There's a history of philosophy, like you said, some work within being  is thinking about the arguments other people have. So even though I like the historical thing, I think it makes sense for me to read other people's arguments if I'm trying to solve a really important philosophical question myself, I actually try not to read other people's arguments before I've come to some view myself if it's something I don't already have a view on, but nonetheless, if I want to be more efficient or if I want to check my answers, I'm then going to want to compare it again to things other people have said. So I have my preferences for sure about the styles of philosophy I like and indeed the kinds of philosophical questions I find the most interesting, but I'm relatively happy just to say those people are also doing philosophy, the flowery language people, it's not my preference I don't think is such a good route to trying to do that hard thing of searching out knowledge, but I don't think, at least on a practical level, there's much benefit to me saying they're not philosophers and in this broader sense of people addressing certain kinds of questions, even in certain kinds of ways, there's going to be some overlap which makes philosophy distinct from say economics or from say, sociology or political science.

Even though again, there are a lot of overlaps. I like doing what I think of as political and economic philosophy because interested in using philosophical methodology to think about economic concepts for instance. That doesn't make me an economist, but there's still a difference between what I'm doing, so I'm largely happy within all of these little tight distinctions I'm trying to make to be, or at least claim that I'm being sufficiently expansive, that I'm not going to annoy all of those people who like to do philosophy in different ways from me.

Juliette Sellgren (18:42)

I kind of like that though. Then you can take a bunch of different definitions. There's the really strict academic definition to be an academic economist, to have a PhD and a post teaching and doing research or even just teaching. I mean maybe there's a distinction between the two of those, but that is a type of being an economist. It is a different but equally valid if weighted differently type of economist to do what you do. You're a casual economist. You approach it with maybe from a different place with philosophy, but you are still thinking about the economy and economics.

I just don't do regressions, right?

Yeah. Well, and some people consider those people who don't do regressions, not to be economists, but in a sense they are, and I think I tend to prefer the expansiveness, but when is that bad? I know earlier we were talking about barriers to entry and exclusivity being a good thing in some cases despite us freedom-loving people thinking that it's not necessarily so great.

One cost would be as if we couldn't talk about being an economist and being a philosopher. It seems valuable to have these distinct concepts even if they have some blurring around the edges and sometimes philosophers are doing economics and sometimes economists are doing philosophy. I was just reading the bio of Milton Friedman. I went to a Milton Friedman conference over the weekend. Most people are going to agree he's an economist. He's doing philosophy a lot of the time. I think it's useful to be able to have these different terms, philosophy and economics, so if we don't have some barriers, we can't able to talk. That's right. We can't distinguish things. Then within that, there are some things where we feel sometimes people just say things like hard to define it, but you just know it when you see it. Love is a good example of this.

People find it very hard to define love, but you generally know, or at least you think you have some idea between the difference of being in love with someone and not being in love with someone. You can be like, there's my neighbor who I've met twice and I find really annoying. I'm definitely not in love with them. So you can do it just on that kind of level and then you get the more formal sense, which you were talking about I think when you said about being an economist and doing X and doing Y and being Z and being a, that's some sense in which you have some conditions that need to be met, talk sometimes about necessary and sufficient conditions. We love those terms. I just use them in ordinary language and people think I'm a weirdo, and then there's these theories like family resemblance these things or bundle concepts.

You can't have the neat or it's much, much harder to have the neat necessary sufficient conditions approach or some things, but you can say, look, it overlaps with this thing, but not this thing, but that thing overlaps with this thing. So there are different ways and some of what I try to get at in my podcast and I should say the main goal of the podcast really is just to get people doing philosophy. I think there are many philosophy podcasts and a few of them I think really represent what it is to do philosophy. I want non-philosophers to listen. There you go. I'm making the distinction to listen to my podcast and be like, oh, that's what those guys do, and some of that is, so I had my friend Josh Ober, who's a really excellent classist and a philosopher and a political theorist, and he and I love doing the whole mastering sufficient conditions thing.

We basically spent 45 minutes doing that and it was awesome. But then also I had my fantastic colleague and friend Tom Hergan who's an economist. We talked about a different contested term and we broadly came at it from thinking about his experiences as an economist, as a banker, and that's an equally good way, at least in the sense of there's more than one way to define a word. We can have a preferences over those. I can give you a complicated spiel about why I think one route is better in a philosophical sense or gets more purchase on the concept as the philosopher might say, but I think they're both ways of doing philosophy.

I like that idea of purchase. How accurate is your regression the way the economist is back in the room?

I pick up terms from my economist friends and I love them and I love this. Purchase is a great term.

I mean that's the thing, it’s being able to pick and choose which definitions and boundaries you like. I might never be a philosopher, but I like thinking about necessary and sufficient things. I think it's an important component of economics if you're going to model anything, right? It is just about thinking, and so there is kind of this overlap and if you choose to borrow from other disciplines or from other people, you're effectively see effectively endorsing. You're voting with your mind what economists say.

That's right. You had ideas. If your mind is within your head and your head is going from book to book, you're voting with your mind. I'm not sure your mind is in your head.

Yeah, okay. We don't have to get into that. That's a whole different subject, but so to me, I'm pivoting a little bit kind of freedom is expansive. I think expansive is good. I believe that people have agency. I do feel confident that people are good at discerning things because wherever the mind is, people have them. That's part of how I define humans. Let me know if you disagree with any of that or if you need to add anything.

So expansive is good. I think it depends. I think expansive is good. Contingent on the thing, expansive, murdering is not good, so I want to say it's a kind of conditional claim. People have agency for sure. Yes, I think we all have the capacity for agency. Sadly, some people you're in a coma, you can't exercise your capacity for agency. Some people, children for instance, have less control over some of their actions, those kinds of points. But yeah, I think it's a basic human capacity and a really important, it's not just a kind of distinction between being a human and not being a human or some kinds of other animals that might have agency tam aliens for instance. It's also morally important. And then, yeah, I do think we're good at discerning things. I'm with Adam Smith on that. I think we all have the capacity to pass good judgment even if we don't always exercise it and even if we have to practice it to get better at doing it.

So then what is your definition of freedom and why is it good if it's good?

Wow, great question. Great question. Yeah, so I did a podcast on this, one of my working definition episodes on freedom. I talked a lot about this. My guest was K, my friend and colleague at Mercatus. We have quite different approaches to defining things, to thinking about freedom. I think one view I have, which I talked a little bit about in that podcast, I have quite, I think a controversial view, which is I do think it's always valuable to do things freely. So one reason that view is controversial is because it commits me to saying that there's some good that obtains, even when somebody freely does something horrible, so you freely torture the cat. That's an awful example. Everyone is always telling me, I shouldn't use these awful examples, I love your…

Better than just murder.

Well, I dunno if some people want to debate that, but yeah.

Some people, okay, just for the purpose of we're cutting costs, we're not talking about torturing.

Humans doesn't come cheap- rough approximation. So if I'm saying that there's always something valuable in doing something freely, then I'm committing myself to saying there's something valuable in doing something freely that's horrible. The reason I think it's okay for me to say that is I think I can separate out in doing that boundary thing again, doing something freely and not doing something freely. So I think the value can obtain at that level. I don't think it has to be contingent on the value of the thing. I don't think I'm making any claim at all about how valuable or non-valuable it is to torture the cat. When I say some value obtains at the level of doing the thing freely, torturing the cat freely. That's a horrible thing to say, and like I say these examples sometimes annoy people but will make them upset. But I actually think if you have the example that makes the person upset, sometimes it's doing the work.

I like that. I agree. Even though I don't love the thought.

Makes me unpopular, it makes me unpopular, but I think sometimes I'll take the cost, I'll bite the bullet, I'll do the thing.

You might decide to be unpopular when you decided to pursue philosophy pretty much, but I think philosophy.

I was already had that kind of disposition, so I just get used to it.

So okay. I guess if you can define and determine what is doing something freely and something not freely, I think a lot of people, especially nowadays, they talk a lot about how even though you're quote unquote free and you choose to do something, how actually you've been coerced in some sense by some, and so I think you kind of have to go and define, if we're going to talk about free and not free, then what is being coerced to do something versus not? In a way I, there's a value to doing things freely, but we still haven't defined what freedom is.

Yeah, you're right. I hedged on that. So I do have a view. My view is basically, I think I'm happy to say that being free is being able to do things of your own accord. Some people want to say that's too metaphysical, it's too much about whilst of action what it is at some internal level, but I think it's a capacity on that point. I mean line of someone like John Locke who thinks that it's important in that sense of being something distinct about us but also morally important that we can reason on things, we can make, we can deliberate, we can make choices and then we can act on those choices. Doing that stuff is doing stuff of your own accord, something like that. I think if you are doing something freely, you're doing it of your own accord. If you're not doing something freely, if you're doing something not of your own accord, then you're not doing it freely.

You're then going to say, what do you mean by of your own accord? And this is where we're going to come into some of these coercion things. So some of the thinking I'm doing lately about free speech, which I like to think at the level of speaking freely. So I think we can use that as an example of doing things freely, which is broadly what I'm trying to bring this freedom conversation around to. I thought about some, I have a little taxonomy of ways in which you can think about what's going on when someone can't speak freely. So when you might want to say something like, is it to do with them not doing it at their own accords? Then? So some instances, and this is not very exhaustive, but I think it's useful. Some instances you can't speak freely because you just don't have the capacity to do it.

The evil demon determines the content of all of your utterance sins or you've got a broken jaw, so you can't utter words at all. That's one type. Another type is you do have that capacity, but you just don't have the opportunity to exercise it in terms of communicating with either generally or with some particular person. So the evil demon isn't controlling the content of my words and my jaw isn't broken, but I want to speak to you. I really want to speak to you particularly that you are in a different country and I don't have a mobile phone. There's some sense or I'm in the forest and I can't speak to anybody, or I'm locked in a box because some evil guys come and lock me in a box. I still have got the capacity. I can still letter the words and determine the content, but I can't use that capacity.

I can't exercise it in this mode of prime importance for speaking freely, which is communicating. And then there's a third sense in which I can do both of those things. I've got the capacity to speak freely and I can exercise it, but I don't because of some expected costly consequence. So that's largely I think where we get into coercion and I think thinking about it in these ways can help us to avoid some cashflow errors. I think it can help us to think about different kinds of constraints. It seems to me like these are three very different kinds of constraints, although sometimes it's quite hard to determine exactly what's going on. But the point about somebody coercing you that I think is really important to note is they can only coerce you if you do have the capacity to do the thing and you have the opportunity to exercise it. If you put the gun to my head and say, Rebecca, if you don't say economics is greater than philosophy, I'm going to shoot you. I can only do that if I'm free to do it in the sense of having the capacity and the opportunity to exercise that capacity. The reason I don't do it is I think you're going to shoot me. It's a different kind of constraint.

So there are so many ways to go here.

Sorry, I said too many things. 

No, it's good. I want to point out the thing that you said. You said it pretty early on, and then I think this is at least in my mind where the level of more detail comes in is one of the earlier more high level things you said was there's the deliberation bit. So I don't know, I just love people being able to think about things and it's not even that you have to think about it for a long time, it's just that you are discerning

In two seconds whether the lion is going to jump at your head and try to bite you or someone's going to put a gun, puts a gun to your head, and do you believe that actually it's loaded or not? I don't think it takes a lot of time, but I think that does a lot of work. Maybe that's just, I really like that aspect of humans and so I think that that's important to almost anything. But I guess what this gets into, if we keep going with the example of are you free to do it if someone has a gun to your head?

I mean don't get me wrong, there's an important sense in which you're not free. It's just a different kind of sense of not being free than the kind of sense in which you don't have the capacity or you don't have the opportunity to exercise it.

And I don't want to necessarily say that living and not dying or not being murdered maybe more strictly and being able to say exactly what you want in any given moment are the same, but what are the different senses of being free then? So in this example, being a libertarian, there's the natural right positive, right, natural negative, right? Sorry, someone not hurting you and killing you is really important, very strict. There's way more that comes in when you say positive rights. So I don't know if that's necessarily the only distinction or the most important distinction or what you're thinking of, but what are the different types of freedom, senses of freedom, and how are they connected to each other and when are they relevant?

This is a great question. So yeah, some people on our kind of side, the freedom side are very attached to what they think of as these negative freedoms or this sense of defining freedom. In terms of the classic examples are freedom is non-coercion, which we already talked about. Freedom is non-aggression, freedom is non nomination. We have these kinds of understandings, I think for all. I think those things are important. I think sometimes conceptions of freedom or understanding as of what it is that freedom is and why freedom matters. If you don't center the person for whom freedom matters, the person who can do free things, I worry something's missing. So I like to take what I think is a kind of agent-focused understanding of freedom example. I think one example I gave in the podcast, I did something like, I don't think it makes sense to say that Belgium is free or Belgium isn't free.

We all know what I mean if I say that right? I mean something like their laws are too restrictive, but Belgium isn't the kind of thing that can be free in this action sense. The question is, are the laws so restrictive that the people in Belgium can't behave in some free manner? So I think when we say something like freedom is non-coercion, believe me, I care a lot about people not being coerced to do things, but I'd want to say something like, what are they being coerced from doing? Why is it important that they shouldn't be coerced as opposed to something that doesn't have the capacity from doing things freely being coerced, it doesn't make sense to talk about the stone being coerced, and that's because the stone doesn't have the capacity to do things freely. So one person, I think he did a pretty good job of pointing out some of these connections, which I think you were also getting at, is this guy, Joel McCallum wrote a paper where he talked about most discussions of freedom are agentic.

So they involve an agent being free or not being free from some constraint to do something or be something or have something. And I think generally when people talk about freedom as non-coercion, they mean something like somebody is being coerced from doing something. So all of a sudden this heavy divide between negative and positive being constrained from doing something, doing the thing are kind of tied together. I think more generally that negative positive talk sometimes is unhelpful. So a lot of it comes from Isaiah Berlin. I think when he talks about negative and positive freedom, he means quite specific things about intentions behind government action, that kind of thing. I think that's important, but I think it sometimes is reduced down to an overly simplistic way of talking about what freedom is and why it matters.

So something that is striking is that we can go into these rabbit holes, foxhole, however many hole in the ground, giant hole in the ground, hobbit hole, not referring to anything specific here of definitions and details and what has purchased, what is most descriptive, blah, blah, blah, and then at every level of definition you can get more granular, but even when you have the perfect mix of granularity and accuracy at truthness capturing ness, then there is always another level of real world ness. There's always another dimension. There's always another word or constraint or getting rid of a constraint, which then complicates things that you can add. And so how do you ever make sense of anything? I know we just have to live anyways, and that's part of just cost/benefit. We can think about these things, but then you have to live in the real world. But how do you think that this helps? I'm asking you to justify effectively your whole job and your whole being, but where is the line between when this is useful and how it affects our everyday lives and how much of it is just kind semantic because we have to survive anyways, whether or not?

Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. So I think I'd say a couple of things. One, the reason why philosophers, or at least why I like to think I'm thinking about the words is because I want to understand the concepts for me. I want to think about what it is people mean when they use these terms. Sometimes terms are really important on a social level, there are some important matters about which if we can't talk coherently clearly know what each other's meaning, then we're in trouble. If you and I don't have some similar, vaguely similar understanding of the word help, I can't know that if you shout help to me that I need to go and see what's going on and you are in trouble. So there are certain words which have that kind of social value. So I'd say the goal of all of this stuff isn't just at the level of the semantics.

It's not just at the level of the words. It's to understand truths about the world, about the world, about us, about what it is to be a human in the world. But yeah, there is a big risk in kind of over specialization, a kind of going down like you say, to the granular, to the granular, and sadly there is a lot of that in philosophy. You read a lot of articles in contemporary philosophy journals. It's people responding to points in footnotes, which were responses to points in footnotes, which were responses to points in footnotes. And you might, if you're a cynic, say even if they're finally going to get it, the truth of the matter about the point in the footnote, by the time they do, it's just less important. Maybe that's unfair, and again, it comes back to your point about what should you spend your time on?

What are the important questions? What are the truths that you should be seeking? You can't seek all of the truths. There are truths about how many grains of sand there are at the bottom of the challenger deep, which nobody may ever know. Maybe we don't even have the capacity to know do those truths matter? What about truths about our people being tortured in some far away country? Those truths matter too. They matter in different ways. So you've got to pick your battles, and the best philosophy can do is give us some tools that are doing that. Then it's up to us to use that power of discernment that you talked about so eloquently in order to not waste our time on earth. It seems to me luxurious, if you're using your skills to just while away your time or try to get jobs because that's the way that other people are doing philosophy or whatever, it's, it's a privileged thing to be paid to think about stuff, and that comes with some quite serious obligations.

I think. I sometimes think if I just didn't have those feelings about these obligations and the fact that this is a privilege I would spend all my time thinking about time is I'm very interested in what time is, but I actually think it's better for me at least at this point in my life, to spend my time thinking about stuff like freedom and rights and equality. I think those things do have more of that purchase. They're equally interesting. Equally, and maybe if I had to be forced to think about it, maybe I'm slightly less drawn to it, although I'm very, very drawn to it, but I can just spend some of my free time thinking about time and I can focus most of what I think of my working time, which I actually basically just think of as all my time because I love my work and I don't want to go and do other things in the evening.

I want to think about philosophy and read philosophy, but my main output, I want to be on these things that I think are more socially valuable, at least that I think I can help to push the dial on in ways that are socially valuable. I don't mean that knowing about what time is isn't socially valuable. I just think in terms of me spending my time, at least at the moment, I think I can do more socially valuable work thinking about what rights are and what freedom is than if I spend all of my time thinking about what time is.

Which is cool.

Yeah, I think so.
 

Thought about that. Well, he kind of just showed people that it's freaky, I think. Sorry, who did? Salvador Dali, the artist. 

Oh, yeah, yeah. I love Dali. He's great. Very cool.

So tangentially related, not quite properly quoted quote that I will begin to end us on.

Yeah, sorry, I should say I've just realized what time it is, and I'm going to have to go in a couple of minutes.

Okay.

Yeah, sorry, sorry.

No, but it's okay. I will be done in a minute. I was told once, and this doesn't really have to do with you weighing the cost and the benefits of doing one focus of philosophy versus another necessarily, but I do think it is tangentially related, and I just love this and I can't stop thinking about it. It's something about using, if you don't have to fight for freedom, what you do in that time is what it means to be free. We fight for freedom to do the things that you might not necessarily do if all you had to do is fight for freedom, and some people still want to fight for freedom, even if they have the freedom to do otherwise, but I think that becomes more of a individual preference. Now that's very rough and not necessarily a very philosophical, well-defined statement, but it's something that I've been pondering for a few months. So let me know what you think of that and also what is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on and why?

Wow, great question. The first one, I think I'd say doing something freely is difficult. I'm wary of the risk of conflating freedom with desire. So I think sometimes people say things like he couldn't speak freely, and what they mean is he couldn't say the things he wanted to say. If it's just at the level of the kind of first order based preference, oftentimes we decide not to do the thing that we want and we do that freely. I want to eat the donut almost every time, but I decide I'm only going to eat the donut some of the time because I have the second order desire, which is not to get very, very fat. Similarly, there are good philosophers’ examples of Imagine the evil demon is controlling me, and all I can ever say is I want the donut, but sometimes I've decided that I don't want the donut.

Somebody offers me a donut. The evil demon makes me say I want the donut. There's a level on which I do want the donut, but it's not what I've decided to say. So I think something like speaking freely isn't just saying what you want to say. It's uttering the things that you've decided to say. This comes back to your point about discernment and deliberation. So I think freedom and desire are different things. They're both valuable on the thing about what's something I've changed a belief on? I mean, I'd like to try to, there's a thing in philosophy called static volunteerism. This is a whole big question about whether we can choose our beliefs, whether we have power to control what our beliefs are. Can you change your belief about something? I find thinking about this thing very interesting, I do believe that you can condition yourself in certain ways.

If you hang out with just the people who have one kind of belief, you might be more likely to come to believe it. Nonetheless, we do change our beliefs about things, and it's partly through that process of deliberation. Deliberation. There are interesting questions about how this works. I believe strongly people don't value sufficiently things like U-turns. So oftentimes people say, I don't like such and such a politician because they're always making U-turns. I would far rather that they U-turned if the thing that they had previously been committed to was wrong. So it's kind of, again, a conditional or a contingent thing. You should U-turn. If the thing's wrong, I'd rather change my mind and be right then continue being wrong. One thing I constantly changing my mind about is eating meat. I think it's morally bad. I'm morally wrong for various reasons. I don't seem able to stop eating it.

I have done for some time, so I try to torture the go through my head whether that's okay. One other thing I changed my mind about is there's these different justifications for punishment. So the two most famous ones are kind of a deterrence justification and a retributivist justification. I used to have a lot more time for the deterrence justification, but came to the conclusion it was justified by consequentialist reasoning, and I think consequentialist reasoning is bad and wrong. I read some of the more sophisticated retributivists theories, and for some time I thought maybe there was something there, but I just fundamentally opposed them for various reasons. So I've come to believe that. I think there's a kind of defensive or self-defensive justification sometimes at least that can be a response to bad action and to crime. Don't necessarily want to say it's punishment. I think it's different from punishment. So I think you can put someone in prison for defensive reasons that are non-punitive, that kind of thing. So that's something I'm constantly thinking about and I've changed my mind on various times.

Well, thank you so much for answering my question more than once and for taking the time to share your wisdom, your thoughts, your definitions with us. I've learned a lot and I know my listeners will as well. So thank you.

No, thank you. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. It's been really fun.

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to The Great Antidote Podcast means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.