 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. Our guest today is Dan Russell, Professor of Philosophy at the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona. Today we're going to be talking about an essay he has coming out in an upcoming collection called The Handbook of Virtue Ethics and Business and Management. This essay is about questions of how much we ought to work, what trade-offs there are in terms of earning more money versus having more time and how we ought to think about those sorts of things. So Dan, you begin by saying that business ethics, because this is an essay on business ethics, needs to expand what it means by the term ethics beyond its typical focus on just ethical dilemmas. But isn't that what ethics is about though? When we talk about ethics, we're talking about facing moral quandaries, figuring out how we should solve moral conundrums, or is it more than that? Well, that certainly is one of the things that it's about, and that's a very important thing. I mean, life presents all kinds of challenges and there are things that new activities and industries and possibilities open up for thinking about what's the right thing to do that people haven't had to face before. And so that makes it important for there to be a continuing, ongoing reflection on ethics as it pertains to things like conundrums and dilemmas. But that certainly isn't all that there is to it, and in fact, if you think about ethics the way, for example, Aristotle did, and that could only be a very small part of it, and actually not the part that you start with, the term ethics actually comes from a Greek word that derives from their term for character or being a certain kind of person. So in that context, when people like Aristotle or Plato talked about ethics, they meant the things having to do with character and the things having to do with who you are and what kind of person you are. And so on that perspective, ethics doesn't just sort of fall in your lap as something you're suddenly presented with because there's this bizarre dilemma that you've got to sort out. It starts because at some point you're reflective enough to realize that you've got a life ahead of you, and not everything is outside of your control in terms of what things you do and even what things you want to do. Those are things we make choices about as well. And so I wanted to in this paper expand ethics in this rather sort of ancient Greek way and think instead of in a very traditional approach to business ethics, you take some quandary and give different sides of it. And I thought, well, that's fine, but I would like to look at something more, not just what people do at work, but what they do about work and what place they give it in their lives overall. So the essay is about the unexamined costs of earning extra income. That's this question about work and how it fits into our lives. So let's start there. What sorts of things do we give up when we take opportunities to earn more money? Well, I called the paper, When Does Income Cost Too Much? And I did that knowing that the title would sound at first a bit paradoxical. Well, no, income is the thing that pays. How could income cost? But of course it does, and whether income is measured in money that you get from an employer or from investors, or whether it's measured in terms of the things that you yourself have produced or gathered or traded for at the end of the day, it does cost something. One thing that it costs pretty clearly is it costs time. In order to have an income, again, whether it's in money or whether it's in goods, it takes a lot of time to do the things that make it possible to acquire that wealth. It takes energy, which means that things that you might have spent your day doing and things that you might have given your energy to are now unavailable to you. And it also involves your attention and just how full your mind is and how many ways you can divide what you're able to think about and concentrate on and really give your attention too. So income costs us a lot of opportunities to do other things with our time, with our energy, and with our attention. Now, obviously, sometimes devoting time, energy, and attention to the earning of income is the use of that time and so on that we value the most because we really need that income. But there can come a point beyond which maybe it's not worth it anymore, and maybe there are more valuable alternative uses of those very personal resources besides just putting them into earning more money. But of course, knowing exactly where that point is and knowing what it would take, what kinds of circumstances are there that go into defining where that point is, those are kinds of interesting questions and those are some of the things I wanted to explore. Yeah. I mean, they're interesting. They're also just very difficult questions. I mean, I think a great many of us wrestle with those sorts of questions constantly or related things about should I go into the job market now? Should I get more schooling so I can earn more later? Should I take this promotion if it pays a bit more but I don't think I'd like the work as much? These are not easy questions to solve and they're really personal questions. So how do – I mean, the Greeks were living – Aristotle was living quite a long time ago in a world that looked very different than the one that we live in today. So how does he of all people help us think about these sorts of questions? Yeah. That's good. I want to address the first thing you said, which is that this is something that we do wrestle with. I think that's actually part of the good news is just noticing that there is something to be given up by earning income or earning higher income at the margins or deciding when to put time into income and when to put it off. And really that's one of the things I wanted to get at in this paper was to encourage more of that wrestling and maybe try to give it some guidance. But it's something that we see Aristotle talking about as well. Now, as you say, I mean, Aristotle – this is someone who was writing about 2,400 years ago in a different part of the world. In such a different time it might have been on another planet for all practical purposes. So there is this question of how could he possibly have thought about this in a way that was relevant? Well, there are a few things about that. One is that ancient Greece turns out to have been wealthier than people have realized. There's an excellent body of research by Josiah Ober about this showing that there was immense economic growth in Athens that culminated in – around the time of people like Plato and Aristotle and that mean wages there were extremely high, I mean, high enough to rival anything in the pre-modern world. And we see Aristotle addressing himself to some of the issues that were arising in a world that was changing and that was as economically active as that world was. And so he talks about happiness. And one of the things that he does when he talks about happiness or well-being is he goes over a lot of the really common opinions there are about it. He thinks some of these opinions are better, some of them aren't so good. But let's at least start with what people think. And one of the most common views that he talks about is the idea that the happy life is the life of being very wealthy and of making lots and lots of money. Now, he doesn't have a lot of time for this view. It's not because he thinks there's something shabby necessarily about money-making, but he thinks that it really is a very fundamental mistake about the nature of money and wealth. The happy life should be something that we want for its own sake and entirely for its own sake. In fact, it's something that we should ultimately want everything else for the sake of. But then, of course, if you think about money or wealth, then it's pretty obvious that that can't be ultimate in that kind of way. That's not something that we want for its own sake. It's not something that we want everything else for the sake of. Unless we're Scrooge McDuck, I suppose, unless we're Scrooge McDuck. Well, that's right. And he realizes, of course, that there are some, so to speak, some Scrooge McDucks in the world. He says, there are people who, at least they say that the ultimate thing to go for in life is just to make more. Well, how much more? Well, more than you have now. And that's something that just never ends. And he finds this a really, really puzzling way of thinking about life. He doesn't doubt that there are people, he doesn't doubt for a moment there are people who genuinely do look at life this way. But he thinks there's something really tragic there because if the goal is not to have enough but to have more, then there's no point at which you could know that it makes sense to stop. And in that sense, the opportunity costs of doing the things that it takes to acquire wealth or to earn income, they're just boundless. There's no point at which they stop. And so what ultimately happens is you don't actually end up having had anything that you were really living for. And there's something he thinks deeply, deeply tragic about that. And that's something that he really wants to try to warn people away from. So if having money is not happiness and is just a means to happiness, then for Aristotle at least, what is happiness? Right. Well, I wrote a book not long ago trying to answer that question. But I'll try to summarize it. Aristotle thinks that happiness ultimately is a life of activity. He thinks that the defining aspect of human nature is not so much that we're just receptacles of pleasure. It's rather the idea that we commit ourselves to things. And our lives take a shape, and our characters and our personalities take a shape by the kinds of relationships that we get involved in, the projects that we become interested in, and really the things that we end up giving our life to. And in that broad sense, he thinks, well, that's to say that a human life is a life that's engaged in these sorts of activities. We might call them pursuits or meaningful pursuits. So he thinks that a happy life is, one, a life of activity. But two, of course, not just any activity. He thinks that it's activity that is guided towards goals that we find important and meaningful for their own right. And not just any goals and not just any kind of activity, but also activity and goals that are characterized by a kind of human excellence, by characteristics and attributes of oneself as a person that are part of what it is to be a person who's living a flourishing life and who's excellent as a human being. How do we know what those are? I mean, isn't that like, because what you described, like, people would say, sure, but figuring out the details of that, figuring out which characteristics are the ones that constitute or lead to happiness and then how much of them and how to weigh them against each other, that's the hard question. So how do we know what those things are? It is. The things that I've been calling excellence is these often get translated as virtues. And there's a real pitfall here because people will read Aristotle says that the most important thing for happiness is virtuous activity or activity in accordance with the virtues. And they'll think, well, that's an incredibly puzzling thing to say because, well, what are the virtues? Well, the virtues are, yeah, I don't know, I suppose. We think of all kinds of traditional moral rules and duties and we look at those and we think, well, I guess they have something to do with happiness but I would have thought what they had to do with happiness was they were curbs on the pursuit of it, right, pursue your happiness but don't go over the following boundaries then that's what the virtues are for. And if we approach it that way, then we find, you know, what he says about happiness to look really strange and people often come away thinking, well, I guess he just must not have meant by happiness anything that we mean by happiness. I think that's a bit unfortunate and I think that that actually gets things backwards. I think for Aristotle, we do better by trying to give a bit of content to the kinds of things that make a good human life, a happy life and then using that to try to understand what kinds of things are virtues. So what I'm saying is he doesn't start with sort of a fixed notion of what the virtues are and then try to, you know, pry them into his account of happiness for some reason. Instead, I think there's an approach to happiness which then leads to a way of understanding well, what things would count as excellences. So one of the things that, for example, that's very important for happiness is having things that you believe in strongly and acting for the sake of those. Well, if you think about that, that's therefore going to require certain attributes of characters such as, you know, not being distracted by things that will pull you away or not being put off those things when the going gets tough. But that's to say that things like temperance and courage are going to be virtues in a person. And likewise, there are going to be, you know, friends are going to be very, very important. These in close personal relationships are very an important part of human flourishing on this view. But then there are going to be certain excellences that go along with being a person who can have friends and being someone that other people are going to want to be friends. And so that will inform the view of what kinds of attributes and characteristics are virtues as well. I think one thing that may seem troubling about this though, especially when we talk about this within the context, we call this all ethics. And this is all coming from a book by Aristotle that is called The Ethics that this seems, I mean, so you say that a lot of this is, you know, happiness is found in having something we believe in and acting in pursuit of it. But let's take, I mean, let's take the most monstrous example possible of someone like Hitler. Hitler obviously had very strong beliefs and he acted to carry those out. And he may have been, I mean, he might've told you he was happy doing it. Does that mean that he was living out the kind of life? And I mean, we could posit, I don't, he had friends and... But to say, you know, it would be odd to have a theory that said, well, Hitler was doing things okay. Yeah, that's right. Here, there's something that's important to bring out in Aristotle's approach that we don't always find in modern approaches to happiness or to well-being. He's not chiefly trying to say, well, what is it for me to be happier? Pick this person over there. What is it for that person to be happy? He's trying to answer a bigger question and that is, what is human happiness? And those things are very different. So one example that I've used in talking about this in another place was the example of Robert Crumb, the cartoonist. There was a fascinating documentary about Robert Crumb called Crumb and I watched it a few years ago and there's a scene in which Crumb was talking with an old girlfriend and they were filming it and I wasn't really sure why they were filming this conversation, seemed a bit tangential. But then partway through the conversation, he just happened to let drop to this old girlfriend that he was never in love with her and she doesn't know what to say about this. Are you kidding? You certainly said that you did. He says, well, I know that I said that I did, but what's your point? And he kind of backed up for a moment and said, now wait, don't take this personally. It's not that I didn't love you, I've never loved anybody. And he goes on, he says, in fact, I don't even get what people are talking about. I don't get that concept. I don't know what it would be to love somebody. It's a bizarre idea. And so I was watching this and I thought, well, was that just something outrageous to say for the camera or for somebody else? But then there's a later scene in which they were interviewing Krum's adult son. And his adult son said, you know, I think I know that I love my father. I guess that he loves me, but I wish there was some way that I could show it to him. And he didn't mean anything sentimental. He said, I wish I could shake my father's hand one time in my life, but my dad can't do that. And I sort of realized, wow, that's why I had to see the conversation with the girlfriend. This guy actually meant it. He doesn't get love. So now think about what it is for Krum to be happy. Well, there are a couple of questions here. One is, okay, well, what's happiness for Krum? Well, evidently, whatever happiness for Krum would be, it doesn't involve being in loving relationships. That's just, I mean, that would just be pointless. But nobody would look at that, would look at Krum and say, well, there you go. That's as clear a case as we could ever have what happiness is. To think of another film as good as it gets, there's the scene where Jack Nicholson is frustrated with his psychiatrist and he storms up out of the office. And as he passes the waiting room to let out his frustration, he says the cruelest thing he could possibly think up to say to the other people in the waiting room, he says, what if this is as good as it gets? And if we think about, well, happiness is just what it is for that individual to be happy and we look at someone like Krum and we think, well, okay, I guess happiness is whatever happiness is for him. But that sounds a lot more like, well, no, that's as good as it gets if you're Krum. But as good as it gets can actually be a million miles away from anything that's really good. So maybe we need to think not just about what this person is like or what they would happen to want and so forth, but maybe we need to think more deeply about what is it to be fully human and what is it to be living a life that is really recognizable as genuine human happiness? And I think that's really where Aristotle is coming from. And I think that's why it's much more plausible on his view to start with that way of thinking about things and then ask, so okay, what kind of characteristics do I need to have in order to live that kind of life? Let's bring this back to the question of the decision to give up time in order to make more income and talk about how these virtues apply to that sort of question. So you mentioned in the paper, you say, well, first that right now to a degree unprecedented in history, most people today have the opportunity of shifting their focus from mere living to living well. And then you go on later to say that the challenge at the margin then, so when we're deciding in the moment to whether to give up a bit of time for a bit more income, so that the challenge at the margin is therefore to choose with wisdom so that taken all together, your time on this earth will add up to a good life, a life that is lived well. So what is this wisdom that you're talking about here and how does that, what is Aristotle? How does Aristotle have something in particular in mind with the word wisdom? Yes, by wisdom, Aristotle means something that acts rather like a skill in that it's about what to do in the way that skills are, but also that it makes a person good at certain kinds of things in ways that people aren't just good at by default. But what wisdom makes a person good at is good at making choices and making decisions. So it's a skill, he says, of deliberation or of decision making. Now, in some places he describes it as a skill of finding the mean. People who might have heard two things about Aristotle's ethics might have some vague memory of the golden mean or something like that. The mean in Aristotle is simply a way of trying to avoid multiple ways of getting things wrong. And he characterizes these sometimes as well. You can go wrong in the area of doing something more than you should or doing something less than you should and the idea is to find the mean. Now, he goes on to explain, and I think this is actually really useful in this context, that by the mean he doesn't mean something in the middle. So for example, people sometimes say, oh, so Aristotle believed in acting in accordance with the mean, and so he thought that meant doing everything in kind of an intermediate way, nothing too much, nothing too little. And that gets a bit absurd when you think about, for example, virtues having to do with emotions like anger. One way to go wrong is to be too angry or to be angry when you shouldn't, and another way to go wrong is not to be angry enough and not to get angry at the things you should. Now, if Aristotle thought that the mean in between these was some sort of halfway point, then absurdly he would hold the view that, so the right way to do is to go around sort of mildly annoyed all the time. That can't possibly be the idea. So what he meant instead was, no, what we're trying to do is find something, is find a point at which you're making, you're doing what's appropriate with respect to something like anger or whatever the case may be. He gives an example to try to illustrate this. He says, think about food, think about a diet. We could identify some amount of food that's just too little. There's nobody who can get through the day on that much food, and then we could identify some other amount of food that's too much, nobody would ever need that much food. We wouldn't want to say, so the right amount of food for everybody is found by splitting the difference between those two quantities. Well, of course not, that amount of food is going to be still too much for some people, still not enough for others. Rather, the thing to do is try to identify what each person actually does need to get through the day, and then to avoid going to either extreme from that point. And that's how he thinks about wisdom as something that finds the mean. And that's relevant because as we start thinking about choices that are at the margin, what's built into this way of thinking about choosing in accordance with the mean at the margin is a recognition that, well, a wise choice is going to look very different for different people, and over time it's something that could really change, and it's going to be heavily dependent on a person's particular circumstances. How do we develop this wisdom, though? I mean, you brought the example of how much is the right amount to eat, and that this is different for different people, but a lot of us even acknowledging that it's different for different people have a hard time figuring that one out. So where is, I mean, how do we make ourselves wise? How do we get to be wise? Where does wisdom come from? Because we're not going to make these decisions well unless we've got it, right? That's right. Actually, a chapter or two before he starts talking about the mean, he takes up this question in kind of a brief way. He makes a comparison between learning to be wise and learning to write, or learning to speak a language. By learning to write, I don't mean learning to write poems or essays, I just mean learning to write when you're in grade school. He says, what people do there is they start off writing. He says, it's a bit paradoxically, you learn to write your letters by writing your letters. He says, well, how? If I knew how to write my letters, I wouldn't need to know how to learn how. Well, no, it doesn't work like that. When you're writing your letters as a learner, you're doing it in a learner's way and you're following somebody else's guidance, you're maybe relying on certain kinds of rules, you're looking at what other people do, or you have a teacher who gives you an outline and so on, and you follow that. But over time, what happens is that you become less dependent on those things. And actually, eventually, you can become quite independent and you can even innovate. You might learn to change your mind about the right way to do these things. That's what happens in the acquisition of skill. And he thinks that, again, this is at a very, very general sort of level. He thinks acquiring a virtue, such as the virtue of wisdom, works like this as well. It's something that we learn. We learn it from examples. We learn it by trial and error. We learn it by making attempts, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, sometimes realizing that we don't do things very well and then trying to address that. There's more that we could say here, but that's basically how he thinks about wisdom, that is something that's built up through practice and through failure, through imitation, and like many skills are, and that over time, it's something that we become increasingly independent of doing. All of us have a fair amount of experience making decisions throughout our lives, sometimes making good ones, sometimes making bad ones, but even with equal amounts of experience, it seems like wisdom, I guess, just like any other skill is not necessarily evenly distributed. And so to bring this into the question of government, whether we're talking about the amount of food you can eat or the number of hours you should work, wouldn't there then be an argument that just like the child who is learning his letters has to be, someone has to say, this is the correct way to write an A and a B and a C. Wouldn't that mean then there's a role for government to step in and say, okay, this is the most likely to be correct amount of food to eat or the number of hours to work, so like the way that the government has a long history of getting involved in work-life balance, like the famous Lochner Supreme Court decision about the number of hours bakers could work, doesn't this mean there's an opportunity for the government to step in and kind of help the unwise or encourage them, get them started on the right path by kind of restricting their options a bit or showing them the correct way to go? Yeah, that's a good question. The next question, of course, is always, so if human fallibility is the problem, show me how bureaucrats who are humans are the solution. So in order for this kind of approach to be some kind of improvement, we need some reason to believe that the people who will be constraining my choices and your choices and our friends' choices and so forth, are in a better position to know where the mean is for each of us than we and the people that we consult are going to be. And I think that's going to be a really difficult thing. I mean, as, well, let's think about some of the choices that people make at the margins and what it is to hit the mean at the margins. So in the paper, and sometimes in my class, I introduced these two people. I call them Fred and Frida. And so Fred, let's imagine, Fred and Frida both, I should say up front, let's assume they both make a comfortable living, right? By any one standards in a developed country, we would say, yeah, they're doing fine. So the question is, okay, how much farther should they go in investing time in collecting income beyond that point? In other words, at that margin. So suppose that one of these people, let's say that Fred is at a point in his life where he has a lot of family commitments. He wants to spend a lot of time with family. And for someone like that, it could be the case that, you know, at the margin, he has a lot more use for the time than he does for the extra money. So in a case like that, where the mean could really be at the margin, the thing to do is to try to get some of the time back instead of investing it in yet another block of income. But now move to somebody like Frida. And let's suppose that she's in a very different position in her life. She's in a place where, suppose she doesn't have a family yet, so she's single, she's not in a relationship. But she does have plans for the future. I mean, perhaps she wants to be able to take a more, take fairly relaxing kind of job in the future or perhaps to retire early or to set more aside for certain kind, you know, so that she can be, spend more time with family when the time comes. So for her at this point, at that margin, it might actually make a lot of sense for her to invest the next block of time in order to acquire the next block of income. She has a greater use for the income that she does for the, than she does for the free time. So here are two very different people and notice that where the mean is for them is in a completely different place, right? I mean, for one person, the mean is going to be one kind of choice. For somebody else, the mean is going to be the opposite kind of choice. And the thing is, it doesn't stop there. It can even change over their lives. So, you know, we could imagine maybe 10 years earlier, the thing for Fred to do was to invest more in the margin in income than in free time. Maybe 10 years from now for Freda, the thing to do will be to invest more at the margin in free time than in extra income. So even, so between people, the mean is going to be completely different depending on their different circumstances. And even for the same person, at different times in their life, the mean could be something completely different because those circumstances change. Now, for each of these people, that means that there's a lot of difficulty. There's a lot of wisdom that's needed at any given time to know what's the most sensible choice to make at the margin. But then there's this further question. So how much sense would it make for them to involve other people in those choices at the margin? Well, if those other people are other people who know their particular circumstances or are invested in their well-being, in other words, if they're the people that know and love them, then that's terrific. Those people can provide advice and counseling. These could be family members, they could be clergy, they could be therapists. On the other hand, if those people are far away in an office having to draft a policy, that's going to be the same for everyone. The problem immediately becomes extremely difficult how that policy is both going to actually do something to constrain people's choices at the margin, but not also constrain those choices in ways that actually make it much harder for Fred or for Frida or maybe for both of them to hit what's the mean in their particular case. So I think that's really the problem that has to be overcome. I thought one of the really interesting parts of the essay was where you say that even if somehow the bureaucrat manages to get it right, manages to set the number of hours or whatever to what you would have decided yourself if you were as fully wise as you could be and had all the necessary information that even if the bureaucrat sets the policy to exactly what you would have chosen, that there's still something wrong with that. Yes, so think about a happiness researcher who comes up with a theory. I mean, they devote their lives to trying to understand what human well-being is and what human happiness is and how it can be impacted by public policy. And suppose it's a terrific theory and they publish it and it's very well received and so on, now consider the fact that they're not the only person who's done that and so there's going to be somebody else who's devoted their life to exactly the same thing and they've got this different view. And then there'll be a third person and that person has a different view. For example, in the area of happiness research Robert Skedelsky and Edward Skedelsky recently wrote a book, How Much is Enough? And in it they outline a view of the good life for humans and the view basically consists of a list of things that are crucial goods in human life. And the list is full of really plausible things. I'm not that kind of list maker myself but if I were, I don't know how different it would look to there. However, they also know that there are other people working in the field who've come up with rather different lists. People who don't put all of the same goods on, right? People who include goods on their list that they don't. People who leave out goods that they insist on putting in. Then there are people who want to assign different kinds of weights between these goods. Okay, well if I have to choose between good A and good B, then which way does it go? And people, which way do I go? And people can disagree over those sorts of things. There can also be disagreements over, well, just how aggressive should public policy be about this? Should public policy simply see to it that people have opportunities to acquire these goods but then leave it at that? Or should we actually try to guarantee that people do obtain those goods and they do actually make the use of those opportunities that we hope they would? And so there are all of these sorts of differences. But then I got to imagining what would it be like then if you took any three people in happiness research and you put them on a desert island? Here I'm drawing on a thought experiment that I thought was just marvelous from a paper called Virtue and Politics that was published recently by Mark LaBar, who I believe has been on the podcast before. Mark ran this thought experiment in his paper. I thought it would really fit in this context as well. And the idea goes like this. So you have these three people who devoted their lives to trying to understand the nature of well-being and they've come up with these three different views. Now suppose that these three are on this desert island and there needs to be some sort of governance on this desert island. And of course the governance should be such that it's going to promote the well-being of all of those who are on this island. Well, that means we need some theory. But whose theory is it going to be? Now pick any one of those people and suppose that their theory is the one that's going to hold sway on this island. Then think about the perspective of the other two people towards life on that island lived in that way. Now it's not just so much that there's disagreement, but rather each of those other people is going to look at that arrangement and they're going to perceive this as they're living at somebody else's pleasure. At their being asked to allow someone else to make choices and to come up with policies and to constrain their choices in accordance with a view of the good that may or may not be their own. And I think that's really the fundamental issue here is the experience of living at the pleasure and at the discretion of some other person. And that I think raises real questions of justification. Suppose that we could come up with, suppose that we, here's a way of trying to solve the problem of why I think that bureaucrats should be any better than I am at trying to figure out the best choice for me at the margin. And the answer might be, well there are scientists who study these things or there are people in the social sciences and in the humanities who study these things. So all we need to do is adopt one of those theories and Bob's your uncle. Well the problem is that if that theory is actually going to constrain my choices then it means that my life is now going to be shaped and my choices are now going to be constrained at the pleasure of somebody else. And that's a question of what we can justify to each other in terms of how we act with respect to each other through political mechanisms. Right, and I think that's an important point because we wanna, I mean what we don't want it to sound like you're saying is all of us therefore ought to make these decisions in a vacuum, wholly independently that all of those scientists and philosophers and whoever else may be very wise people and it would be in our interest to seek out their advice but I think what I hear you saying is then ultimately and we can learn from them, we can take the advice but what's important is that ultimately that the final decision is our own. I think that's right, I mean one thing that Aristotle saw that I think was very insightful was how deeply social human beings are. So I mean I talked earlier about what is it that's really definitive of human nature and therefore what's really crucial to human flourishing and for him our social aspect was part of that that we were not solitary animals. Is this what he meant when he called us, when he said man is a political animal? Yes, in the politics he describes, he says a human being is a political animal and I think that was incredibly insightful although I'm not sure it contains exactly the insight that some think that it does. What he had in mind there was to say that man is the kind of animal whose distinctive mode of living involves living in a polis or in a city state. A city state is for him defined as, I read him as defining a polis functionally. A polis is whatever level of population and organization within that group that's sufficient for people not merely to meet their needs and to make it into the next day but also to live a fully human life and to be able to flourish. And he thinks that there is a certain level of social organization and hierarchy that makes certain kinds of institutions possible and makes it possible for us to create wealth so that we have time to devote other kinds of pursuits and so on. And that's the characteristic mode of human life is to live in that kind of way. Does he mean by the polis, does he mean the group of people, the community? Does he mean the state, the political organization? Does he mean both? That's a really good question. The Greek word polis is ambiguous between those two things. On the one hand, a polis could be a community. It could be a group of people. On the other hand, a polis could be specifically a sort of government, what we would think of as well, a political kind of organization. And that turns out to make a difference and actually in ancient Greek philosophy, different philosophers had had a different view of what the fundamental mode of human life was. And some thought, well, actually we need to distinguish political life from social life. Aristotle himself is, I find, very unclear. And so I think that I'm not sure that he gets this distinction as cleanly as I would. And I think that leads to an unfortunate result. There's a couple of ways that we might have interpreted Aristotle's insight about our being social creatures. We might have thought, well, that's interesting. So if we have public policy so that we live better with it than without it, then here's how you think about that. Public policy should create a space in which society can happen, in which people can live in peace, they can pursue their interests without having to come into constant conflict or negotiation with other people. People should be able to experiment. There could be, therefore, a discovery process by which people live differently and they share ideas and they communicate and they give advice and they pass down wisdom through the ages. And that's how we learn how to live better lives. But as far as the government is concerned, really its role is to fence that in to protect it. It's more like a system of traffic lights rather than someone who's actually telling the traffic where it should be going. Aristotle, however, went the other direction and he thought that our sociality involved, the idea that, well, if public policy is for living better with it than without it, then we need a full-blown view of what it is to lead a good life and then we need to design all of our institutions so that they constrain people's choices from cradle to grave. Actually, for him, the process actually begins before the cradle so that we can guarantee as far as possible that people will do the things that we know, according to this theory, it takes to live a flourishing human life. And I think it was unfortunate that he went that way rather than the former. And one of the reasons I think it's unfortunate is the one that I was talking about a moment ago. There's this question of, not so much, who has the best theory and therefore would make the best decisions if it were their decision to make? There's a more fundamental question of, well, whose decisions are they to make in the first place? And what kind of reallocation of that decision-making jurisdiction can we really justify to each other? 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.