June 8, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
59:07
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
(dramatic music) | |
| We're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty today and joining me is an author and associate professor | ||
| of philosophy at the College of William and Mary, Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| All right, man. | ||
| We're gonna do philosophy for an hour. | ||
| Are you ready? | ||
| Sounds good. | ||
| You are prepared. | ||
| I feel the jacket-shirt combo, it's very philosophy-professional. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I said, give me the Reuben, and this is what my tailor came up with. | |
| All right, let's talk philosophy, because I think one of the things that I try to do on this show is I talk about philosophies more than people, ideas more than people, and it seems to me we live in a time where we don't do a lot of philosophy and idea stuff well, and I guess that's maybe why people are watching this. | ||
| So let's do a little Philosophy 101 with you. | ||
| Give me just some of the basics of what people should understand about philosophy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, yeah, that's a great question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How's that for an open-ended question to start? | |
| Yes, that might take the hour. | ||
| But yeah, so I think, you know, at the fundamental level, philosophy is about challenging assumptions. | ||
| I think one thing that makes philosophy different from other sorts of academic disciplines is that you can't really take anything for granted. | ||
| So when you're doing philosophy, you have to justify why killing people is wrong, for | ||
| example, why feeding the hungry is good. | ||
| And all of these things that we take for granted at the level of everyday life, philosophy | ||
| calls into question, and I think that's really important. | ||
| And so the kinds of philosophical questions that I'm most interested in are ones having | ||
| to do with moral right and wrong, justice, injustice, the moral importance of economic | ||
| equality, these sorts of things. | ||
| and also the ethics of public policy. | ||
| So for example, one-- | ||
| One thing that non-philosophical disciplines can do is make predictions about what a given policy is likely to do. | ||
| So, will opening the borders lead to higher unemployment, higher GDP, something like that. | ||
| But all things considered, they can't really tell us what the right thing to do is. | ||
| So you say, okay, suppose it turns out that opening borders will slightly increase domestic unemployment. | ||
| But it also will mean that certain workers in the developing world will see their incomes rise by 300%, for example. | ||
| This leaves open the question, what should we do? | ||
| Is that a trade-off that we should make? | ||
| And that's really what philosophy tries to answer, is what should we do, all things considered? | ||
| Alright, so in a little bit we're going to get to some of your moral philosophies that you care about, and economic philosophies, and immigration, and a bunch of other things in just a little bit. | ||
| But first, I'm curious, what got you interested in philosophy in the first place? | ||
| Yeah, that's a good question. | ||
| So I think I was doing philosophy before I realized I was doing philosophy, because Arguing, let's say good-natured arguing, was the family tradition in my household. | ||
| So ever since I was a little kid, you know, my parents and my sister and I, we would argue about religion and politics and these sorts of things, right and wrong, the economy. | ||
| And when I got a little bit older, I started reading things in philosophy and economics columns, articles, and things like that. | ||
| And I realized that there was this kind of formal discipline | ||
| called philosophy where you could argue about right and wrong and justice and injustice. | ||
| And if you were very lucky, you could get a job doing this. | ||
| If I get paid to do this-- | ||
| Not a lot of jobs do it anymore. | ||
| Not a lot of jobs, not paid very much either. | ||
| But it's kind of like saying, you know, you can get paid to eat ice cream for a living. | ||
| I thought, oh, okay, that's a pretty good gig if I can get it. | ||
| And so that was kind of the start of the trajectory into philosophy. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I came from a very similar family in that regard | ||
| where we argued about everything from economics and religion and all of those things. | ||
| And I guess perhaps if this is what led you here, it's kind of what led me here as well. | ||
| But we're missing that these days, don't you think? | ||
| Like that must infuriate you as someone that cares about ideas when you watch the news and watch all these people that aren't arguing from like a principled position. | ||
| Or something like a philosophically thought-out position, but just from like a party place or a partisan place must drive you nuts. | ||
| It does. | ||
| It does. | ||
| Because, right, I care about ideas. | ||
| I care fundamentally about good arguments. | ||
| So this is something that I hope happens to my students in my classes, is they come in with a set of preconceptions. | ||
| They have, you know, their partisan political beliefs. | ||
| Everybody does. | ||
| I have my partisan political beliefs. | ||
| I hope we can try as hard as we can to just focus on the arguments, think critically, and maybe change our minds even if it means admitting that we were wrong or finding out that we have different political or religious beliefs from our friends. | ||
| We should really just follow wherever the arguments lead us. | ||
| Do you actually like it when you find out you were wrong on something? | ||
| Because when I've had the moments on this show, and the most famous one is when I had Larry Elder in here, and he just kind of beat me senseless with facts, and we've since become friends, and he was on just recently, and I love the guy, that it was scary in the moment. | ||
| Like, sitting there in the moment of being beaten is not fun, but afterwards, when you go, whoa, that's what it's about, it's actually pretty cool. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I don't like, like you said, in the moment, I don't like being burgeoned. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because I've got a couple of things I'm going to burgeon. | ||
| I would expect nothing less. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But long term, I think that's right. | ||
| It shows growth. | ||
| And the funny thing is that... | ||
| What are we afraid of when it comes to changing our mind? | ||
| Admitting we're wrong, what's really the harm in that? | ||
| And I like the process of arguing. | ||
| It's a form of recreation or something, a form of exercise. | ||
| I think it was Edmund Burke who said something like, my adversary is actually my best friend or something like this. | ||
| So the person that is willing to argue with you in good faith and genuinely cares about getting at what's true rather than what maybe confirms their prior political beliefs. | ||
| That's a person that I wanna hang out with. | ||
| That's a person I wanna talk with. | ||
| One of my best friends growing up, his name's Ari Greek, so he was all into Greek philosophy and all that, and he was my intellectual sparring partner from literally from 12 years old till well past college, even now. | ||
| And ironically, we actually agree more now than ever before, which is sort of weird because we both had sort of reverse philosophical journeys or political journeys, but that's actually what it's all about. | ||
| So tell me a little bit about some of the philosophers that have affected you. | ||
| So one of my favorites is probably John Stuart Mill. | ||
| So he was a classical liberal. | ||
| So he's what's known as a utilitarian. | ||
| And this is a moral theory that essentially says the right thing to do is the thing that has the best consequences, the thing that produces the most happiness for everybody who's affected. | ||
| I find that view attractive in moral philosophy. | ||
| But he was also a classical liberal politically. | ||
| He was a big defender of free speech, free discussion in particular. | ||
| His book On Liberty is probably the single greatest Defense of freedom of speech. | ||
| I travel with it. | ||
| You know, I'm on tour right now. | ||
| I travel with it. | ||
| It's a thin book. | ||
| Everyone should have it. | ||
| You can put it right under your pillow. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Okay, so you mentioned classical liberalism. | ||
| Okay, everyone knows my feelings on this. | ||
| Do you see any meaningful distinction between classical liberalism and libertarianism at this point? | ||
| I think that libertarianism is probably a bit narrower than classical liberalism, but this is a matter of debate. | ||
| I don't have a very firm opinion on this. | ||
| But when I think of a libertarian, I think of somebody who says the state should do the following three things. | ||
| Have a court system. | ||
| Have police force. | ||
| And maybe enforce contracts, something like that. | ||
| No more. | ||
| Maybe some kind of very small social minimum, Milton Friedman negative income tax type thing. | ||
| Whereas I think classical liberals are more friendly to a more active state. | ||
| But I would also say that I'm happy to say that libertarians are part of the classical liberal family. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny because I had Don Boudreau in here a couple weeks ago talking about this, and I fall on that path where the more I go down the libertarian route, I like that line of thinking. | ||
| I still think there's some utility of the state, but I think the more that you have these conversations, for me, I'm finding it harder and harder to defend anything related to the state, which is, I guess, I'm taking a philosophically fair approach to this because I'm taking in new information. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I'm the same way. | ||
| So I think that the best arguments for something like classical liberalism or libertarianism is just the pervasiveness of government failure. | ||
| So, you know, you look at where actual government money goes, not just not in theory, but in practice where it goes, what sorts of groups are advantaged and disadvantaged by the state. | ||
| I think that the government just doesn't work very well, and so the same reasons why we don't want the government producing food, for example, are also reasons why we might not want the government in the business of, say, running schools. | ||
| Right, so do you think it would be fair to say that if it ran well, if this thing was a slim trim operation and it was financially sensible and we had people of good moral character in the government and the rest of it, that you'd actually have no reason to be certainly a libertarian and perhaps even a classical liberal. | ||
| You might actually be more of some sort of big government democrat or something like that. | ||
| I think that's right, at least from my perspective. | ||
| So, as I said, I'm a fan of Mill and utilitarianism, the idea that the right thing is the thing that produces the best results. | ||
| And so I think in a world in which the state was run by angels, very wise people, very benevolent people, and it produced good results, I would be happy to accept a big activist government, a regulatory and redistributive state, but I think there are very powerful reasons for thinking that that's not the world that we live in. | ||
| So I think that some of my audience, when they hear you talk about Mill and what's what's best for everyone, they're going to view that through some sort of lens of collectivism, which is going to set some bells off. | ||
| So can you unpack that a little bit? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So for what it's worth, my view is that a system that produces the most happiness, the most flourishing, the most prosperity is something like a libertarian minimal state, perhaps with a small social minimum. | ||
| So when you look Historically, at collectivist regimes, say the Soviet Union or North Korea, something like that, these don't have a good track record of making people happy. | ||
| When you look at the societies that actually make people happy, compared to the alternatives, they tend to be limited government, free market, civil libertarian-ish kind of states. | ||
| All right, so what other philosophers affected you? | ||
| You're one for one. | ||
| I mean, you gave me John Stuart Mill right up the top. | ||
| I'll give you somebody who you might not like, although you might not be familiar with him, Peter Singer, who's a contemporary utilitarian. | ||
| And a lot of people, I think a lot of classical liberals and libertarians aren't big fans of his, although I think they need not Not be fans of his. | ||
| So he's famous for a number of things. | ||
| He has a number of very controversial positions on a lot of things. | ||
| But one of his more famous thought experiments involves you imagining that you're walking somewhere and you pass a small child who's drowning in a shallow pond. | ||
| And you can save this child at a very low cost to you. | ||
| All that's required is that you step into the pond, get your shoes muddy, and pull the child out. | ||
| But this means you'll have to spend, I don't know, a hundred bucks on new shoes. | ||
| And he says, clearly, the sacrifice of $100 worth of shoes is worth saving this child. | ||
| And so this suggests that we have strong obligations to make personal sacrifices for the betterment of the world's poor. | ||
| And I think that's right, at the level of moral principle, for example. | ||
| But I think a lot of libertarians and classical liberals worry that what this is going to mean is we ought to have large welfare states, we ought to have Billions of dollars channeled into foreign aid and so on and I can understand why they make that leap but I don't think that follows especially again if you look at the track record of whether or not the government does a good job of helping the poor and I think it generally doesn't. | ||
| Yeah so and I definitely want to get to your thoughts on that so do you view that sort of is like that's sort of like a micro macro argument that at a micro level yeah you'd probably do it like I'm sure if either one of us were walking down the street We wouldn't care that much about our shoes and able to save somebody, but at a societal level, which probably gets to a lot of your economic arguments as well, the more that you keep giving over to society, the more that it keeps taking. | ||
| Well, so I think as individuals in their private lives, if they do a good job of, say, researching | ||
| which private charities do a good job of alleviating poverty in the developing world, and I think | ||
| there are some, then we would have, in some sense, a societal obligation to help, just | ||
| in the sense that most people of means have this obligation to, say, donate some of their | ||
| paycheck to the Against Malaria Foundation, for example. | ||
| But I think that doesn't justify saying we want the state in the business of redistributing | ||
| income on a global level, if only because it just doesn't do a very good job of it and | ||
| oftentimes makes poverty even worse. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So you are a blogger at Bleeding Heart Libertarian. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now, I've seen the site before, and I checked it out again before you got here, but I thought, all right, the phrase Bleeding Heart Libertarians, that sort of sounds like what a classical liberal is, right? | ||
| We got a little more heart, in essence, or we're okay with a little more state to hopefully make sure the people who need it the most are okay. | ||
| But I think a lot of people will see those terms at odds. | ||
| Bleeding Heart Libertarians. | ||
| Yeah, and that's a great point, too, in light of the conversation about Peter Singer, because I do think that we have—and I think a lot of classical liberals agree—that we have this strong obligation to uphold political institutions that work particularly well for the poor. | ||
| And this isn't just—even though the term bleeding-heart libertarians is new—this isn't just something that popped up in the last five or six years. | ||
| If you go all the way back to Adam Smith, he has this argument about the division of labor and free trade. | ||
| He says, you know, You sitting at your desk trying to make pins all by yourself, maybe you could do two or three in a day. | ||
| You have a division of labor where one person straightening the wire, the other person's putting the pin on the wire and so forth, makes us massively more productive than we otherwise could be. | ||
| And then through free trade, everybody's welfare is increased. | ||
| But he stresses that this is particularly good for the poor because he says a society in which We're very productive and we have this abundance of material goods is a society in which these sorts of goods are going to be a lot cheaper. | ||
| And this is, in fact, what we see. | ||
| And so a society in which the real price of not just necessities, but also things that we might consider luxuries like smartphones or something, a society that makes those abundant and cheap is a society that's very good for the poor. | ||
| So I think a bleeding heart libertarian or classical perspective is hundreds of years old, although you probably we haven't done a good job of marketing ourselves, perhaps. | ||
| Yeah, how would you actually define what good is? | ||
| I mean, I know that's a tough one. | ||
| Yeah, that's a big question. | ||
| So, here's the evasive answer, is that it depends on which philosopher you're talking to. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So, some philosophers think that, so Mill has this view that the good consists Of pleasure, but it's a sophisticated view where some pleasures are of higher quality than others. | ||
| So if, I don't know, you have pleasure as a result of shooting up heroin, and that's equal in intensity and duration to the pleasure that you get from reading Shakespeare, there's something qualitatively better about the Shakespeare than the heroin. | ||
| And so that's his view, is that it's a life of pleasure, but where you have these higher and lower pleasures, other people, other utilitarians think, oh, pleasure is created equal. | ||
| Other people have maybe more complicated views where a bunch of stuff makes a life good. | ||
| So it's pleasure, it's knowledge, it's living a morally virtuous life, and so on. | ||
| And this is a debate that we've been having for 2,500 years with no end in sight. | ||
| I sense I know where you stand on that, but do you wanna elaborate on that a little bit more? | ||
| Well, so I think that the, yeah, so it's a good question. | ||
| As long as you're here. | ||
| Yeah, as long as I'm here. | ||
| So what is good? | ||
| Well, so I think the good for a particular person is probably what a philosopher would call the satisfaction of your informed preferences. | ||
| So essentially getting what you want if you know what it is that you're getting. | ||
| So for example, you might want the liquid that is in your glass right now | ||
| because you have the belief that it's water, but if that belief is false | ||
| because it turns out to be vodka or something like that, you might have a desire for what's in there, | ||
| but the desire is in some sense informed by this false belief. | ||
| But if you have perfectly true beliefs about the world and then you desired, say, that cup of water, | ||
| I'd say, well, that's good for you to get that water, getting what you want. | ||
| Yeah, so you basically believe that selfishness is good. | ||
| No, because I think that a lot of people, I think most people, in fact, have preferences, | ||
| rational preferences for the welfare of other people. | ||
| So I would say, you know, most... Can you make a selfish argument for that? | ||
| Because the way I've always sort of understand, or at least the way I use these words now, By doing what is good for me, that doesn't mean I want to ransack the entire world. | ||
| I want to do good so that it's good for my community. | ||
| I want to take care of my own house so that my neighbor hopefully will be like, I'm next door to someone with a nice house and they're going to take care of theirs. | ||
| So I view selfishness, I guess that's a little more of an Ayn Rand thing, where I view selfishness actually as a virtue. | ||
| Yeah, so I think the difference would be in, say, a case where you're walking and see the child drowning in the shallow pond. | ||
| The question would be, well, what is the reason why you're saving this child and ruining their boots? | ||
| I think a good answer to that is, well, because they care about the child's welfare. | ||
| And in some sense, it's true that that's a preference that you have. | ||
| So it's your preference. | ||
| And so you could call it a sort of, I don't know, self-guided or self-directed preference. | ||
| But I wouldn't call it a selfish preference in the sense that you expect, in some sense, this child's welfare to directly translate into benefits for you. | ||
| Right, but you would feel good after. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| You'd be a pretty twisted person if you were walking by and like, well, how's that going to make me feel after? | ||
| No, you should do what's right. | ||
| What's right can often lead to all sorts of bad things. | ||
| But I think you could make a selfish argument for that. | ||
| You know that if you walk by a child that you could easily help, and you don't, you're going to feel shitty after if you have any shred of conscience. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I hope most non-sociopaths, I hope, have that sort of psychological disposition. | ||
| And as far as sort of what's so I think also what morality is more concerned with is not just the good of the individual but sort of the good of all. | ||
| So I think sort of what the morally right thing to do is figuring out the decision. | ||
| So this is the kind of million utilitarian view that the right thing to do is basically that which produces the most good for everybody not just an individual person. | ||
| So it could be in some cases that a person's individual good comes apart | ||
| from what's morally good. | ||
| So you could imagine somebody who just has no desire to help other people, I would still say | ||
| they're doing something morally wrong if they fail to help other people, | ||
| because they're not taking that person's welfare into account. | ||
| Right, so where do you think morals come from? | ||
| This has been an ongoing discussion on this show between talking to Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro | ||
| and Sam Harris and Michael Shermer and Dennis Prager and many others, and there's sort of a religious argument. | ||
| I think there's a secular argument for it. | ||
| I think I'm somewhere in the middle. | ||
| I think it's a really rich spot to figure out what people think about things. | ||
| Yeah, so that's a hard question. | ||
| I'm not sure I have a satisfying answer to that, but maybe in terms of the religious question, there's this very old argument from Plato, the Euthyphro Dilemma, I'm not sure if that's ever popped up in conversation, but the idea is basically, does God will something because it's pious, independently of God's will, or is it pious because God wills it? | ||
| And Plato's view was, well, It doesn't quite make sense to say that it's pious just because God wills it, because you could imagine, as a thought experiment, that God willing all sorts of terrible things, just as a thought experiment, that, you know, if God willed us to torture, it doesn't seem like that would make torture good. | ||
| And so it seems more plausible to think that there is sort of an independent standard of goodness Even if you're a theist, for example, and you believe in God, and you believe God has this intimate connection to morality, I think even on views like that, it makes sense to say that goodness is, in some sense, independent of the will of God. | ||
| And so, in terms of what more... that's, again, sort of an evasive answer as to what it's not. | ||
| Where morality comes from, I mean, I'm inclined to say it comes from what's good for human beings and maybe other sentient animals. | ||
| So what sorts of things satisfy our interests, satisfy our preferences, cause us pleasure and pain, these sorts of things. | ||
| Do you think that's subjective, though, that different cultures obviously have different beliefs and different, you know, moralities and all sorts of things? | ||
| I would say it is not subjective in the sense that different cultures having different moral beliefs would show that nobody's wrong in those debates. | ||
| So it might be very difficult to determine who is wrong, but I don't think the mere fact that different cultures have moral standards shows that it's subjective. | ||
| So by analogy, you could imagine different cultures having different beliefs about astrology, for example. | ||
| So some cultures think that astrology is a legitimate enterprise, other ones don't. | ||
| They disagree about that, but I think it's safe to say that there is, in some sense, an objectively correct answer about that. | ||
| Same thing with other sorts of scientific disputes. | ||
| Right, but do you think that that objective place, does that have to come from God, per se, or can it come from... I mean, the discussion that we've had a lot around here and that a lot of people in this space talk about basically is, does objective morality either come from God and religion, or does it come from enlightenment values? | ||
| And then there's other arguments that it's only through religion that we got to enlightenment values in the first place. | ||
| Yeah, that's tough. | ||
| My hunch is that something like enlightenment values. | ||
| So I don't know, I'm somewhere in the agnostic space myself, and so I think that... You're a philosophy guy. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So it's hard not to be an agnostic. | ||
| So yeah, I'm agnostic, but I'm also Jewish, and so it's all part of the kind of questioning, lack of certainty, and so forth. | ||
| So I think that there is... | ||
| There's enough reason to think that we have objective morality, even if you're not certain about the existence of God. | ||
| We shouldn't worry that morality is going to collapse if people become atheists and agnostics. | ||
| Right, because when I've had this discussion, usually with conservatives, they love to say, well, God gave us morality. | ||
| I mean, your rights come from God. | ||
| And for me, it's like, I think you have Whether they're God-given rights, or it's your right, freedom is your right as a human being. | ||
| Or as Optimus Prime said, freedom is the right of all sentient beings. | ||
| I think you are born free. | ||
| I just think that's a humanistic approach. | ||
| You're born free. | ||
| The government can take away your freedom, but it doesn't give it to you. | ||
| And I think that's just a really interesting place to go for all these political discussions. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| So that's right. | ||
| I think that there are right and wrong ways to treat other human beings that are just true independently of whether or not the state happens to respect them. | ||
| And this is the kind of enlightenment thought. | ||
| So John Locke said, look, in the state of nature, I would be wrong to kill you or assault you or steal your property. | ||
| This is just the wrong way to treat human beings. | ||
| It doesn't really have anything to do with the state. | ||
| Now, we might want the state to come in and protect those rights, enforce those rights, and so on, but the rights themselves, the standard of the right and wrong way to treat other people does not itself come from the state. | ||
| All right, so before we get into some of the specific arguments that you make on economics and a bunch, how do you think our founders got so much of this stuff right? | ||
| If I'm going on the assumption you believe, they did. | ||
| But I mean, every time I go to D.C. | ||
| and I go to the monuments and I read all of this stuff, and I just was in Philly yesterday, I mentioned to you, and I have now a copy of, I have that little copy, like an old Republican senator of the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| Is it the one that sets off the alarm at the, there was this thing with like, it would set off the TSA alarms at the, Oh, this one's just standard, just simple paper, whatever. | ||
| I don't know, it's probably you'll set off some alarm somewhere, I'm sure. | ||
| If I go to San Francisco or something, I'm sure a constitution would set off an alarm. | ||
| I assume you think that they got much of this stuff correctly. | ||
| How do you think they did it? | ||
| Yeah, so I think that, I don't know, so I think that some of it, and this is a bit outside of my own area, but I think that a lot of them were influenced by smart philosophers. | ||
| People like, so I think the influence of someone like Locke on the Constitution is pretty evident. | ||
| The influence of somebody like David Hume on people like Madison. | ||
| I think that's, I think that maybe that's a matter of controversy in history, but I think there's some evidence to suggest that. | ||
| So I think that they were students of history, students of philosophy, students of economics, and this helped them get a lot right. | ||
| And I think, you know, obviously I think there were mistakes in the way that they applied it and, you know, the way that, like, Jefferson's omission of mentions of slavery and things like that, but I think in terms of, like, the fundamentals, a lot of that was informed by really smart philosophers and economists and Well, they were all philosophers in their own right, and they were inconsistent as people in their own time, which is why I'm so fascinated with that period of history. | ||
| All right, so let's talk about some of the specifics here. | ||
| So I wanted to go to one that I think we disagree on, but I want you to make the most compelling case that you can, this open border stuff. | ||
| So you're not an open borders guy? | ||
| I'm not an open borders guy. | ||
| I'm not a crazy borders person, whatever that means. | ||
| I don't think there should be no immigration. | ||
| We are a nation of immigrants. | ||
| That's what's made this melting pot. | ||
| I think the greatest nation in the history of the world that's given more freedom to more people than anyone ever. | ||
| But the open borders situation, especially now in 2018, 2018 strikes me as particularly tenuous, but take it away. | ||
| Yeah, good. | ||
| So I think one thing to keep in mind is what exactly an advocate of open borders is arguing for. | ||
| So I think most... So open borders is maybe a bit of a misnomer. | ||
| It's more light borders or porous borders or something like that. | ||
| So the idea wouldn't be that there's perhaps no checkpoints or no restrictions on immigration, just very few. | ||
| So I think most open border folks would be happy saying that If you are a wanted violent criminal, that might exclude you from immigrating. | ||
| If you have some particularly deadly contagious disease and so forth. | ||
| But other than that, ordinary peaceful migrants should be able to come to the United States. | ||
| As far as the argument goes, I think there are really two strands. | ||
| One is just that the economic benefits of immigration are huge. | ||
| So the most optimistic estimates say that we could potentially double world GDP. | ||
| By opening borders. | ||
| So we've done a pretty good job opening up trade. | ||
| We've done a much worse job opening up borders. | ||
| But in terms of the productivity gains, it would be incredible, better than anything else we could do. | ||
| And this goes back to what I was discussing earlier with our obligations to the global poor. | ||
| Foreign aid doesn't have a good track record. | ||
| Military intervention doesn't have a good track record. | ||
| But allowing people to move from places with low wages to higher wages is by far the best anti-poverty tool that we have. | ||
| So if we were gonna get into the nitty gritty of some of that, what do you actually have to do then to secure the borders, right? | ||
| Because that's really what this is about. | ||
| So even if you make every economic argument that I'm like, all right, I can't whittle my way out of that, right? | ||
| Like if I'm on board that, you still have to do something to make sure that you're doing those things, making sure that murderers aren't coming in and all that. | ||
| And we don't seem very good at that. | ||
| And I think maybe that's the leap that gets me to where I can't make the secondary part that you're talking about here. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm not sure about the policy specifics. | ||
| I mean, something like the old Ellis Island system seems pretty good. | ||
| I mean, we had a ton of immigration back then, but there still was some kind of checking mechanism. | ||
| So I doubt that that involves building a wall, but having some kind of, you know, centralized location where immigrants can come and get documents and things like that seems pretty reasonable. | ||
| But that's probably the most detail I could give you on policy ideas. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So then when you go over these borders, then you would want these people to be governed by the laws of the place that they were in, correct? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I would be happy to allow ordinary peaceful migrants to come in and then apply for U.S. | ||
| citizenship. | ||
| Make it pretty easy to do that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is this, though, a tough one for a guy that doesn't trust the government that much? | ||
| Because that's what's ringing with me here. | ||
| And when I've heard this argument, it's like, all right, wait, if you don't trust the government, well, then why do you think the government would be able to vet people properly? | ||
| Especially because we now see what's going on in Europe where they've vetted people very poorly and have had very porous borders. | ||
| Yeah, so this might yeah, so I don't know. | ||
| I think though if you're a skeptic of the government, so presumably you're a free trade advocate, you like trade across borders, you wouldn't be happy with government's micromanaging trade across borders because you're a skeptic about how well the government works, as am I, and for the same sorts of reasons I am skeptical. | ||
| So I think if you're worried about the government working well, that's all the more reason to get it out of the immigration regulation business. | ||
| So it might, I think you're probably right, it does a bad job of A lot of stuff, almost everything. | ||
| And so the standard here is not going to be perfection, but just what's the best alternative? | ||
| Heavily regulated immigration or lightly immigrated regulation. | ||
| And I think all things equal, lightly regulated immigration will probably be better. | ||
| And let me give you another argument too. | ||
| So this again is maybe a more libertarian, classical liberal argument for immigration. | ||
| But it just seems like people have a right to move across borders. | ||
| So for example, if, you know, I don't know, this table, for example, were divided by some | ||
| kind of border and I said, well, look, I want you to come over to my side and rent my house | ||
| from me or work in my business or join my religious congregation. | ||
| And you said, OK, I do want to do those things. | ||
| And we both agree on this. | ||
| We agree on the terms. | ||
| And then the state sort of intervenes as a third party in this, what this philosopher Robert Nozick would call a capitalist act between consenting adults. | ||
| It seems like they would be violating our rights to associate with one another on free terms. | ||
| And so I think there's a reason to think that border controls violate people's natural rights. | ||
| Is there also some inherent problem though that Let's say most of the Western societies, the freest societies, got on board this. | ||
| Well, then they would end up being flooded with people where maybe the economics don't work out, because if we just say, I mean, if you think about it, like if tomorrow we were just like, all right, everybody can come, as long as you're not a murderer or, you know, drug dealer, you're good to go, that there must be some economic theory here where we're gonna let in a certain amount of people, your economics are gonna work out, and then we're gonna get to some odd tipping point where, because freedom's pretty good, and a lot of people are gonna want in on it. | ||
| Yeah, so I think there are a couple things to say. | ||
| So one is just if we, I think that problem to some extent would be self-correcting. | ||
| So if you think that a lot of the pressure to migrate is economic, so people are moving from low-wage countries to higher-wage countries, well as you had more and more people enter the high-wage, higher-wage countries, this would increase the total number of workers, which would probably start dropping down their wages, and so you would probably see less motivation to move. | ||
| I think that's one thing. | ||
| But as a concession to this worry, what I would say is we could do it slowly. | ||
| So, for example, if we're really worried about these effects of dramatically increasing immigration overnight, what we could do is just say increase, say, the limits on immigration by, I don't know, 10% every year or something like that, and take it slowly and see where it goes. | ||
| We wouldn't have to push the button, open the borders overnight if we have this worry. | ||
| Yeah, what do you think is philosophically the soundest way to deal with the people that are already here? | ||
| Yeah, so I am an advocate of the view that you don't have an obligation to obey unjust laws, and so I think that our immigration laws are unjust, so I think people who came here, even against current immigration law, I think they should just amnesty, full citizenship, That would be my approach to that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We're not quite there on that, but it's all good. | ||
| That's what it's all about. | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| You're not a fan of the drug war. | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
| Okay, so suppose we have somebody who, I don't know, is in jail for selling marijuana or something like this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then suppose that, yeah, so they're breaking... Who is a citizen of the United States. | |
| Who is a citizen of the United States, but who broke, say, current immigration, or not immigration, current drug laws. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that they violated some moral obligation that they had not to break U.S. | ||
| drug law? | ||
| Or do you say, well, look, it was a bad law, so they didn't do anything wrong? | ||
| Well, partly I think it would depend on the specific offense. | ||
| So whether they were using drugs or selling drugs, I would see a distinction there. | ||
| So if there's someone that, and there are people that are in jail for using drugs right now, for using pot, I think those laws are unjust and I would want to do everything I could to reverse those laws and reverse the prison system, the justice system, and all that. | ||
| As far as the dealers, Yeah, you can't. | ||
| Until we fix these laws and figure out what actually is fair and change some classifications on marijuana and a bunch of other things, it's tough. | ||
| I think it's tough. | ||
| I don't think you can free drug dealers, per se. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Even though you don't think they did something that should be against the law. | ||
| The people that are doing the drugs, I think you have a right to do with your body as you see fit. | ||
| But again, if you break a law, you have to, like, I would change the laws, is what I'm saying. | ||
| But if you break a law, then you have to suffer the consequences of that. | ||
| Did that all work out? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, but so I'm curious, I don't know, forgive me for pressing you on this. | ||
| But so suppose you have a drug user who's convicted of this offense and they're in jail. | ||
| But suppose they can escape from prison harmlessly. | ||
| Do you think they would be doing something morally wrong by escaping from prison? | ||
| All right, so this is a good little, all right, we're doing a little philosophical game. | ||
| Yeah, this is what I do, I know, is I annoy my students. | ||
| No, this is great. | ||
| I mean, this is what it's about, right? | ||
| So, okay, so let's say someone was smoking weed at home, cops bust in, they're thrown in jail for three years. | ||
| It's year two, and they're going to pull a Shawshank and get out of there. | ||
| Do I think they're morally, the question is, do I think they're morally right for doing it, or can that be morally justified? | ||
| Is that the question? | ||
| Yeah, is it morally, so, right, so would we morally criticize them if, right, they pull the Shawshank, where they escape through the wall or something like that, and they don't harm anyone, they just leave, because they say, I was convicted of something that ought not be a crime, so I don't owe any moral allegiance to that law, and so I'm just gonna escape. | ||
| Would you, if you hear about this story, do you say? | ||
| I'd be rooting for that guy. | ||
| Yeah, I would be rooting for that. | ||
| So that's kind of my perspective on immigration, that I think that it's an unjust law, and so just as people aren't under an obligation to obey the state with respect to the drug war, I don't think people are under an obligation to obey the state with respect to immigration. | ||
| Right, so I guess our sort of disconnect on this is just the unjustness of immigration laws versus drug laws. | ||
| Right, so if you think that the law itself is not unjust, then my argument won't have any kind of grip on you. | ||
| I'm not saying our immigration laws are just, by the way. | ||
| I just think that, especially now, also just because of terrorism and people move, and just when you see what's going on with Europe, and because it hasn't just been People trying to get over for humanitarian purposes there. | ||
| We know that there's a lot of migrants and all sorts of other people and then assimilation problems and then welfare state problems like it just seems like it's become this massive thing that most of Europe would probably do it very differently if they could look back eight years ago, right? | ||
| Yeah, so as far as the terrorism point goes, I mean, I think if somebody is a wanted terrorist or a suspected terrorist, that's a perfectly legitimate reason not to allow them in. | ||
| I'm less concerned about the assimilation concern, the welfare state concern. | ||
| So as far as the assimilation worry goes, I mean, a lot of the evidence I've seen suggests | ||
| that the political values of immigrants, and especially second-generation American immigrants, | ||
| is almost identical to the political values held by native-born Americans. | ||
| And as far as the welfare state concern goes, I would say we have lots of other freedoms | ||
| that can potentially increase the cost of the welfare state, and we're okay with people | ||
| exercising them. | ||
| So for example, you know, I don't know, we allow people to choose their own profession, | ||
| for example, in the United States. | ||
| And so suppose you have a student who says, "Here's what I want to do with my life. | ||
| I want to become a philosopher." | ||
| You say, "Well, that's a dicey career choice." | ||
| Not a lot of money in it. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Maybe you'll end up on unemployment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And this will, in fact, increase the cost of the welfare state because now you have this person on unemployment because they chose to become a philosopher with their life. | ||
| We say, well, we let them do that. | ||
| We let them exercise that freedom to choose their occupation, even knowing that this might increase the costs of the welfare state. | ||
| And so I think you can make an analogous argument about immigration. | ||
| If you think it's a right and important to human freedom, then you say, well, this is sort of the price of respecting rights and respecting freedom. | ||
| They sometimes can impose costs on third parties. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if all these people come here, then what duty does the state have to make sure that they don't just get here and can't do anything and then more crime comes and drugs and the rest of it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there a responsibility for the state at that point? | ||
| I'm not sure that the responsibility of the state to immigrants is different from their responsibility to citizens. | ||
| So I think part, so I mean, there's also a question of what we would do in the ideal world versus the real world. | ||
| So you say in the ideal world of somebody like Milton Friedman, the welfare state is much smaller. | ||
| Maybe you have something like the negative income tax. | ||
| This isn't the world we live in. | ||
| We have over a trillion dollars of redistributive spending every year. | ||
| I mean, I don't. | ||
| So there are two separate issues. | ||
| So one is this empirical claim about whether immigrants tend to consume more in government services than they pay in taxes. | ||
| And it seems like the fiscal effect is pretty moderate. | ||
| So some estimates say they do, in fact, raise fiscal costs a little bit. | ||
| Others say, no, in fact, actually, they're a net benefit because a lot of new immigrants aren't consuming a lot of government services and so forth, and they're paying sales tax and things like this. | ||
| But I think, again, this is like a concession. | ||
| If you really have this worry about the welfare state, we could say, well, maybe this is not my view, but if this is what it took for me to get you over to my side, I'll give you this concession. | ||
| We could say something like, you have a five-year waiting period before you have access to unemployment benefits and whatnot. | ||
| I would take that over border closure if those were the only two options on the table. | ||
| It's tough being intellectually honest, isn't it? | ||
| Because you have to concede things every now and again, which you just don't see people doing anymore, so it seems like doubly... This is just a ploy to get you and your viewers to come over to my side. | ||
| So yeah, I don't care so much about the honesty. | ||
| Just get people on the open border side. | ||
| Alright, so you've argued that inequality of income isn't the real issue, but poverty is the real issue. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Let's get into the weeds on that. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| So sometimes you'll hear, this is sometimes philosophers, but oftentimes politicians, they'll make statements like 2% of American earners have 40% of the country's wealth or something like that. | ||
| And from here, we're supposed to infer that some injustice has occurred because there's this large inequality. | ||
| And I think, I mean, there might be an injustice there. | ||
| But we can't tell strictly on the basis of the inequality. | ||
| So there's a philosopher named Robert Nozick who famously said, what matters isn't so much the income distribution that we end up with, but how we got there. | ||
| So if somebody has a huge amount of wealth, but they got it through theft, or they got it through lobbying the government for special privileges, this is very bad. | ||
| This is something that we shouldn't encourage. | ||
| On the other hand, if we have somebody who has a lot of wealth because They invented the iPhone, and there are tens if not hundreds of millions of people who want to buy this. | ||
| That's totally fine. | ||
| So we can't just look at the pie and how it's carved up and say whether it's just or unjust. | ||
| We have to see, did people make their money by making other people better off, by giving them things that they wanted? | ||
| Or did they take it through fraudulent means, coercive means? | ||
| And I think that the talk about inequality oftentimes confuses equality with poverty. | ||
| So, is what we're really concerned with equalizing income, or are we concerned about making the poor better off? | ||
| And I think it's the latter that we really should care about. | ||
| So how do we go ahead and do that? | ||
| Well, so opening borders, I think, is the first step in terms of alleviating global inequality, or I'm sorry, global poverty, I think is the best thing that we can do. | ||
| I think domestically there are a lot of government policies that really do harm to the most disadvantaged groups. | ||
| So I think opening up school choice would be a great idea. | ||
| I think ending the drug war would be a great idea. | ||
| I think ending occupational licensing would be a very good idea. | ||
| So enabling people to work in certain industries or start their own business with a lot less red tape is a very good idea. | ||
| Wouldn't barbers be stabbing people with scissors? | ||
| Well, this is what I say. | ||
| There are some states where you have to get a license to shampoo people. | ||
| But I shampoo my hair every morning. | ||
| You're doing this unlicensed? | ||
| I probably shouldn't say that. | ||
| I shave myself, I comb my hair without a license, and so far the government hasn't come after me and I haven't poked my eye out. | ||
| Yeah, so what's your best argument then when the people that don't buy into this and say, well, we need these regulations because you're going to have people that don't know how to dye hair are going to be scalding people's heads and, you know, Mr. Burns is going to be dumping nuclear waste into the Springfield River and all of those things. | ||
| What's the best argument against that? | ||
| Well, so one argument is just that I don't think regulation works very well, and I don't think – I think the way that the public views regulation is probably misguided. | ||
| So I don't think that regulators are bad people, but I think if you examine the ways that regulations are formed and operate in the real world, it's oftentimes to protect the interests of the industries that they're regulating. | ||
| So this is what's known as regulatory capture, where regulators aren't always looking out for the public interest, they're actually looking out for the interest of people in that industry. | ||
| So financial regulation is a case of this. | ||
| You have lobbyists who might be friends with people in the financial sector, they want to work in the financial sector later, or vice versa, and so they're often very friendly to the very people that they're regulating. | ||
| And as far as, you know, the worry about, you know, scalding people and so forth, I think that competition itself is a kind of regulation. | ||
| So in the case of school choice, it's true you might have very bad charter schools, for example. | ||
| But again, the standard here is not perfection. | ||
| The standard is what's the alternative. | ||
| So we have public schools that are terrible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But charter schools have this advantage of enabling people to choose. | ||
| So if you go to a charter school that's failing, you can pull your kids out and put them somewhere else. | ||
| And that's a kind of regulation in the sense that it provides incentives to the providers to supply good service. | ||
| So it's almost like we should rely on self-regulation instead of external regulation. | ||
| Yeah, not even self-regulation in the sense, so this is something that comes up when I argue with people. | ||
| They think that I have this view of private business as being sort of benevolent, where they'll just take care of themselves out of a sense of the public interest. | ||
| I think maybe to some extent that's true, but it's more the kind of Smithian insight, where if you have providers who are competing for my business, They don't have to care about my welfare directly or the welfare of my family, but they might just want my money. | ||
| And that itself is an incentive for them to provide good, safe service. | ||
| So in a sense, it's competition for dollars, competition for customers that acts as the regulation. | ||
| So I think the market as a whole is self-regulating or self-correcting. | ||
| Yeah, so you're also a universal basic income supporter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now usually this is a idea that comes from economists on the left. | ||
| I've heard some interesting sort of libertarian arguments from it, from people, but what is your take on this? | ||
| So this goes back to the idea that it is important to take care of people who are in poverty or who might have fallen on hard luck and need some help getting back on their feet. | ||
| My short pitch for the universal basic income would just be, suppose you could take, I forget what the number is, but over a trillion dollars of redistributive spending that the United States government does, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, all these things. | ||
| Suppose we said, okay, you can remove all that And just get some kind of cash payout if you fall below a certain level of poverty. | ||
| So this is kind of the Milton Friedman idea, where you get sort of more and more money the further below the poverty line you are. | ||
| So you can take the whole apparatus of the welfare state with its bureaucracy and inefficiency and just replace that with a universal basic income. | ||
| I make that trade every day of the week. | ||
| Yeah, do you think that that would disincentivize people to actually, the people that are right above that marker, I mean, do you know where you put that marker? | ||
| So I don't know, I don't have the specifics of where I would put it, but the idea is that we, so the way that Friedman structured the idea of the negative income tax is that You would still get more total income by working and making more money. | ||
| So you would see some decrease in the cash grants that you get from the government. | ||
| But it wouldn't be so massive as to disincentive. | ||
| So they would be trimmed, but they wouldn't be trimmed so much that you have no incentive to go to work. | ||
| Yeah, do you see that as just like some sort of inconsistency with the way that you generally view government? | ||
| Because you're obviously not a big government guy, and yet this is something that's really, like I would view this as something that this is like government should have no place in giving that much to people. | ||
| Like it's kind of shitty, like I'd love to figure out better ways to help people who need it the most, but the idea of giving more, I just don't know that there's evidence that it works. | ||
| Yeah, so I think, though, that if that objection is successful, it would also be successful against something like private charity, for example. | ||
| So I think there always is this worry that when you give some kind of assistance that this will have negative effects on people's incentives to work. | ||
| I think that's probably true to some extent. | ||
| But that might just be a cost that we have to live with. | ||
| So I think, again, even if you're doing some sort of private charity, that might lessen at the margin people's willingness to go to work. | ||
| But I think that trade-off is worth it if it means, say, that we have people who aren't starving, who aren't very sick without help. | ||
| But I do—so again, a concession that I will make is I think, by and large, private charity will work much better than sort of state bureaucratic charity or transfer programs. | ||
| At some philosophical level, doesn't that also make people feel better? | ||
| The idea that right now the government just does things, and it either does them inefficiently or not, and you don't really know where your money's going, and you can just easily be like, yeah, I'm for poor people because the government's doing it, where when you actually go ahead and do things, and go ahead and volunteer, and go ahead and give charity and all that, that just philosophically, for your own goodness and happiness and things that we've talked about, that that's probably much more rewarding? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| It's very easy and low cost to just cast a vote for some policy or politician that happens to align with your values. | ||
| The price of that is very low. | ||
| But actually doing some research, figuring out what causes you support, putting money to those things, I think that's much more gratifying. | ||
| I think you should get more moral credit for doing that than just voting for policies that you like to. | ||
| Is that sort of the basic disconnect between Democrats and Republicans at this point? | ||
| Like, I view it as sort of Democrats are kind of like, we'll just do everything for you, we're gonna say all the nice things and do it for you, and Republicans are just like, well, they end up doing it anyway, because once they're in power, they're always spending the money anyway, but they seem like the evil guys, because they don't wanna do it, and then they do it anyway, but that's what it really comes down to. | ||
| It's like one set of people who are saying, we're gonna do all the nice things, and then doing them even when the results aren't nice, and another set who doesn't, Say they want to do the nice things, but then they end up doing it and the results still aren't great. | ||
| Yeah, well, so I'm not sure, although I do remember this book, it's probably a little old by now, called Who Really Cares by Arthur Brooks. | ||
| Have you ever come across that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| So he's, I think now he's the president of the ABI, right. | ||
| And he did find that there were differences in charitable giving between Democrats and Republicans. | ||
| I'm not sure if it was along party lines or ideological lines more broadly. | ||
| And he did find evidence that conservatives tend to give more privately than Democrats. | ||
| There might be a variety of explanations for that. | ||
| So one explanation might just be that conservatives tend to be more skeptical of the efficacy of these large-scale bureaucracies. | ||
| Like, how well do they actually work? | ||
| I think there's maybe also this idea that it's the role of something like the family or the church or civil society to take care of people who are in poverty rather than the states. | ||
| And so maybe that's why you see conservatives giving more charitable dollars than people on the left. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right, so I want to finish up with a couple scientific experiments that you've written about. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I got a couple here. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's see how sharp you are on the previous work you've done. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Talk to me about the Stanford Prison Experiment. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, so, oh man, that's going back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, so this was... I do research around here. | |
| No, I'm impressed. | ||
| I don't just sit down with people and, you know... I think you know my work better than I do at this point. | ||
| So that was an experiment that was conducted, I want to say, in the early '70s by a Stanford | ||
| psychologist. | ||
| And he recruited more or less ordinary young men to serve in this experiment. | ||
| And some of the subjects were cast as prisoners in this fake prison, and other subjects were | ||
| cast as the prison guards in this experiment. | ||
| And so they were enforcing the prison rules and feeding the prisoners and having them | ||
| go to sleep at specified times and so forth. | ||
| And to make a long story short, what he found was that the power given to the students who | ||
| were the prison guards did have this corrupting effect. | ||
| So this idea that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely seemed to be supported | ||
| by his experiment. | ||
| So very quickly, I think in a matter of days, what you found were the guards, who again | ||
| were drawn from the same demographic pool as the prisoners, were abusing the prisoners, | ||
| were mocking them. | ||
| And he had to cut it short because essentially the wheels came off of this experiment. | ||
| The prison guards got so abusive. | ||
| And so this, I think, confirms this idea that you don't have to be a bad person to allow power to have this corrupting effect on their behavior. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There must be plenty of other studies proving that, right? | ||
| Even through just the prison system. | ||
| I mean, I feel like every prison movie I've ever watched or Orange is the New Black. | ||
| I mean, the people that are in charge of the prisons usually are pretty bad people. | ||
| Yeah, and like I said, they could be perfectly ordinary. | ||
| And there's also the Milgram experiments, which are kind of the classic case of this, where you just have people who are, in essence, willing to torture, give electric shocks to complete strangers, because somebody in authority told them to do so. | ||
| And the subjects figure out ways to rationalize why these What do you do as a human knowing that? | ||
| the person should have behaved differently and they wouldn't have gotten the shocks. | ||
| And what's really frightening about this is it does show that ordinary people, | ||
| people like you and I, could easily see our behavior corrupted | ||
| given the right sort of institutions. | ||
| Yeah, what do you do as a human knowing that? | ||
| What do you do to insulate yourself? | ||
| Yeah, well, so one thing I think is to be very skeptical of these sorts of institutions | ||
| which give people lots of power over others. | ||
| I think that's one of the big picture lessons from these sorts of experiments is just be wary of giving people power. | ||
| On an individual level, knowing about it I think helps a little bit, but even more than just knowing about it, I think practicing it. | ||
| So when you know that you're in a position, say, to do something wrong because you feel the social pressure to do it, On a small level, just try to resist that impulse and actually do the right thing. | ||
| So I don't think it's the sort of thing that you can condition yourself to do overnight to resist malevolent authority or resist becoming a malevolent authority, but you could take small steps. | ||
| It's like practicing an athletic skill or something like that. | ||
| You don't try dunking a basketball the first time you pick it up, but you take these small incremental steps and you get better and better. | ||
| Hopefully you build character traits, and then maybe resist it when the situation becomes more dire. | ||
| It's interesting, because that sort of reminds me of the way that we see virtue signaling happening on social media these days. | ||
| It's not that we're all deciding we have this power and we can shock somebody, but it's like you find someone halfway across the world who says something you slightly disagree with, even though you've never heard of them before, you start seeing the mob go at them, and then next thing you know, you ratchet up more, and then someone else ratchets it up more, and ratchets it up more, and it's all done in the name of being good, actually, the way you're trying to shame and destroy this person. | ||
| Yeah, and they're right, there's something kind of psychologically gratifying about being part of a moralizing mob, and I think that's an impulse that does have to be resisted, right? | ||
| So it's virtue signaling, it's not actual virtue. | ||
| It's not actual virtue. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Actual virtue would be saying something like, well, I think everybody here is wrong about what the right thing to do is here. | ||
| Yeah, that's usually a pretty lonely guy. | ||
| That's true, that's true. | ||
| All right, one more. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The Ash Conformity Experiment. | ||
| Yeah, so that's along the same line as the Stanford Prison Experiments and the Milgram Experiments. | ||
| In this, I think this was one of the originals. | ||
| It was in the 1950s. | ||
| And subjects were given a board which had lines of different lengths on them. | ||
| So like there was one that was very long, one that was moderately long, one that was short, for example. | ||
| And then they were given another line that they were told was the same length as one of the lines on the other board. | ||
| And it was very obvious. | ||
| So it was like, this was a very long line over here, and there was a very long line over here. | ||
| They were clearly the same length, but they were surrounded by other lines of various lengths. | ||
| But it was just this very easy test. | ||
| And so they asked subjects, well, which line over here is the same length as this line over here? | ||
| And everybody knew what the correct answer was. | ||
| But the twist of the experiment was the experimenter would bring in confederates who would lie and give the obviously false answer. | ||
| So they would say, oh, in fact, it turns out that this short line over here is the same length as this long line over here. | ||
| And what they wanted to test was whether the genuine subject would conform to the mistaken group judgment, which they knew to be clearly wrong, or would they stick to their guns and say, no, everybody in this room is wrong. | ||
| It's clearly, you know, this line here and everybody else made a mistake. | ||
| And the depressing result is that many people would not just conform once, but would conform over and over again to the judgment that they knew was wrong. | ||
| And even people who sometimes broke from the group would have at least a couple of answers where they conformed to the group answers. | ||
| So is that just sort of basic built-in DNA that just certain people are gonna stand up for what they believe and what's right and what's true and just most of us aren't? | ||
| Or is that, can you really get to that? | ||
| That's a good, like, Steven Pinker question. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Well, I believe Pinker would say something about a blank slate. | ||
| Yeah, right, so I'm not sure, right, he might say it's something close to our DNA. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| It's interesting, when you read testimony from people in the Milgram experiments, there were some people who just refused to deliver these shocks to people, even though there was a lot of pressure on them. | ||
| And it seems like some of them had life experiences. | ||
| that really discouraged them from obeying the authority. | ||
| And it wouldn't shock me, no pun intended, if there was something like that going on | ||
| in these conformity experiments where maybe people have seen the malevolent effects | ||
| of blind conformity and this motivated them to do it. | ||
| So yeah, so I'm not sure whether it's nature or nurture. | ||
| I don't know, that's probably above my pay grade. | ||
| Right, so all right, as long as you mentioned, Pinker, this I think will be a good way to wrap this all up. | ||
| Are you hopeful, as a philosopher, are you hopeful for free thought? | ||
| I mean, a lot of people that care about the conversations that we're having are really worried, and I find that the people that I'm most closely associated with, that I have these conversations with most, I would say most of us are sort of world-weary optimists. | ||
| That's how I would describe myself. | ||
| Like, if I wasn't hopeful, I don't know how the hell I could do this every day, right? | ||
| Like, I'm hopeful that we can make things better, and yet at the same time, there's no doubt we have an uphill battle and that there's, you know, so much hysteria all the time and all the forces that we're not into seem to be on the march all the time. | ||
| But are you hopeful? | ||
| I like that term, world-weary optimist. | ||
| I think that probably describes me pretty well. | ||
| And part of the reason I'm optimistic is because oftentimes when, I think when you're interacting | ||
| with people on a one-on-one level, you're more likely to have a civil, productive discussion | ||
| about controversial topics than when it's like these huge, like you just gave this talk, I think recently at a college | ||
| and you got heck of a-- | ||
| You could probably give me an hour of philosophical beat down on that at University of New Hampshire. | ||
| Oh, okay, right. | ||
| Yeah, and so I think in those, so talking about like virtue signaling and a mom mentality, | ||
| I think those sorts of settings are conducive to that. | ||
| I think oftentimes when you're just talking with a person over a beer, you might have completely different politics | ||
| than they do, but it's kind of a non-threatening sort of friendly situation. | ||
| I think people's guards go down a little bit more in those sorts of situations and you can actually have | ||
| a conversation about controversial topics in good faith. | ||
| And so that, so I think people want that. | ||
| I think people want to have these kinds of discussions and arguments. | ||
| And it might be the people who are least friendly to that sort of thing get the most visibility or get the most publicity. | ||
| But I think if you took an average person off the street and said, hey, let's grab a beer and talk about politics, it wouldn't be nearly as bad as doing it in front of 50,000 people. | ||
| I agree, and that's why I said the thing about the 80% before, and I think, in summation, you believe that beer is the great philosophical equalizer. | ||
| Maybe bourbon, I'm not really sure. | ||
| Oh, you're more of a... Yeah, no, not beer. | ||
| Yeah, no, you've got this great thing over here, so yeah, so bourbon is bourbon, whiskey, that, yeah. | ||
| On that note, we should wrap this up and see what we can do with the bourbon. |
Export Selection