need to be defined here so there's not only well there's aggression but there's also morally impermissible and what that means and then you know once even if you have the terms carefully defined the way to test whether a moral theory is particularly useful is to take it to its extremes and see if it still holds water and this is not something that you would do for the non-aggression principle you would do it for deontology or consequentialism or any of the other moral theories out there and this is you know a lot of the criticisms of the non-aggression principle come down to this because you'll have people saying you know if someone says I believe in the non-aggression principle and it is the axiom that is the bedrock of my political philosophy then you can come up with useful tools called thought experiments that are designed to test the boundaries of arguments and for something like the non-aggression principle you could say so you're thrown out of a 20 story building and there's a flagpole are you allowed to grab it to save yourself even if it's privately owned should a parent be allowed to you know not feed a child in their own private home can you shine a laser pointer at someone's house right and also how high does property rights go if you own a house do you own all the air up for how high and then there are also problems with you know pollution that are very well documented that's what you do that's one of the knocks against the non-aggression principle is that it's I mean it's parasitic upon a theory of property and so we can we can be an argument that everyone accepts no matter your political views if you differ on your definition of private property so you have to you can't simply assert that you know property equals what I think property equals which is this strong libertarian nozeckian sort of property therefore the non-aggression principle applies because or leads to libertarianism right because you first have to establish the truth of this particular conception of property and so you have an alternative conception of property say that says that because we operate in a community because we benefit from the actions of others some portion of the property we own or the goods that we generate or the money that we earn is already owned in common and so taxation which is one of those things you know the non-aggression principle if it's an axiom would you know it seems to just make taxation completely impermissible I mean it would be to take your money and taxation would be to aggress against your property right but if it's not your property to begin with if I'm just taking as the government or as the society that portion that belonged in common then the non-aggression principle would appear to allow for taxation so we have to we have to first get to a theory of private property the other question about the non-aggression principle is I think it's related to what Matthew was saying about can we use a thought experiment but there's a contrary view that how much do these really help us actually scope out something that at least seems to be clear for many if not most situations do we need to answer a question like can I grab a flagpole for that to be meaningful in some way and then the second question is sort of very on the Rothbard type of scale which is Rothbard seem to be very concerned with the fact that if you didn't draw completely absolute lines that were ones in zero binary lines that this is aggression and this isn't aggression this is this therefore means it's impermissible it doesn't matter how slight it is any of those things then you would be inviting the kind of gradual erosion of the principle just by not drawing an absolute line and saying no you can't you know pull a hair out of my head or any of those things this is his concern I mean he has famously let's call them controversial views about children and what parents are allowed to do or not do to or for their children and he ends up arguing say that because a baby is ultimately the property of its parents or certainly not the property of anyone else that it is if I as a parent wanted to leave my child on the dining room table inside my house and let the kids starve I can't actually physically assault the kid because that would be an aggression but I'm not I'm not obligated to provide for the child and so I could let the kid starve which sounds pretty bad but I think what sounds worse is that you would be it would be impermissible for you to come onto my property to save the child because you would be violating my right in my front lawn and my front door and the inside of my house and my dining room table and we're not going to have a balancing test about that and this sounds bad but one of the reasons that he makes this argument is because of precisely this slippery slope concern which is look if we don't have these absolutely strict property rights this like very clear here's what's permissible and here's what is not and I should be clear that he's careful to distinguish moral from legal so he could say it could be morally monstrous for a parent to do this would be still impermissible for and it would be rights violation the parent for the state to come in and take the child but his concern is that if we allow it if we allow this abridgment of property rights then we end up with the state saying oh well you failing to give your kid education of the kind we like is similar enough to starving them that we're going to force you to educate the kid in a certain way we're going to force you to inculcate certain values that we find really important and so we can't open that door even in the slightest and this does seem to be I mean an issue in philosophy is how strict do these rules need to be how much predictive power do they need to have how certain do they need to be how much wiggle room can they allow I mean could this seems to me to be possibly identifying for some people what they have a problem with in philosophical discussion that if we're sitting here let's say a libertarian party I'm sure other people have these conversations too and people for the three hours are talking about whether or not that example right there or the light post example or a laser pointer sign on your house that they're just sort of ruminating on angels dancing on ahead of a pen when we all sort of morally know that those are very exceptional circumstances maybe our moral principle should be based off of exceptional circumstances maybe we should just use them as presumptions which itself is a metaphilosophical sort of theory about the value of theory but that's what they're really upset about is that people talk about this everyone knows that it's the case that it's fine to save that baby so why are we even talking about it yeah I think anyone who's engaged in philosophy or philosophy maybe even especially is you know if you reach a conclusion which is morally repulsive then it's okay to say I'm going to reexamine this there's nothing wrong with that it's not cheating does that seem to put the card before the horse though because you're basically just trying to come up with a theory that aligns with your pre-existing moral intuitions so that might well be true so you could come to a conclusion which is like actually you just got to suck it up and our moral intuitions are not logical and you're gone this is the argument my Libertariansburg assistant editor Grant Babcock is sitting in the control room right now and we have long had this argument he's a fan of this Peter Singer article that says look intuition should play the notion that it seems wrong which is how we do a lot of moral arguing we say like this seems to lead to a conclusion that it is obviously wrong so therefore there's something wrong with the argument let's revise that we have no reason to trust our moral intuitions and then what we need to do in Singer's case being a utilitarian is we need to accept strict utilitarianism that says the right action is always whichever produces the most happiness this might include euthanasia and killing babies all sorts of things might not be intuitive and that you know even if we think it seems intuitively wrong if we've argued correctly for the principle then that's where we are and that's what we should accept I've often wondered this a lot of philosophical discussions end up in a similar type of thing if you're trying to define art or let's say you're trying to define science for philosophy of science class or aesthetics philosophy class and the debate will often go here's what my theory of art is and then someone else says ah but by your theory of art the Mona Lisa is not art and since we know the Mona Lisa is art you must go back to the drawing board and come up with a theory that includes the Mona Lisa to which the person who created the theory could either say they could bite the bullet like you're right the Mona Lisa is not art or they could be like ooh well that's a problem I need to go back and make sure I have a theory that identifies a Mona Lisa's art which just sort of again seems like you're just trying to draw borders that you can state around things that you already believe in for possibly not philosophical reasons and that's really true in politics to some degree but there might be another reason to care about intuitions in politics though which is that no one would follow those laws so they could just be purely pragmatic the inequality debate I mean we so when people talk about you know income inequality is awful we need to stamp it out we need radical redistribution and all sorts of policies to flatten the spread of wealth in the country we meaning often libertarians say well hold on why? we say first off that inequality is not as big as you think it is if you control for things like cost of benefits and so on and so forth but even if it's there why is this bad? it doesn't seem to make the poor are getting richer the rich may be getting richer at a faster rate but the poor are still getting richer so if they're getting richer we want to think that the rich were getting rich by stealing money from the poor so that doesn't seem to be a problem and we can't necessarily trace you know actual harms like as income inequality goes up we don't see you know well-being however you measure it go down like all of these things why? and the response is a form of yeah but it's just bad like there's just something wrong about some people having a whole lot more than other people it's a very hard argument to really well I mean if they think that so on Travis's point Jonathan Hite the psychologist I think at New York based university I forget which one you can go to I think it's your morals.org and you can take this long questionnaire about your opinions on certain moral statements and you can chart out people have very different some people are very pro-fairness and some people are very pro- anti-tradition and they don't really respect authority very much and I mean so the controversial statement might be something like some people in view of their genes are more likely to value fairness or more likely to value individualism or whatever but I don't you know most libertarians I know and I find that families I'm skeptical that libertarianism is all moral philosophies in general are genetic I think there is something else to it but you know there might just be the case that some people just have yeah but gut reaction that is difficult to argue But can we do anything about those values disagreements can we try and rectify them in some way Let me give my quick critique of the your morals thing because I think that I think that it sometimes gets I want to say it gets misread I want to say the study is I'm going to say potentially poorly designed and that in fact the conclusions that we draw from it which is that I mean the articles about this show up have shown up quite a lot that libertarians care less about fairness than other people we care less about authority than other people Sanity discussed that these things these basically these virtues that you know I mean maybe the authority isn't a virtue I would argue it's not but the you know the fairness the beneficence and all of those that libertarians score poorly on it and the way that these tests work and this is where I think it goes it goes wrong in how it judges these things the way that these tests work is first you go to the website and it's fascinating I encourage all of you to do this it's really interesting to take these tests it's your morals.org I believe is you first you self-identify you say I am a progressive I'm a conservative I'm a libertarian I'm very libertarian whatever you self-identify and then you take this series of moral questions they're not political questions they're you know they're straight up moral questions that are are things like you know do you have that I don't know the drowning baby version shows up but things like that so you know you're walking by the stream and there's a child drowning and you're wearing really expensive Italian shoes do you have a obligation to ruin your shoes in order to save the child yes or no and and then questions about discussed like there's one about they eat the family dog after it's died and you think that's permissible or not and what I what struck me with this is that because the way that these tests work is you self-identify first by choosing from a list of political philosophies you go into it thinking okay this quiz is in some way about politics and libertarians because we live in a world where the question is always like should we make the state do this you know we've identified a problem like it's it's never it's never should the state do this the question washing is always is this a problem or not because if it is then the state should do something about it and so when we see these questions then like should you say save the drowning baby I I know that I did this and I would imagine that a lot of people who took it did think oh and this may be subconscious right but think oh this is this is actually a question about politics and so what this question is really is would it be okay to force you to have a law saying you need to save this this child or that you could be punished for not and then the answer becomes a political question of yes I think that I have a moral obligation to save the child but I don't think that laws that would require it mandate it are wrong and so it colors the answers that we give because we're coming at it from within a political viewpoint so I think that that's a few interesting critiques there and but what I would say is even if that is true and that people do come in with this unacknowledged or unrealized political baggage I think most listeners and certainly I think both of you guys would agree that I've met people throughout my life this is totally antidotal with another fallacy but you know it's that people I've met who seem to for whatever reason not particularly care about authority they don't see what's wrong with just not talking to family members or respecting the traditions of the family and then you see other people who are easily disgusted by things and people who for whatever reason do value egalitarianism and equality very very strongly and you know that might be for and oftentimes not even related to politics it will come to you know a pizza delivered to the house does everyone get one slice or is it should you do what your parents tell you just because they are your parents those sort of things are really interesting to observe particularly I think in kids but I don't think even outside of the Jonathan height work I think most people listening will have first hand experience of the differences that people have when they approach morality but does it what is this where does the philosophy one thing you can conclude from heights work and other types of moral political psychology work is kind of what I was saying before you arrive at conclusions for there would be non-rational not necessarily irrational non-rational reasons biology could be part of it since political opinions are quite heritable and identical twin studies and then you rationalize them after the fact so what when we try and do philosophy on these things and we start talking about the non-aggression principle and all these things we're just looking at a bunch of people have different scales of values maybe we can tell them that they're wrong to value X Y or Z or maybe values are not amenable to being wrong or right and then they try and come up with a theory for this but at the same time when I deal with my labor union example for example like so I don't need to fully explain whether or not grabbing the light post outside of the window while it's a non-aggression principle to have the more mainstream example of that this seems to be aggression taking money from people forcefully it's a presumption against that which I think is safe to say I don't need to explain all of the extremities of this I don't need to explain whether or not I'd tax people if an asteroid was going to hit earth tomorrow or conscript them into building a giant space laser all those things don't undercut the basic quotidian kind of questions that we deal with and so therefore philosophy doesn't seem that useful correct I have I think I have an answer to that or at least a way to think about that question which is first I would say that in my experience people's values the those underlying values differ less than were led to believe especially were led to believe by people engaged in politics because I mean if you're trying to win an election you know there's a big part of that is getting is motivating voters to go out and vote and if you say look my opponent and I were we basically you know I mean we have the same values we disagree on some of the policies but we both you know we'll look at the evidence because they always say they'll look at the evidence and do whatever works best then that's a harder sell for like why this is really important that you come out and vote and make sure that this other guy doesn't win and so instead what you say is you know he's this radical anarchist who would destroy society because he hates all that's good and pure Mitt Romney was that way right and Barack Obama was Barack Obama was this like secret Muslim fundamentalist socialist who hated America because of colonialism and wanted to destroy the country and these are of course absurd but you know just like Coke and Pepsi you have to spend a lot of time distinguishing themselves from each other you have to do that and so we get told that these differences are bigger than I think they actually are and then I would also say that if the differences are not quite as big although I think they're genuine in a lot of cases then the value of this stuff it's not first we all have experience of people changing their mind you know I mean I I'm looking at one right now yeah I had I had a certain set of views and I changed them and it was due to argumentation but that even if it's hard to change your mind and it should be like you shouldn't just radically change your mind when every argument comes along but it's hard to do it's slow process but if our values are closer than we might think then reflecting on them which is and reflecting on whether the actions we take are actually compatible with those values advance those values in the world what the what follows from those values like you say you really care about respecting everyone but is doing this actually respecting them that I think we can we can affect genuine change on the margin by just asking people to consider their moral beliefs consider the effects of their actions and that's where this toolkit of philosophy that we've been talking about I think is so valuable because it's a way to do that to think carefully about our own views the views of others examine them in ways that are fair are to the extent possible unbiased also to avoid making bad arguments I think that distancing yourself from your own arguments which is sort of weirdly metaphorical but there is a theory about there's sort of an idea of philosophy is kind of like a successive almost like conical progression through meta beliefs the idea that you have a primary belief like that's that is blue and then you have a belief about that belief like I believe that that is blue or I have I'm now believing things about the fact that I believe that that's blue and you can keep doing that until you're thinking about the nature of believing in all these things but one of the observations has been made before is that the philosophers are really looking for what Spinoza would have called super-species I turn a tautus which is the view from infinity or Thomas Nagel had called the view from nowhere which is the idea of what does the world look like if no one is looking at it if I'm like so I've thought about something being blue and now I've extrapolated back till I'm trying to think about what the world looks like from nowhere what you can't ever get to the nowhere position especially if you're a Kantian but if you start thinking back behind your beliefs your beliefs and your beliefs about your belief I think you can start being a little bit more fair to other people who believe different things if you just believe on the primary level like if you just have a very primary belief that that's blue and you're not really thinking about how you believe things then it's very difficult to understand how someone else might think it's green and then the dispute is sort of strange you think about your beliefs and you think about why you believe your beliefs and how other people might believe their beliefs in a certain way for certain reasons that are that are not because Obama's a colonialist oppressor or whatever they might believe in anti-colonialist oppressor one of the things that I always try and find is I always try and make sure that I'm not using words to describe people that more or less they would never use to describe themselves so that the word brainwashed is a really good example no one would ever describe themselves as brainwashed it doesn't mean that doesn't exist but when you say someone else's brainwashed it's a very sort of primary thing as opposed to thinking about your beliefs and how you believe them and then giving respect to other people's beliefs which I think is a good thing that you get from philosophy. Something that is sort of interesting working here at CAO with Libertarian philosophy is that you realize that these disagreements are made worse by this thing we call politics which is in the world if there are some parents who want their kids to be taught Latin at school and some people don't in a Libertarian society that's not really a problem the parents send their kids to the school that teaches Latin and if some adults want to smoke marijuana and others don't then we don't really have a problem the introduction of this thing of politics and I know both of you have said many times that it makes us worse and I think this is a good example of that these disagreements become worse than they have to be in this context very regrettable but those sort of conversations can become more civil outside of politics. I would love it if there wasn't a Department of Education and I could walk to my neighbor's house and say hey, why doesn't Jimmy go to a school that teaches Latin and that would just be a different conversation than it is now. Got you the annoying neighbor. Oh, Peter. Matthew's dad is a classics professor so he thinks everyone should have to speak Latin. I'm willing to tax all of you to teach Latin. I suppose the underlying point here is that there is a way to make these disagreements worse and bad in poor taste but where we could just use the philosophical toolkit instead of the prism of political communication. Here's a knock against the philosophical toolkit or a possible one because we've been we've been pretty pro philosophy for the last hour is philosophers don't agree. In fact, they disagree deeply. Every year every so many years there's this survey of the beliefs of professional philosophers, philosophy professors and they'll ask, you know, do you believe in this particular theory or this particular competing theory and I know that in the moral philosophy field there's I think four broad categories that they give. There's deontology there's consequentialism there's I think contractarianism is on there and there's virtue ethics and which one of these do you fall into and if I remember correctly it's a really big chunk are consequentialists a really big chunk that's about the same size or deontologists and then smaller chunks are virtue and contractarians but these are people who I mean these are PhDs philosophy. These are people who have spent their career learning and applying this toolkit that we are saying is so useful in talking about issues in really getting to the heart of the matter and yet they disagree these are fundamentally incompatible theories. I think that this sort of reminds me the question of is there such thing as philosophical progress and I think there absolutely is there is that's writ large even though they disagree that's how you build things up but there are writ large philosophical progress a classic example would be the free will debate which for a really good philosophical debate I mean like over a century and over many different people will clarify what you're actually talking about and the question of do we have freedom goes back thousands of years but then that became refined to based on people having the discussion what would it even mean to have freedom and how are we even asking the question do we not even understand the question and then people started talking about that until we actually created progress for refining what the question is of are we free into a far more sort of looking down and figuring out and then secondly there's a lot of personal philosophical progress and for I think all of us personally if you engage in philosophy you can personally grow in the field of thought realize things you used to believe and you should not believe them anymore in it making you a better more coherent person hopefully than you were before that's very viable too this reminds me that listeners should know that I did my philosophy degrees at the University of Reading where a philosophical Galen Strossen works and he actually is someone who doesn't believe in more responsibility and I suppose thinks earthquakes are as responsible as murder is when it comes down to it and there are you know error theorists that sort of on the fringe I suppose but what I do think is worth pointing out is even people who disagree about these sort of issues we've moved on and this sort of I guess dovetails what Travis said is it's not often heard in philosophy seminars like we have discussions on slavery from a consequentialist point of view or a deontological view we all there is some sort of widespread acceptance that which took thousands of years for us to get to the point that basically slavery is wrong no matter what sort of philosophy you decide to apply to it and that is progress of a kind I think but I know you know people certainly would disagree with that so as I said at the beginning we in this room there's three of us and there's four philosophy degrees because Matthew you've got two of them he has to show off of more but that's I mean getting a philosophy degree is it's quite a commitment not just in time but there's you know you're giving up and tweed jackets too the pipes an MBA in that time or something that's gonna be considerably more lucrative but so outside of doing that if we agree that there's a value in understanding philosophy and thinking philosophically and knowing how to have arguments in this style and evaluate arguments in this style how do we learn to do that I mean this goes back to the question I asked again at the beginning of decoupling the tool set from the content of it is people have had all of these crazy ideas for thousands of years that fall within the genre of philosophy so is the way to begin you know like I want to learn to think like a philosopher so I can have better arguments about politics does that mean going back to the pre-socratics and reading about how all of the world is made out of water and then just working our way through to the present day is that the way to do it or is there is there a way to maybe accelerate the process there are a number of different ways you can teach philosophy and one is chronological like you point out I'm kind of a fan of that method maybe because I wasn't taught that way but I have a bit of a soft spot for the Greeks but I think it started the beginning and I think but you don't have to read everyone between Aristotle and Wittgenstein right but there's a good way to start with the person that started it all which you know Plato and Aristotle that said I think if you're talking about some logic I mean there is you know a book I think we give all the interns here a care to logic made easy that they're required to read a colleague Jason Kuznicki I think gives a lecture on all that there are tons of good introductory books when it comes to things like logic and critical thinking and also great books on introductions to major philosophers like Aristotle Kant and some of the people we've been talking about I think that that's also time consuming and all of us have done those things but I think the most important thing is to care about being clear trying to understand the questions that are out there in the world about the difficulty of knowing things to being true and maybe your perceptions aren't true maybe they're somewhat deceiving you the difficulty of knowing what sort of things there are in the world and of talking about them so you can actually try and communicate using precise language like when I was talking about green what is it in the world or what do you mean by in the world well the first thing is you have to care about making that clear like what is the world here I mean my brain's in the world so it would be like okay if you're going to have a conversation about where green is in the world or where moral truths are in the world you have to be able to like okay in okay what's the world and like in what sort of thing is it and then care about having that kind of conversation and then hopefully if you can find people to talk with then you can have you can build that kind of toolkit with a feedback that I have done for 15 years I build that kind of feedback loop where you start caring about taking hard questions and trying to deal with them seriously which is fundamentally what I think philosophy is and I would just say that even simpler than that even simpler than approaching all of these questions at that really deep fundamental level and walking through all the pieces of them that if nothing else I think what the philosophical toolkit teaches and encourages is a sense of humility about our own beliefs is that what I think is true may not be that there may be good arguments against it that things that I think aren't true people may have real arguments for those and so to approach when someone says something to you that you disagree with you know you hear at an opposing political view just think for a moment as Deirdre McCluskey says often consider that you might be wrong just stop and say like well let me listen to this and let me examine my own beliefs let me just not assume the truth of them but say why do I believe these things I think even that small process of just assessing why do I believe this are my reasons good why does the other person believe this is there a charitable way of reading their view of reading their evil or stupid just doing that gets you a long way towards employing this toolkit in what will be a fruitful manner in improving the way that you engage with politics thank you for listening if you have any questions you can find us on twitter at Free Thoughts Pod that's Free Thoughts P.O.D Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel www.libertarianism.org