 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining us today is Andrew Jason Cohen, associate professor of philosophy at Georgia State University and visiting professor of ethics at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown. He's the author of a terrific new book on toleration. So I guess we'll start with definitions. What is toleration? Well, thanks, first of all. Thanks for having me and thanks for enjoying the book. I'm glad you read it. So what is toleration? It is, I have three main conditions in the book that I talk about. It has to be principled, that is to say there has to be a good value behind the reason for the toleration. And then of course it has to be non-interference. And finally it has to be non-interference with something that you're actually opposed to. So those are the three basic conditions. If there isn't something you're opposed to, we don't talk about tolerating. I don't, for example, in the normal circumstances, tolerate my son. I love him. I have nothing to oppose, so I'm not tolerating him. In fact, quite the opposite, I try to promote his well-being as much as possible. And if I am tolerating something, say there's somebody that I'm not happy with who's doing things that I think are wrong and I decide not to interfere. It has to be that I'm not interfering for a principled reason. It can't be, for example, that I think if I refrain from interfering with them, that they'll do something and end up dying. That wouldn't be toleration either. I'm going to dig into all that a bit because it's one of those look simple definitions, but there's a lot of depth. But I quickly, in the beginning of the book, you distinguish toleration from tolerance. And we often, I think, a lot of people use those terms interchangeably, so what's the difference between those two? Right. So I do think we use those words interchangeably at certain points. And really, at the end of the day, I'm fine with using the word tolerance to mean what I talk about when I talk about toleration. But I think we use tolerance to mean something else as well, something that we don't use the word toleration for, which is you have a tolerant attitude or tolerance could be a virtue or a disposition. We don't use toleration that way. So for simplicity, we'd rather say, look, we already have a different use of the word for tolerance. Let's leave it alone and let's just talk about toleration, which is a behavior. So behavior and virtues or attitudes are just very different sorts of things. I considered doing more work on the attitude or the virtue and decided it wasn't the way I wanted to go and have been pursuing the behavior ever since. How does toleration work into a political framework? Because it's an attitudinal thing. We could say it's not really a political value, but you discuss it in a political context in many ways, including bringing up people like John Rawls. So it has more than just a day-to-day life. Absolutely. Yeah. So here's the thing, so there's a large chapter in the book in which I talk about the arguments or some of the arguments for toleration. I think Rainer-Forest identifies like 28 arguments in the book. I don't do nearly that many, but there's something really decidedly odd about arguments for toleration in the year 2015. The fact is nobody really questions whether toleration is a value. We all think toleration is important. You can look at foreign countries of various sorts in the Middle East or whatnot and say, well, they don't seem to think it's important, but that's not really right. Even people in the Middle East will say, yes, toleration's important. You think it's important, we think it's important. Where we disagree, and this is where the politics comes in, is what are the limits of toleration? So if you're somebody who has a very religious background and you want to protect your children and keep them in your religious group, you might be worried about the great Satan that is the US tempting your children away. And for them, for people that think like that, that is a limit to toleration, and they might be willing to use state mechanisms to prevent it. I don't happen to think that's the right view, obviously. And so I think the real questions that we're dealing with in the 21st century and really for a large part of the 20th century as well, the real questions are, is toleration a value? We already know it is. The real questions is, what is the extent of toleration? What are the limits of it? And that's where the political stuff comes in. Well, that's one of the things that potentially makes toleration a bit odd, because if it's a value or if it's a virtue, we tend to think of it that way. But as you said, your definition needs a principle. You need to disagree with what someone is doing. You need to not like it in order to tolerate it. Does that mean the most virtuous person from the standpoint of possessing toleration is the person who doesn't like anything that anyone else does? And if you're the kind of person who doesn't bother me, I'm just well-adjusted to a multicultural society or whatever, then you somehow can't practice this virtue. I think this is a good question for you, because you don't like so many things, so you must be really tolerant. You don't like Jets fans, you don't like so much music, and you don't like guys who wear shorts. Yeah, and I'm a profoundly virtuous person. Exactly. It makes you more virtuous the more things you dislike. There's something totally right about this, actually, and I'm not the first person to say this. You see this in the literature on toleration in the 1980s and the 1990s, etc. People often talk for one reason or another about the Dutch as being unable to tolerate anything, not because they want to interfere all the time, but because they're so tolerant by attitude that they have nothing to tolerate, that is to say nothing bothers them. They don't oppose anything. There is nothing for them to, on principle, refrain from interfering with. That reminds me of it because a little bit later in your book, but it kind of reminds me of one of the general arguments he put forward of toleration, which is the skepticism relativism, which seems to go into that, which you reject as a very bad argument. But everyone's like, oh man, everything's true and everything's cool and everyone has their own worldview. That's not toleration, though, correct? I think that's right. I mean, I'm not 100% certain, to be fair, about the skepticism issue. I've been working on some stuff and reading some stuff recently and I'm sort of getting persuaded that skepticism itself may be a value that can allow for toleration in some cases, but I'm not certain about that. But the relativism stuff, on the other hand, that's just clear, right? I think that this is a mentality that you see very frequently on college campuses and in the broader culture, unfortunately, when you think, who am I to judge, right? I'm not the one that gets to decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. So I can't judge if it's good or bad, so I can't tolerate it. The fact is, if you think that way, then the most you can say is, well, I'm going to refrain from interfering. But if somebody else wants to interfere, you've got nothing to say back to them because after all, you don't believe anything on principle. You don't have any values to endorse. And so you can't use any of those values or any of those principles to argue against somebody. You can try to persuade them on a motive basis, I suppose. But if they are just not persuaded, if they have very different emotional reactions to things, so be it. Or if they want to interfere with your toleration, you have nothing to actually principally resist with. That's exactly right. Toleration is pretty cool, but there's no principle behind it. Right. What does principle mean in this case? Like, if I disagree with something you're doing, I can presumably disagree for principled reasons, in which case I can tolerate what you're doing, and I could disagree for non-principled reasons, in which case... You can still. Yeah, so the opposition, on my view anyway, and there's debate about this in the literature, there are some people that think that the opposition that you have has to be moral opposition. And that if you're not morally opposed to the thing, you can't tolerate it. Merely disliking it for aesthetic reasons or something else is not enough. I think that's wrong. You do tolerate Jets fans because he's morally opposed to them. Well, but on my view, you could tolerate them even if you just have an aesthetic preference. I don't know what it would be aesthetically about Jets fans that you didn't like, but if there was something about them aesthetically that you didn't like... If we had time, I could go through it all. But on my view, yeah, it doesn't have to be moral opposition. What has to be principled is the reason for refraining from interfering, not the reason that you're opposing it in the first place. Let's get into some of those parameters this week. I think we've sort of established that it's the extent and the reasons of your toleration and what you tolerate. So we're talking about a liberal society. As you mentioned, Saudi Arabia or Iran, they tolerate people. They just have different definitions of what is tolerable, what can be tolerated. Exactly right. Different limits. So your main limit comes in with the harm principle. Correct. Can we talk a little about what that is and who originated it and what are the limits of it? Sure. So the principle is actually older than I even suggest in the book. You guys probably know this. Of course, John Locke talked about something very similar. But John Stuart Mill gave us this really nice, clear... That's an overstatement, I suppose, but a nice statement about the harm principle. He says basically the only reason in a civilized society that we should be interfering with people is if they're doing harm to others. That's it, nothing else. The reason why I hesitated and say I was overstating the case about saying it's clear, of course, is because it's entirely unclear what it means to talk about harming people. And this requires a lot of work. And Joel Feinberg in the 1980s, sorry, did the most work, I think, on clarifying what must be meant by harm in the harm principle. And there are people today that disagree with him and think he's got it wrong and that Mill wouldn't endorse this. So ultimately for me, although I love Mill and I think he's got a lot of stuff right, I also think he gets a lot of things wrong and I don't need to worry about whether or not I'm a million in the perfect sense, right? I think the harm principle is the thing to endorse. And so it means you can only interfere with a person rightfully if they've harmed somebody else, where harming somebody else means they have wrongfully set back those person's interests. Now this sounds like a principle of political action or something libertarian would say this is, you know, what limits justified state action, for example. But you're calling it toleration. Are they similar type of question? Very similar. I would think the toleration question is broader. So it doesn't only apply to the state. It's not only a political thing. It's a matter of personal morality as well as political morality. If there's somebody walking down my street playing Justin Bieber on, you know, a radio and they're not wearing headphones so I can hear this horrible music, I think I have to tolerate it. I certainly don't think the government should be interfering, right? If I got on the phone and said, you know, come police. They're playing Justin Bieber outside and we all know how terrible that is. I don't think the police should be interfering. But I also don't think it's for me to interfere either. And that's not a political issue. It's just personal morality. So I think the toleration question is broader. It feels like the term wrongfully is doing a lot of work here because you can... I mean, most everybody could agree with what you're saying and then the disagreement comes down to whether... And I think you hear you distinguish hurt from harm. And so a hurt is not... A harm is a wrongful hurt, if I remember correctly. Exactly right. And so the Iranians might say, look, we're tolerating everything. We're supposed to be tolerating. But these behaviors are actually wrongful and you might disagree. And so do we need like another level of moral theorizing about what's wrong before we can get to questions of what's toleration and what we should tolerate? I think for the difficult questions, that's right. I don't think there's any way around that. I think there are a lot of things where we all know where somebody is wrongfully set back in other person's interests. And so it's fairly quick and fairly easy. I can't come over and, you know, smack you across the face, right? You have an interest in not being smacked and if absent some sort of prior agreement, it's wrong for me to do it. Nobody's going to disagree about that. It's wrong for me to take the money out of your wallet, right? And it would set back your interest. Again, nobody's going to disagree about that. It's not... I don't wrongfully set back anybody's interests if I go outside and I give a beggar a dollar, right? So those aren't harms. But there are going to be difficult cases. And in those difficult cases, yeah, absolutely. I think we're going to have to do a lot of work to figure out if there's a harm there or not. You talk about an example. I think it was a Feinberg example of people having sex on a bus and doing other grotesque things and analyzing that under the harm principle. How can we prohibit that? Should we tolerate it or can't we prohibit it or should we prohibit it and not tolerate it? Right. I think my own view is we can prohibit it in certain ways, that is to say... So the example... Maybe you didn't want to fill out the whole thing. Oh, yes. It includes other bodily fluids and coprophilia and things like this. We'll mark the page numbers. Exactly. Think of the aristocrats, pretty much. That's what I was thinking when I was reading it. I was like, they're going to go to the aristocrats if anyone knows that joke. That's not the connection I was making. But yeah. So if it's going to do something that's going to increase the probability that future riders of the bus are going to get sick, then I think it's obvious that it can set back people's interests in the future. People have an interest in not getting sick. It seems like you're doing things that are going to make them sick is probably wrongful so we can prohibit that. But can we prohibit the acts entirely? I think no. If you can, I talk about this in the book, if you can rent a bus and the bus company agrees to allow you to do it and the bus company is then going to take responsibility and make sure the bus is clean so future riders don't get sick, I don't see any reason why we should be interfering. So the not get sick is you might be causing a physical hurt or harm to future people but is there such thing as mental harms? Because I mean the reason, one of the reasons we care about physical harms is that physical harms or physical hurt undermines our quality of life in a dramatic way. But the same could be said for certain degrees of mental anguish and so if seeing what these people are doing on the bus causes post-traumatic stress or something then it seems like we can't arbitrarily say well the physical is okay, the mental is not. Yeah, so there are a lot of people that worry that we should not be extending harm to talk about mental or emotional harm. I don't have that worry frankly. I think it's right. If somebody, if you get on a bus and you're riding downtown or you're riding across town or something and two people get on and have this capriphogic sexual picnic on the bus you may well suffer mental anguish and I think it's actually fairly predictable that the persons committing this act know that somebody on the bus is going to have some sort of emotional distress and I think it is wrongful for them to do it. I don't see any reason not to interfere in those cases. That's not to say that we should always interfere just because somebody suffers some sort of mental anguish but the case here is somebody's getting on the bus and they're doing something that there's an easily predictable outcome of other people on the bus suffering. That strikes me as yeah there probably is a mental harm or an emotional harm and so we can in fact interfere. That's very different from say banning homosexual marriage just because I use the example in the book I don't remember the name of the character though Aunt Jeanie gets upset when she knows that there are gay people getting married she suffers mental anguish. Very different sort of case because in that case the gay people aren't doing anything to Aunt Jeanie whereas on the bus the people getting on the bus and doing these acts are doing something to the people that were already on the bus. Does the existence of potential mental anguish, mental harms create something of a feedback loop where the if the society is not very tolerant to begin with then we don't have much experience in toleration and so seeing these potential. Yeah the anguish the anguish might be more acute. I'm thinking of like so these kids on college campuses with the microaggressions and all of that which to those of us who grew up in a world where you just dealt with offenses, we're used to it and so that stuff doesn't bother us but if you're one of these protected kids it might be genuine anguish that you're feeling that those safe zones might be necessary to prevent catastrophe and probably overstating it but the experience of tolerating limits the amount of mental anguish you feel and so then it becomes less necessary to tolerate it and the other way around. Well I think everything you said is right. I mean if you live in a society that's not very tolerating then you're not gonna be exposed to very much and so it's more likely that you're gonna suffer anguish when you are suddenly exposed to these sorts of things but still there's a question there is whether or not anybody's doing anything to you. So it's not enough that your interests are set back. It's not even enough that your interests are set back when somebody does something wrongful. It has to be that they're doing a wrong to you that sets back your interests, right? And so you're, I don't know, seeing somebody with the lady exposing her ankles she's not exposing her ankles to you, right? She's not doing it to bring about some sort of anguish with you and so you can't claim that she's harmed you and so there's no reason for interference there in the same way that Anjini can't say that we should disallow homosexual marriage just because she gets upset by it because when homosexuals get married they're not doing anything to Anjini. How do we distinguish that though? I mean, the people having sex on the bus they could be getting on their, they have no interest in you. They don't care if you see it or not. They're not, they're certainly not intentionally trying to cause you mental anguish and you could also, I mean, presumably you could say like people could engage in behaviors behind closed doors that they're doing because they know it's, eliciting is the kind of thing that would make people upset and that they're, you know, people know this stuff is happening even if they can't see it. So it's the only, it seems like you're, the difference between the homosexual sex in a bedroom and the sex on the bus, let's, and bracketing the issue of the morality of homosexual behavior is the existence of like photons between, you know, the act and the eye but that doesn't seem, I mean, we can imagine like people doing really horrific things behind closed doors that we could rise to the level of mental anguish we find out about. What if there was a homosexual, back when Jerry Falwell was still alive and there was a homosexual couple who decided to have homosexual sex in private but with the intent of making Jerry Falwell very upset or telling him about it later? Yeah, so first of all, yes, I actually think this is a very difficult question. I don't wanna deny that. At the same time, I think that there are reasonable answers for these things. I think we should be concerned about reasonable expectations and I think if somebody gets on the bus and starts having this mad, caprophagic sex picnic on the bus, they should deal with it. That would be the title of this podcast. I could have a mad, caprophagic sex picnic and my new rock album coming soon. Probably would be a great name for a rock album. But look, I think if you get on a bus planning to do that, you have to know that if there are other people on the bus, some of them might be upset about it and you are in fact doing something that will cause them to get upset. And I don't see any reason why we should be obnoxious in that way. We should recognize that other people have feelings and we shouldn't try to get them upset and if you're doing something like that, you don't wait until you get home and go do it in your own bedroom. Well, but would that mean that the harm principle and maybe this question carries more weight, say 20 years ago, that the harm principle would have prohibited, say, pride parades? Interesting question. Yeah, I mean, I am inclined to think, for example, that Nazis marching in Skokie knew what they were doing and they were doing something that was gonna cause harm to people that lived there and so that that should, in fact, that it's reasonable to interfere in those cases. I'm not sure. I guess I'd like to think pride parades would be different, but 20, 30 years ago, maybe they wouldn't have been different and maybe that does add an element of conservatism that would worry me a little bit, given that I oppose the moral legalism, as you know. Well, the mental English thing seems difficult. I think I agree with you, but at the same time, since you're the only, under most circumstances, you're the only observer of your mental states, it does give you some sort of interesting hecklers veto by just simply claiming your own English. And also, if you think about the psychologization, the DSM-5, and now everything is a disorder, so now if they put in the DSM-5, then maybe that would give you good enough reason to ban it or not tolerate it because you would suddenly have, you know, I saw a woman's ankles on TV,itis or anguish, you know, and it's now in the DSM-5. Yeah, I think, so take up gay pride parade 30 or 40 years ago. I guess I still think I have a way out of this. I think it's, unless the people marching in the parade are really doing it because they want to annoy certain people and really want to cause those people anguish, they want to harm those people, there's still not gonna be a reason to deference. Now you worry about having your own claim that you can just look into your own mind and say, yep, I'm feeling mental anguish, you're causing it, therefore I can interfere. I think that's a mistake as well, and here's where you could put it in one of two ways. You could say either doing the philosophy matters or you can say doing it through a judiciary matters, because it's not just that you can claim that something harms you. People can claim to be harmed out the wazoo and sometimes they're truthful and correct and sometimes they're just wrong. And we have to recognize that. So as a philosopher, what I want to say is it's not that you simply claim to be harmed, it's that you are in fact harmed. That might sometimes be hard to tell but we have to make the distinction. And in fact, when we talk about this in court cases, courts are often at times at pains to try to figure out if there's a genuine harm or not. So I don't think this is something that's merely limited to philosophers. I think we do this in courts all the time and I think we would have to do it in the sorts of cases that you're thinking about where somebody wants to claim to be harmed and the rest of us look and say, no, come on, that's not really a harm. In fact, Feinberg himself talked about a case, I can't remember if I brought this up in the book or not, somebody who is so weak and frail that if you sneeze, they fall down. We call it eggshell plaintiffs in law. Yeah, we don't say that we have a right to interfere with people who accidentally, because they didn't know about this, caused the person to fall down. Talking about people taking offense at actions leads, you've got this section of this book where you outline alternatives to the harm principle, alternative ways to talk about the principle behind toleration and the first of those. So maybe we can just go through those because they're pretty interesting. And the first of those is the offense principle. So how does that one? So the basic idea behind the offense principle, which of course I reject, is that anything that is offensive is possibly something that can be interfered with. Typically people that want to endorse this don't actually take that broad of you. They say there have to be certain sorts of offenses. They have to be the sorts of offenses that you can't get away from. They have to be very intense. They have to be long lived, is another one that people talk about. For me, no offense by itself is enough to actually warrant interference. However, there are some offenses that like the Capri-Fagic sex picnic on the bus rise above being mirrorly offensive, because they can actually cause harm, whether it be mental distress or physical illness at the site of what's going on, that actually rises to the level of harm. Trick is then, though, that it's not the offense principle any longer that's doing the work. It's now the harm principle, right? So for me, if it's a mirrorly offensive thing, it's not gonna warrant interference. If it rises to the level of harm, then it may well warrant interference. Now what about harming the fabric of society, harming our good values, that kind of thing, or even, I guess, a follow-up there, what about the harm of a wrathful God who may smite us in Sodom and Gomorrah style if we allow for homosexual behavior? Okay, so I think those are actually two very different questions. I think, so let me take the latter one first. It would be a rather remarkable thing if I could harm God. Yes, but he could harm us. That's why we don't tolerate, I'm saying the argument that we don't tolerate homosexuality because God, because of Katrina, see that kind of thing, he's going to smite us. So you might have sort of a background principle behind the offense principle and say the reason why we limit offenses, the reason why we interfere when people do things offensively is because we want to prevent God from being so upset with us. Yes. Now, if you were right about that, that would be some sort of violation of the harm principle, or it would be something you could harm. That's probably right. So if God would actually respond in a harmful way, so who was it, Pat Robinson, who said something like 9-11 was a response to gay marriage or some of these crazy claims, or Katrina was a response to who knows what. New Orleans sinfulness, yes. Yeah, so. I think it was Christopher Hitchens. So that was Jerry Falwell who said the thing about New Orleans, and it was Christopher Hitchens who said, if you gave that guy an enema, you could have buried him in a matchbox. My all-time favorite kitchens line. But anyway, sorry, continue. So two things. One, if in fact there would be an end result of harm from an action, that would, I think, at least warrant consideration for interference. I should say, importantly, I've been saying it might warrant interference. Having a harm doesn't say you should in fact interfere. It says interference is permissible at that point. But then you have to figure out if all things considered interference is the way to go. I think that's very important to recognize. It's not that we're saying every time there's a harm, there must be an interference. Rather, it's that if there's a harm, now we ask, given everything else that we know, should we interfere. So going back to the offense principle and offending God so that he then comes out and uses his wrath, harms us. I still think this is a very weird picture of God, right? I would agree. You have a God now who gets upset with some people who are doing things offensively and then turns around and harms everybody else. I'm inclined to think that this is... He needs to read your book. That God would need to read your book. Yeah, I'm inclined to think that would not be a God at all. Right? And I think I'm at Georgetown for the semester. I think good Catholic theology would say that's not what God is. What about societal harm, though? Societal harm. That's a different question. And I think I talk about this in the legal moralism chapter section. So the legal moralist says there are some things that are immoral, whether or not they cause harm, such that we should interfere. And there are different versions of the legal moralist principle. One of those is, well, really what's going on when you do something immorally is you're tearing at the fabric of society. This is Patrick Devlin's way of talking about a famed jurist from earlier in the 20th century. I have to say, I mean, these things leave me utterly without any sort of desire to respond. Like, the fabric of society, I don't even know what that means, right? I just, I look at it, I think fabric of society. I'm not sure what it means, but I'm not sure if it meant anything, what would be needed to see it, right? So people have said things like this about pornography. Pornography tears at the fabric of society. I don't know if this is true anymore. But a few years ago, the porn industry was bigger than Hollywood. So if it was gonna tear at the fabric of society, whatever that means, it should have done so already. Now some people will say, well, in fact it has, and that's why society is so bad right now. Now we're in an empirical question. Is society that bad that it's been harmed? More importantly for me, I just don't think society is the sort of thing that can be harmed in the first place. And I think in that regard, the metaphor of tearing fabric is actually quite useful because you can't harm fabric, right? So you've got these backdrops here when you do video and there's no way that these backdrops can be harmed. They can be torn, they can be ripped, they can be painted on, they can be any number of other things that might make them useless to you, but they themselves can't be harmed. If you are the owner of these backdrops, then you can be harmed if I tear them, right? Because you're losing your interest in the backdrop or the financial interest in the backdrop is being set back. But the fabric itself has no interests, so it can't have interests set back wrongfully or other. And I think society is exactly like that. It has no interests. Society is a collection of individuals. It's the individuals have interests. They may have similar interests. They may have overlapping interests. In some cases, everybody in a society may share a particular interest, but it's those people that can be harmed, not society as a whole. Maybe I can ask Trevor's question about harm to society in a slightly different way, which is so looking at the kinds of things that when people are talking about on campuses, we shouldn't allow certain kinds of speech. The argument there is there are groups of who are traditionally marginalized, who are historically victimized in some way, and by engaging in offensive behavior, making racist or sexist jokes say, what you're doing is contributing to an atmosphere that or an environment that then in turn serves to either keep those people marginalized or to maintain their victim status or to harm them because of their marginalized status, that it's an environment in which they can't thrive. So you're not directly harming a particular person, but your behavior in some small way, there's an emergent factor of it that is this environment that is then ultimately harmful. Yeah, so maybe this will surprise you, but I actually think most of what you said is actually right, and I know it wasn't your voice, you were talking about what other people wanna say, but I actually think most of that is right. I mean, I put it a little bit differently. I think first of all, if you allow students in a particular college to, I don't know, put up racist or sexist signs, like there was one recently where these kids in a frat put up a sign about drop off your daughter here and leave your wife as well or something. That really does, it's strike me, set up a bad environment, an environment such that the female students arriving will not feel comfortable and won't be able to learn, and so their interests will in fact be set back, and I think the obnoxiousness is probably wrongful as well. We don't have to worry about all these little microaggressions to get to that point. I think we should agree that those things are just things that we can in fact rule out of a college campus, and I think there's a bigger reason, perhaps, that we can rule this out of a college campus, which is we know there's good empirical evidence that people, that colleges do better and college graduates learn more from having people with different backgrounds, and there's plain simple reasons for this, and if we don't allow those people from different backgrounds to participate in the dialogues that go on on the college campus because we shut them down with this sort of language, then we're hurting ourselves as well. So I think colleges in some sense should in fact be a safe environment for people of all walks of life to come together and discuss things, and I think we have to be careful about setting up an environment where people can participate fully without feeling like they are being treated differently or something like that. How do you draw a line between that and microaggressions? And that's gonna be hard, right? And so what I was gonna continue to say is I don't know how to draw that line. I mean, I think we do sometimes go way too far, but I think we go too far for all sorts of reasons, and some of those reasons have to do with the sorts of rules that we've put in place. Let's, because I wanna get through all of these, I wanna get through all of these alternatives. So I guess I'll spur us along to the benefit to others principle. Yeah, so benefits to others principle is basically the view that if we can benefit certain others, we can interfere with you, right? So the benefit that comes doesn't have to come to you when we interfere with you. So I mean, this is a non-standard way of talking, to be fair, but I think this is, it gets to the point, it gets to the point of what people that want redistribution in society are doing. They want to allow taxation interference with the people that pay the taxes in order to better everybody else. That seems like a way that most people in our society are quite willing to engage in interference, even if they don't talk about it in those terms. Most people don't, most people don't sit there and say the taxation is a huge interference. They certainly don't think about it as a physical interference, I think, even though essentially it is, right? You're removing their ability to spend their money as they see fit. Again, I don't think that that's the right way to go. And I think here the economics is really important. I think if we continuously interfere with people in order to provide benefits to others, we actually lower the degree of economic progress. And so I think that's a bad way to go for that reason alone. But I think on more principled grounds, once you open up this door to say we have to benefit others or that benefiting others is a reason for interfering with you, I don't know where it ends. Right, so I have a colleague, not at Georgetown, but I have a colleague who actually does think the fact that somebody walking in a state park stubs their toe on a rock is a good reason for interference and we should raise money and make sure the rocks are cleared away so that they can walk without stubbing their toe. I find this remarkable. Seriously, I mean, that's what you want to interfere with people for. I mean, every little thing, you can benefit people in so many different ways that you're opening up a huge door here and I don't know how you would shut it, right? So I don't know how you would stop it from sliding into everything. Are there examples of this principle and action that aren't taxation? Because taxation looks a little bit odd compared to the other things we've been talking about because the other things we've been talking about are all been examples of like, you want to engage in some action and it is that action, that behavior itself that we find harmful or under other principles offensive or whatever else and so we're going to cut you off and stop you from doing that. Whereas taxation, especially those of us who aren't libertarians and so aren't predisposed to think of taxation as either theft or awfully close to it, tend to see it as more, you know, you're just giving up a little bit of something but you're still free to do whatever you want. It doesn't seem to fit under the toleration or not toleration analysis. Right, so I mean, there are just, there are lots of different examples. Some of them get a bit confusing to talk about. So for example, I think about helmet laws, right? We standardly think of helmet laws as justifiable under legal paternalism, which we haven't talked about yet. That's basically the principle that we can interfere with you to prevent you from doing some harm to yourself. Whereas the benefit to others principle is we can interfere with you in order to benefit somebody else. So I think we standardly think about helmet laws and the like as matters of legal paternalism. But it's not always clear that that's actually the way we should think about it or the way that legislators think about it when they institute those laws. And so when you start talking about helmet laws, and I've done this in college classes and I've seen people say this, it's not only that they wanna protect the people that wouldn't wear the helmets. It's that they wanna protect the people that come after those people because if you don't wear a helmet and you get into an accident, things can get really ugly. And we wanna protect the people that come after you so they don't have to see that ugliness, right? And so it could be a matter of benefiting of those other people that come after you to force you to wear a helmet so that they don't have to suffer that so that we can benefit them. I don't think that works any better than legal paternalism to justify helmet laws. Having said that, I should say wearing helmets is a good thing, so. Now, you mentioned earlier too, legal moralism, because we kind of touch on legal paternalism is one example for an alternative. Legal moralism is just the, you mentioned it, the Devlin kind of. Right. It's wrong. The idea is it's wrong. Full stop. It's harmed, yeah. Yeah, and that is an example of things we shouldn't tolerate. You reject that entirely. Right. Yeah, and again, there are different versions of legal moralism. There are some versions of legal moralism that say, look, individuals aren't harmed, but society is. Then there are some people that say, well, individuals aren't directly harmed, but society is harmed, and when you harm society, you indirectly harm the people that live in the society. And then there are people that just go, look, moral is all that matters. If there's something that's immoral, full stop, it doesn't matter if people are harmed, society is harmed or whatnot. It's just immoral, we shouldn't do this period. On legal moralism, is the critique of it or the rejection of it ultimately about that, as we discussed, the underlying moral theory that is, so is the difference between the reason that you reject moralism simply because you think that the things that they would outlaw under it aren't really morally wrong because you have a different moral theory than say the moral. Yes, moral. The legal moralists or is it that your moral theory instead just says that some immoralities we should permit and others we shouldn't and then give some way to decide between them? Yeah, it's the latter for sure. I will say, I doubt that there are any legal moralists with whom I agree with their moral theory. But having said that, there's a way of thinking about legal moralism in which it's completely obviously true, which is to say there are some immoral actions that merit interference or that warranted interference. I'm gonna agree with that. And then I'm gonna say, but the immoral actions that warranted interference are only those that cause harm, right? And so you can think of the harm principle as a particular version of legal moralism. I think it's the correct version. It's the only version that we should accept. Most people that we think of as legal moralists like Patrick Devlin and many others, James Fitzpatrick, Stevens, these people are not thinking like that. These people are thinking homosexuality. These people are thinking women's rights. These people are thinking black and white people getting married. Those are the sorts of things that they worry about. They're thinking about pornography. They're thinking about prostitution. They're thinking, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, down the list. Those are the things they worry about. It's hard for me to imagine a good moral theory saying that a lot of those things are actually immoral. That said, I do think that there are clearly immoral things that are not harmful, right? And I do think that there are things that are objectively immoral that are not harmful. Some of those things are things that people disagree with me about. So for example, using an example from John Rawls, I think this is the example I used in the book, the grass blade counter, right? Somebody who's, if I didn't, maybe I didn't use this in the book, somebody who spends their life and alls they want to do with their life is lay out in their backyard and count blades of grass. So they set up a little latrine out there and they have their well off so they don't need to worry about working. They have somebody bring them food on a regular basis and they just stay out in their yard and all they ever do is count the blades of grass. I think this is immoral. I think that person is leading an unethical life. Do I think that we should interfere with them? No. If it was a friend of mine, which is hard to imagine, but... You don't even care about friends. You only care about so many grass. But if somehow I thought this person was worth saving as it were, I would try to convince them not to do this and convince them that they should be doing much more. But actually going further than that and interfering with them, I think, no, absolutely not. It's immoral. They're actually doing something clearly wrongful, but they're not harming anybody. We don't interfere. What about harm to animals and the environment? They're two different concepts. What about harm to animals? I think harm to animals is real. So we should not tolerate dogfighter Michael Vick, dogfighting regimes? I think at the very least we should recognize that harm to animals, like the sorts of cases that you're thinking about, it definitely allows... It opens the door for not tolerating. It opens the door for interfering. Again, though, the harm principle doesn't say that when there's a harm, you must interfere. What the harm principle says is, if there's a harm, then it's reasonable to think that you might interfere, that now the question is, all things considered, is it worth interfering? Yeah, I think that... We've said that a few times and it made me remind that I want to clarify exactly what you mean by that because you make some good points about international intervention, for example. The first thing is permissible, but that doesn't follow that you do it. So there's horrible human rights abuses going on overseas, but fighting a war to stop female castration, for example, could have a huge amount of costs, even though we probably shouldn't tolerate it. That's exactly right. So I mean, imagine there's a country in which they practice female infanticide or something like that. Yeah, it seems to me that there's a harm there. I don't think there's any reason to deny that there's a harm there. Female castration, perhaps even more so. Should we interfere? That's not clear, right? Is interference permissible, according to the harm principle, yes. But now you have to look at all things considered and imagine whatever country this was had China supporting it. Do we want to go to war with China to do this? And I don't just mean that in a, let's just get emotive and figure out how we feel about going to war with China. I mean, think about the consequences of going to war with a country like China. Lots of people are going to die, right? Lots of resources are going to be spent. There's just no question about that. Some of those costs are financial, some of those costs are moral. We're going to lose human lives. We're going to have people suffering. I think that argues clearly against the assortment of interference that would be permitted if we weren't looking at everything considered, right? And we were talking about like animals in situations like this, you say that. Same sort of thing, exactly right. So I don't see why we wouldn't interfere with the Michael Vicks sort of case. On the other hand, there are all sorts of other issues. You see somebody pulling their dog a little too roughly on the street. Is that really going to be worth getting the government involved with? You know, I would probably, if I saw somebody treating a dog roughly, I would say something to them and try to persuade them that this was not a good way to behave. But am I going to call the police afterwards? Maybe if it rises to a certain level of abuse, but earlier on, if it's just they're pulling a little tightly, of course, I'm not going to call the police for that. Environmental harm, like should we tolerate suburbs and smokestacks and clear-cutting forests, those things that should be tolerated? Interesting grouping there. Some people think suburbs have a huge problem and overextending our resources and too many rooms at our house and things like that. Yeah, so I mean, the fact is, again, as with society and as with these curtains, the environment is simply something that does not have its own interests. There are people out there. It probably upsets a lot of your colleagues about it. What do you have against Gaia? Yeah, exactly. Well, right, that's where we get Gaia. There are some people out there that believe that there's this Gaia thing that really is this living creature that is the Earth. That was a big sigh. Yeah. I mean, there's certain things you just like, I don't know what to say about this. Like, why would you believe this? What is the possible evidence for this? Because they watch too much anime, that's really why. Exactly, right. So, I mean, I think, no, the Earth does not have its own interests. The universe does not have its own interests. We have interests in the Earth. We have interests, perhaps, in the universe, but the Earth doesn't have its own interests. The Earth is here to be used. Like, if there were no Earthlings, if there were no humans, we wouldn't be using the Earth this way, but we are and we have to live, and so we have to use what we have available to us. That includes everything on the Earth. I don't see any reason to think that's problematic. That said, of course, pollution can become problematic, right? Because we need to conserve the resources so that we can continue to live. I want my child, he's five. I want him to be able to have a good life. If there are no trees left, he's not gonna be able to have a good life, right? We need the trees because we need the oxygen, and so we want to protect trees. Does that mean we should never take a tree down? No, of course not, right? I mean, I have neighbors actually who believe this, that you should never cut a tree down. Like, you tell them the tree is diseased. You tell them you've had an arborist look at the tree, three arborists look at the tree, and they all agree the tree needs to come down, and they say, no, no, we can save it. They don't know what they're talking about. This is nonsense, right? The tree doesn't have interests either, in my view. I actually read something recently about talking about how plants do think. But I think this is nonsense, and people are misusing the words. Trees, the Earth, don't have interests. We can't harm them in the sense that's relevant to the harm principle. But again, we have interests in having these things around, right? So this is sort of old-fashioned environmental conservatism. We want to conserve the environment so that we can continue to survive. Conservationism, sorry, not conservatism. Does toleration itself have value outside of these questions about harm? Is there something good for me about tolerating your behavior? Some reason I should want to cultivate this beyond just not harming you inappropriately. Well, there's straightforward recording in economics that says yes, right? I mean, the more people you trade with, the better off you're gonna be. And the more people you trade with that are different from you, the better off you're gonna be. So for one example, I took a car over here and I got out and I saw this place down the street called Boltzberger, I think. I don't know what Boltzberger is yet, but I'm probably gonna find out when I leave here. I like the fact that there are these new sorts of burger joints around town in different places. I like the fact that there are different ethnic foods around town, like good Chinese food, good Thai food, this makes my life much better. If we don't tolerate people that do these different things, whether it be making a burger a different way, again, I don't know what Boltzberger does, or a different Chinese food or a different type of Thai food or what have you, I would be worse off, right? So I think if we want to make ourselves better off, we need to tolerate more people. I've been taking Uber a lot recently and a lot of the Uber drivers are clearly immigrants and I think that they've made my life better, right? And so I wanna tolerate them, not only because I just think doing harm is a bad thing, but because it makes my life better to have these people who are willing to perform these services. Well, you talk about, in the book, just generally, why toleration, why we argue for it generally, and you bring up some of the arguments which I think are talked about more often than like the sort of harm principle thing that you go through systematically of what should be tolerated and what shouldn't be, but these ideas of like moral muscles, for example. What's the moral muscles argument? So the moral muscles argument, which is also from John Stuart Mill, is basically the view that what we are as persons is moral beings capable of reasoning and thinking things through for ourselves. And if we don't tolerate differences, we're not going to have much incentive to do that. That is, if we all agree about everything, if we grow up in a particular religious environment or whatnot and we never question it and we never see anybody else questioning it, then we're just going to accept what our elders have told us and never actually work it through ourselves. And if we don't work it through ourselves, the very thing that makes us a moral person, the fact that the ability to think things through will weaken, will atrophy. And if that atrophies, then we cease being persons. That seems somewhat similar to the St. Augustine argument, a little bit, which is more about finding truth, I guess, but letting things exist out there so people can think about them and finding, because I think Augustine kind of understood that to find religion, to find true religion, you need to let people get out there and believe. Yeah, I think the argument's very different. And I think the evidence for it being different is the fact that Augustine ended up rejecting it. Oh, okay. So Augustine visited an area, I'm not going to remember the name of the area, where the Donatists had been living. This was some heretical sect. And they had been gone, they were wiped out, right? And some of the remaining people who had been Donatists were now accepting the orthodoxy that he wanted them to accept. And so he said, well, I guess I was wrong. That argument that I gave you that said that we have to tolerate people so that they'll come to religion on their own because you can't force people into religious views. Turns out it doesn't work that way, empirically speaking. There you go, there are no Donatists left. I find this hard to believe. I wasn't alive at the time and I'm not a historian, but my guess is a lot of the Donatists were killed and other Donatists just hid their views and then were absorbed into the broader community. I don't think they were actually all just gone in the way he seemed to think later on. But still, the argument is very different. It's not about increasing the numbers of people that believe in the right religion. It's about getting people to think it through on their own. In fact, I think that Augustine would be quite happy to have people accept religion without thinking it through on their own as long as they were just sincerely attached to the right religious view. And that seems connected to one of the general arguments of conscience and autonomy too. Right. Out of those arguments work. Yeah, so conscience is the older one, right? Autonomy comes about in the Enlightenment period and some people that worry about autonomy and want to have tolerations so that we can live autonomous lives, they want us to think things through on our own. They want us to come to autonomous conclusions about the way we should live and what we should believe. The earlier view, which I think was present in Augustine and certainly present in Locke and Spinoza and Pierre Bell, other thinkers that are important in that time period, that the Locke time period, not the Augustine time period. For them, I think it was much more about conscience and much less about autonomy. That is to say they wanted people to be able to lead their lives in ways that they were sincerely able to endorse. Whether or not they sincerely endorsed them autonomously or they sincerely endorsed them because they never thought it through on their own and they just said, well, this is obviously right. Why would we question this? I don't think for those arguments that that matters. The autonomy thing is a little bit different. It takes more work. Arguably, autonomy is a better thing, but it's also more difficult than I think fewer people can live autonomously. I think we like to pretend that everybody can live autonomously but I don't think that's true. I do think everybody can live according to their conscience. But as Chandran Kukvas discusses, there are people in the world that don't live according to their own conscience. They just do what the religion says and don't even think about it. There's no conscience there to really consider. And so both of these I think are important and have some sway in persuading people to abide by toleration, but I don't think ultimately that they're enough on their own. Are we becoming less tolerant? And is that one reason maybe you wrote the book because there's a lot of campus stuff out there. We're hearing a lot of stories. That was my reaction reading this, was this book seems to come out at a time when it's awfully difficult to be bullish on toleration, looking at the U.S. looking at this stuff. Well, and then the campus stuff we talked about but also Trump's campaign and the anti-immigration attitudes that are everywhere, it seems like toleration is not winning out. I think that's right, but I think that's been right for a long time. So I wouldn't say it was these sorts of things that encouraged me to write the book. It was rather that I would look out at the world and say people think we're tolerating in all sorts of ways and they don't see all these things that were not. They fail to see it. They don't recognize that having this anti-immigration bias is a matter of failing to tolerate. They don't see that at all. They don't see that prohibiting marijuana from being sold legally is failing to tolerate. They don't see that failing to allow people to lead whatever sort of sexual lifestyle they see fit is failing to tolerate. I think there was just a lack of awareness about these things. I think there still is a lack of awareness about these things and it may be getting worse, but if the book can help reduce the extent to which it's getting worse, that's a good thing. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.