Philosophy is not wisdom but rather the love of wisdom. Wisdom is not knowledge but increased knowledge may make one wiser. Moral philosophy is love of a type of wisdom which promotes morality and ethical behaviour. We may have a theory about someone we love- I think the girl next door is angelic and bitterly contest your testimony that she is a raving nymphomaniac- and moral philosophy is a theory about morality just as epistemology is a theory about Knowledge which, as taught at University, is stupid, ignorant, shit.
Similarly, there is an academic subject called 'Moral Philosophy' which consists of mere ipse dixit virtue signalling. That is what Sen & Nussbaum have specialized in.
Persuasion magazine has an interview with the latter
Yascha Mounk: Before we get properly into the different subjects we'll explore today, what actually is a moral philosophy? And what is the strange enterprise of ethics, and of trying to think about how one should act in the world?
Ethics is not a strange enterprise. It is the business of altering your ethos- what you are in yourself- for the better.
Martha Nussbaum: I'll first say what most people think it is (I have a rather different view). The general idea started with Socrates,
Nonsense! Moral philosophy has been around from pre-historic times.
who thought most people don't pause to think and they don't summon their beliefs into explicitness and therefore are guided by custom, convention, and authority, and have never stopped to sort out what they really think.
If you do the right thing because you have internalized the right reason for doing it, your ethos is clearly superior to that of a person who did the right thing merely because everybody else was doing it. We would have higher reliance on your continuing to act in an upright manner even if everybody around you has succumbed to temptation.
So what most people who teach moral philosophy do is just try to conduct that kind of Socratic inquiry, get people to be more critical, more conscious, and, therefore, to discuss with others more in that spirit of critical awareness, rather than just saying, “Oh, I think this.”
This is an 'ipse dixit' statement which relies on the authority of some long dead Greek dude. It is the opposite of 'critical thinking'.
But I also think that in a pluralistic culture, where people get their ethical views from many different sources, some religious and some secular, we have to be very careful about not pronouncing and not steering in one direction rather than another.
Why not simply do good rather than talk about doing good?
And, therefore, I think ethics has got quite narrow constraints.
Nussbaum thinks it should consist of mere virtue signaling and clutching your pearls and screaming hysterically if a Modi or a Trump is elected.
But political philosophy has to try to get to principles that could guide the whole society.
This is an arbitrary assertion. What should guide a society is not an a priori principle, but an ideographic appreciation of the threats or opportunities that society faces at a given time. Politicians are superior to political philosophers in their understanding of these ideographic matters in the same way that Mathematicians are superior to Philosophers of Mathematics.
And, therefore, I agree with the great John Rawls, who was my teacher, that we need to make sure the political principles are narrow enough, and they're thinly formulated enough, that they
are useless or 'anything goes'
don't use concepts that others would completely reject. So, for example, you would not use the concept of the “immortal soul”; you would use a thinner concept of “human dignity.”
There may really be a soul and it really may be immortal. But 'human dignity' is meaningless. It is not the case that a homeless alcoholic taking a dump on the street is equal in dignity to the King.
When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was formulated, people from China, from Egypt and France, and so on agreed on that whole idea, but they had to formulate it in a kind of thin enough way that people from all the different religions could sign on to it.
They signed it because it was meaningless and unenforceable. Anyway, it gave the Commies a stick with which to beat Jim Crow America and Imperialist Western Europe.
So that's what I see myself as doing and trying to get the basis for what Rawls called an overlapping consensus among the different views.
If that consensus is meaningless, it is a waste of time achieving it. Still, it is vitally important, today more than ever, that the UN recognize the FUNDAMENTAL human right to fart wistfully while gazing at a bowl of oranges.
So I see myself as doing political philosophy, not really moral philosophy or moral theory.
Nussbaum has zero understanding of politics. She is 'doing' it in the same sense that I am 'doing' Mia Khalifa on pornhub.
Mounk: One of the things that strikes me in particular about academic moral philosophy or ethics is that it has a pretty narrow focus.
It is a degenerate availability cascade- a citation cartel of credential craving cretins.
It can seem as though the sort of enterprise of ethics of moral philosophy is to look around the world at people and actions and entities and say, “This is good, that is bad.” And that's a kind of very strange orientation towards the world.
It is useful. We can imitate what is good and reject what is bad.
I know that you've been critiquing that kind of narrow way of thinking about right or wrong, or thinking about what a worthwhile life for people is.
Nussbaum may as well critique breathing.
So how can we have a broader understanding of how to reflect about living a worthwhile life?
Why not simply reflect on how to live a better life? We don't need a broader understanding of breathing in order to breathe- but we do need to breathe, otherwise we die.
Nussbaum: That would be a very bad philosophy class that would just make a list of naughty and nice.
It would be useful. Nussbaum thinks only uselessness is virtuous.
What's going on is much more Socratic, trying to elicit from people their reasons for doing what they do.
trying to elicit from cretins their reason for studying worthless shite.
And that can happen without any kind of prescriptive element, you just get each person to clarify what they're doing and get them to think.
They won't agree if there is something useful they could be doing instead. The trouble with Academic Philosophy is that standards have fallen very steeply over the last four decades. It is now a case of cretins teaching drooling imbeciles.
Now, of course, once you think and you formulate your reasons, you notice that a lot of the things you think are full of contradictions.
Because you don't have a complete Structural Causal Model of the world. But, because of Knightian Uncertainty, that is a good thing. Consider the person who believes they have hired a conscientious and diligent Nanny for their child. They may still install a 'Nanny-cam' just to be on the safe side. There is no contradiction here.
And this is what Socrates brought out in the Dialogues.
Socrates spoke in a charming and gentlemanly manner. That is why we still read the Dialogues.
And then you might change your actual view, because you see you're kind of a mess, and you straighten out your views and make them more coherent.
Gerhard Gentzen, 'Logic's lost genius', certainly straightened out his views. He became a Nazi.
And, of course, that leads to a different way of conducting discussions with others. To me, I think this is most the most valuable part of a required philosophy class,
the University administration forces you to take useless classes because it has asymmetric power. Somebody should organize a class-action suit forcing 'unbundling' of this sort.
as you'll become more aware of why you believe what you believe and how it all fits together.
Then you leave College, get a job, and forget all that bullshit.
You also see other people in a different light; they're not just the enemy, or the “other side.” But instead, they are people who have reasons for what they think. And some of those reasons might dovetail with some of your own reasons. So then you start sorting things out.
But Nussbaum and Sen didn't take this step. For them Modi & Trump are the devil incarnate.
Again and again in writing about liberal education, I find people telling me that they never realized that you could actually argue on behalf of a position that you don't hold,
who are these people? Don't they know that lawyers make their money by making such arguments all the time?
that you could actually have a classroom debate where you’re assigned the beliefs you do not actually agree with. But to me, that's a crucial contribution, not just to one's life, where it's good to be wide awake
because being woke isn't good enough.
and know why you're doing what you're doing, but especially to our political culture. We're not just yelling at one another across a great void, but we're trying to sort out why. And then that classroom debate is going to be a model that people could take into the larger society.
But in that 'larger society' they might find that their taxes are going up and public services are turning to shit because the State Government has to spend billions housing refugees.
But you have to have a content that directs political action and political distribution.
But that can provoke a backlash. 'Wokeness' can become a vote loser.
And then when you formulate that content, it's very important to do it in a thin way, not using divisive concepts.
the Sciences made great progress by getting rid of vague notions like 'aether' and replacing them with concepts which were highly divisive at the time. Still, Nussbaum is right. Schools should not teach Darwinian Evolution or the theory of the Big Bang. Also the moon landing was fake. It is highly offensive to Muslims to maintain that it actually happened.
So we wouldn't use the concept of the “class struggle,” in the Marxian sense.
Or the concept of shit as opposed to food. Who is to say one man's shit is not a delicious main course for somebody else?
We also wouldn't use the concept of the “immortal soul” in the religious sense. And we try to think of things where we could meet on the same terrain. And then let's hope that people's larger comprehensive doctrines could be grafted onto that in their own minds. So somebody might say, “Well, I don't just mean human dignity, I really am thinking of the immortal soul. But I'll use the term human dignity because my fellow citizens don't all agree that there is an immortal soul.” And so we can talk in this thinner way when we're deciding what to do politically.
Don't plants have dignity? What about planets? It is highly offensive to my wife, who happens to be a Camel (I'd advertised for a Tamil but there was a typo), to suggest that only humans have dignity.
Mounk: The narrow objection here is simply one of how we actually understand each other.
Language. If that fails then money or beating gets the point across.
So the idea, broadly speaking here, is that we live in a coercive society that is very diverse,
if it is coercive, the diversity ceases to matter.
in which you will have a very different set of ideas about what is good and bad, and what motivates us and what kind of life we should lead. And we also have laws that threaten you with terrible consequences if you don't obey them. And so for me to say, “I think we should worship God in a particular kind of way. And so I'm going to try and use the law in order to coerce you to do the same”—that seems very unjust, and therefore we should limit the kind of moral considerations that we invoke in arguing for law, for example, right?
There are plenty of countries which spell out how you can worship and who you can worship. Even in liberal London, I am not allowed to sacrifice a goat to Beelzebub upon the altar of St. Paul's cathedral.
But people might say that if the way we do that is simply to translate the true reasons for what we believe into these sort of bad imitations of them, that doesn't make that animus go away; it simply cloaks it in a way that might be unhelpful. So I might still be trying to ban abortion, let’s say, and I've recognized that we should talk in terms of public reason, in ways that don't invoke our ultimate, comprehensive doctrines that drive us towards the political beliefs we hold. So rather than talk about the idea that life starts at conception, I talk more broadly about human dignity. But doesn't that just cloak what I'm actually trying to do, making it harder for me to explain myself to my fellow citizens without actually stopping me from trying to impose my preferences on the rest of society? And isn't that a reason to be skeptical of the kinds of limitations that someone like Rawls thought should apply to public reason?
In other words, if you use politically correct language, people may not understand whether you are for or against a particular thing. Was Rawls for abortion? Personally, yes. But nothing in his philosophy militates for or against it. At what point a foetus becomes a bearer of 'human dignity' is ultimately a question of fact, not principle. Suppose my wife suffers a miscarriage after eating the wrong type of shrub in the Park. Are the Park authorities guilty of homicide?
Nussbaum: Well, first of all, the old maxim is that hard cases make bad law. The case of abortion is one of the hardest cases in our society.
No. It is a contentious matter but at its root is a question of fact. When does a foetus gain 'human dignity'?
And I think that's one where it's particularly difficult to carry on an argument in terms of public reason alone. But for most things, where we have to talk about, let's say, the distribution of health care, or other goods in a society, I think it's possible to find this neutral meeting place where, for example, the reasons of a believing Catholic for wanting everyone to have access to healthcare will be very different, maybe, from my reasons as a Reform Jew for wanting everyone to have access to health care. But we can meet and we can talk about those things, and there's no big impediment.
But why bother? I have my own reasons for taking a dump. Your reasons for taking a dump may be quite different from mine. Yet, if I were to invite you to a panel discussion on why we shit, you will have to be a real Johnny-no-friends to accept my invitation.
If we start with the basic idea that we want to live with others who are different on terms of fair cooperation—that's an essential starting point—then you can do pretty well with very many topics.
You can do even better by not having pointless conversations about why different people take a dump.
And I have in our law school started a program of what are called Nussbaum Lunches. Because people often sign up for classes around their politics, I don't get so many of the conservative students in my classes, but if they sign up for one of these lunches, which I usually teach with a more conservative faculty member, then they discuss the topic with other students who disagree for 90 minutes. And I found that works really quite well, that we learn to understand one another better.
What the students understand is that philosophy is a shit subject.
We thought the abortion topic would just be the death knell for the Nussbaum Lunches. There, I think we have to go beyond Rawls a bit because people need to explain where they're coming from. I think if they just use the language of public reason, you're quite right that people feel constrained and they feel they can't explain themselves.
The public does not use the 'language of public reason' because it is meaningless shite.
But when they did it, of course, you found out that not all Catholics had the same view. Of course, some were aware that Aquinas thought that the fetus wasn't a person until just before birth. And so we started discussing things in a much more open-ended way. And there were students who were Catholics who would become worn-out by the pro-life movement, because they thought it wasn't supporting life enough, so they had that inter-Catholic discussion. And then there were Jews who had a different point of view. And there were many, many other religious points of view. And we found that we were listening to each other. And I think that's the crucial thing, that people are actually able to listen.
If they have nothing better to do- sure. But capable people must not waste their time in this manner, otherwise society will turn to shit.
Because, usually, you just don't talk to such people. Usually, those conservative students wouldn't be taking my feminist philosophy class or whatever. But of course, if they listen, then they learn something about the other side.
If they don't listen, they can use that time to learn something that is useful both to them and to society.
And I was so delighted when at the end, later in the day, I ran into the most conservative Catholic student in the elevator, and she just looked at me, and she said, “Thank you,” because I had listened.
The girl thought Martha had taken the first step to converting to Catholicism. That would be quite a feather in her own cap.
So I think we can still get a long way with that. I actually think sometimes going beyond the narrow limits of public reason is quite helpful.
Rawlsian public reason was useless shite. But so is Nussbaum's transgression of its narrow limits.
Mounk: The broader critique that post-liberals whom I've debated in various contexts have put to me—which I don't find to be intellectually convincing, but that clearly has a real emotional force to them and to others—is that that evolution that you invoked from a perfectionist liberalism of somebody like John Stuart Mill
who became an actual politician
to a more political liberalism of somebody like John Rawls,
who was not a politician or a political scientist.
is somehow a con job. What they claim is that liberalism at the beginning had this idea that religion would fade away (I don't think all liberals had that, even at the beginning) and now they sort of pay lip service to the idea that liberal institutions and societies are neutral, and that people with a broad variety of viewpoints can live equally and fully among them, including those who are deeply religious—but in practice, that just isn't the case. This is just a sort of thin veneer applied in order to actually exclude people who do have those strong religious or traditional beliefs. And so in practice, if you are somebody who has a traditional set of moral views, or if you're somebody who has a strong religious faith, you have to reject liberalism if you want to sustain a society in which you're going to be able to sustain your kind of moral and religious community.
To be fair, the Liberals have never tried to ban religious political parties though, at one time there were concerns about Catholic priests influencing their flock to vote in a particular way. Still, it would be fair to say that the decline of the Communist ideology coincided with the rise of an Evangelical 'Moral Majority' or its Indian or Turkish equivalent.
How do you respond to that criticism?
Nussbaum: The first thing to say is I think a lot of people in the academy really are guilty of despising religious people and religious doctrines. I think that's very unfortunate, and I think they're behaving badly when they do that.
But the academy is a play pen for Peter Pan pedagogues. It is reassuring that they are against religion because their students soon come to despise them.
But I'm a religious person, and I am a member of my synagogue. And I do feel it's an important part of my life. Now, of course, Reform Judaism is about as kind of critical thinking-oriented as any religion has ever been.
It is wishy-washy but there is a reputational benefit in attending any type of Synagogue regularly.
But what I think is that Kant was right, that if you feel you're weak (and I think we're all weak) then we have a moral duty to join a group who helps strengthen our dedication to very good principles that we actually are inclined to hold.
Kant was wrong about a duty to enter into a civil condition governed by a Social Contract. This is not compatible with a duty to perfect oneself. Kant was relying on a psychological theory of an obviously specious sort. On the other hand, Kant- as a 'beamten' or servant of the State- needed to modify his views as Prussian politics changed.
And so that's what I think about my religion, that it's a community of conscience
it isn't. It is a community of worshippers with a common creed.
that strengthens my vacillating adherence to good things
one may worship while being aware that prayer does nothing at all to alter one's adherence to very bad things. This is because devotion is owed to the Deity even if one's character is bad.
—and, of course, within which we have lots and lots of disagreements. We're about to have a big debate between me and the cantor about animal rights, so that'll be fun. But I never conceal my own interest in religion. And I try very hard to make it clear that I think it's perfectly compatible with being a political liberal.
Because being useless and silly is compatible with anything at all.
There are some evangelicals who think that critical thinking is bad, and that you shouldn't be exposed to critical thinking.
Critical thinking would militate for the abolition of Philosophy as an academic discipline. The thing is stupid and useless.
When I wrote my first book on liberal education, Cultivating Humanity, I made a great point of including religious institutions in the database. So I had a chapter called “Socrates and Religious Institutions,” and what I found is that most of them really wanted Socratic debate
Socrates rigged the game in advance so he could put his own words- very silly words- into the mouths of his interlocutors. This was cool because wealthy young men wanted to learn a technique to brow-beat their enemies before the Ecclesia and to claim that their own words had convicted them of serious crime. Sadly, Socrates wasn't able to work this trick during his own trial. A charming fellow but a fool nonetheless.
and they wanted this broader joining to a culture. And, in fact, the Baptist institutions that were running afoul of the Southern Baptist Convention on certain things about women's status had just left the Southern Baptist Convention. So I really didn't include very many Baptist schools in the final study, because they had become liberalized. But I did find Catholic institutions—of course, particularly the Jesuit institutions—were prepared to defend academic freedom, academic pluralism, and they wanted that kind of debate. And this is why all Catholic institutions in the United States, but I think, also, in the world, require two semesters of philosophy from everyone, because they think that kind of clarification and that kind of participatory debate is crucial.
Most PhD dissertations in Philosophy, back in 1950, were by Catholics, for Catholics. But everybody else ignored that shite.
I don't think the number of people who have the very exclusionary view in the general population of those religions is so large—the religious leaders are a different matter. They get power from extinguishing debate.
Television can change our views- after watching 'Modern Family' we tend to favour Gay marriage- but televangelists too can gain wealth and influence through the same medium.
But I do believe that we have a lot of hope. I mean, just think of the way that the debate about same-sex marriage has changed with younger people coming up.
They grew up watching 'Modern Family'.
Knowing more people who are lesbian and gay, it turns out for people under 35 that a very large majority even in evangelical schools favor same sex marriage, because they know people want to get married, and they think marriage is a very good thing, etc. So I think on a lot of apparently divisive issues, people are able to move their religions ahead of them, rather than being dragged backward by those religions.
Devotional Religion is about God and the after-life. There may be a theocratic version of Rawls's 'public reason' doctrine. If you punish blasphemy perhaps people will be more devout. Sadly, this wasn't really the case. There could be an anti-clerical reaction- look at the Bolshevik revolution.
Mounk: So one way of thinking about liberalism is that it's a set of rules about how we can live together in society even though we have very, very different beliefs, and yet each be able to pursue our idea of how we want to spend our time.
You don't need a set of rules for this to happen. It is enough if there is a judicial or other type of enforcement system with incentive compatible remedies for the violation of a set of Hohfeldian immunities.
But it seems to me that liberalism has greater difficulties coming to clear answers in cases where it's unclear whether somebody has full moral agency, and where it's unclear whether somebody should be counted among the circle of people who have full moral rights. So, in a sense, I think that is what the debate about abortion is over: what is the moral status of a fetus, for example, and what does that mean for how we can constrain what kind of medical interventions we're going to license? That is, of course, often the case in controversial questions about education: to what extent can a 13-year-old make choices for themselves, to what extent should parents be alone in making choices on their behalf, to what extent should the state be allowed to step in?
I suppose the reference is to gender reassignment surgery for minors.
But it seems to me that the same question is fundamentally at odds in the topic that is covered in your latest book, which is to say, how we treat animals and how we should conceive of the responsibilities we have towards animals and perhaps the rights that animals have in their own right.
Some animals have some rights in most jurisdictions. These may be extended or reduced. But what matters is whether the remedies are 'incentive compatible' - i.e. if it is in the interest of the obligation holder to actually provide the remedy.
Nussbaum: This is a very long discussion, and I don't expect that we're going to arrive at any consensus anytime soon. And rather like Peter Singer, who has said similar things, I'd be very happy for people just to take these issues seriously, debate them, think about them when they buy meat, and when they endorse practices, like the factory food industry, that cause great pain and suffering to animals.
Nussbaum has had to abandon feminism for animalism. Meat may be murder but penises cause RAPE!
The first thing is that we know a lot more than we used to know about the capacities of animals.
There is little point arguing that women have capacities because they have proven themselves in every type of competitive endeavour. Sadly, though many men have tried to get pregnant, they haven't yet succeeded though, no doubt, they enjoy trying.
There's a lot of science in my book. And I, myself, learned a huge amount while I was writing it, because I knew a lot about elephants and whales, but didn't know all that was known about rodents and all kinds of other animals. So scientists now know a great deal. And so I tried to make it clear that animal sentience is a very complicated thing. And then, of course, sentience itself (that is, the ability to feel pain, to have a subjective point of view on the world) I think licenses a certain kind of respectful treatment. We share the earth with these other sentient beings. And I wanted to criticize a very common view—that, namely, it's all organized in a rank order, with the humans at the top, or maybe God at the very top, and then everyone else ranged below—by simply pointing to what we know.
What we know is that you can have a society where the killing for meat of all four legged creatures is banned. The problem is that such a society may fall behind others and, like Japan, be forced down a different path. Competition for resources means that ethical systems which impair efficiency or productivity or innovation have to be abandoned or else are supplanted by conquest or insurrection.
We know that birds have a sensory faculty of magnetic perception that we don't have at all. And for that reason, they're able to go all over the whole world and find their way. And we know that dolphins can echolocate, they can say what's inside an object they approach. I tell this story about when a trainer in a private marine facility was told by her captive dolphin that she was pregnant before she herself knew that, because the dolphin could sense that there was something growing inside and that woman hadn't yet had the pregnancy test. So animals can do these amazing things.
while humans can get paid for teaching stupid shit
And I think once you realize how complicated animals are, then, of course, it's not just the ones that we tend to like like elephants and dolphins, but it's also squirrels, mice. Rodents are very intelligent creatures. They actually have one capacity that usually humans think only humans have—that is, metacognition: they can think about what other creatures think. When a squirrel is hiding a nut, it's got to be successful at thinking, “Where will other squirrels look for that nut?” It's got to avoid that. People do know that their dogs can deceive them. The world is full of animals who think in very, very complicated ways.
But all those species have to compete for scarce resources. Lower efficiency in converting resources into reproductive success can cause extinction events.
Now, what does that all mean? You can still say, “Oh, well, knowing all that. I'm just gonna say goodbye to all those other creatures, I count them for nothing.”
This is silly. We are obliged to say goodbye to millions of fellow human-beings in countries who are being butchered in countries hostile to us. But then, we too have blood on our hands.
But we might at least start to think about, first of all, the pain that we inflict on such creatures.
Why not think of the damage Universities inflict on students by making them take useless courses?
And pain is very important, but it's not the only thing we do to these creatures. We deprive them of free movement very often.
Nussbaum is a citizen of a country which spends a lot of money restricting free movement into it.
We ruin their habitats.
Or we create or expand habitats where those which are useful to us can thrive and multiply
Whales can’t move around without being obstructed by noise made by container ships and propellers, and also the oil riggers that send sonic bombs down to chart the ocean floor. Or plastic: anytime somebody drinks from a plastic bottle and throws it away, that plastic is very likely not to be recycled but end up in the ocean. And then when it's there, it's gleaming, it looks very appealing, and a whale will swallow it. But of course, it can't digest it, it will sit there and probably more plastic will come in. The whale ultimately can't take in any real food, and the whale will die.
Our species too will die out. True, if we study something useful and do useful research, then we may attain a great height of felicity.
So if we know these things, we have to think, could we do what we do differently?
Only if we know how smart people are doing the smart things which maintain our standard of living.
Now in the case of whales, there are lots of things we could do differently. For one thing, we could just set speed limits on these container ships—they would get where they're going, but they just get there a little more slowly, there would be much less obstructive noise.
America can't set rules any more. Its ships only handle about 2.6 % of world shipping.
We could certainly do what a lot of states and cities are doing, banning single-use plastic. And I think that's good for human health in many ways, too. So you know, there are other things that we could do. Sonar has now been regulated by a United States court so that the US Navy can use what's called “defensive sonar.” But there's a kind of sonar used just in an exploratory way that is now illegal, because it obstructs the lives of whales. So there are many, many cases where we don't really need to do what we're doing. And any time it takes congressional approval, as you know, it's gonna take a long, long time.
America can go further down the path of 'wokeism'. But it will become a 'rule-taker' rather than a 'rule-setter'.
We don't really see the animals we eat as full beings.
More particularly if we cook them first
We need to change that. But the pork industry and the meat industry have a real hold over politics.
As do meat-eaters.
You can't get confirmed to a position that deals with regulation that requires Senate confirmation without sitting down at the table with those people and saying, “I'm not going to regulate against the meat industry,” whereas Europe is not in the same situation
Italy has banned plant based 'cultured' meat. It may get a similar law passed by the EU.
Contrasting the laws that regulate the factory food industry in the US and in Europe, you can see what happens if there's less obstruction from the meat industry. But I actually am hopeful about this, because now we're getting meat that's grown from stem cells in labs, and once it is widely available—we see that the plant-based meat is already very popular—this other meat would just not involve abuse of an animal. I think we're gradually going to see that power diminishing. And I'm glad to open the conversation that contributes to that diminution.
That conversation predates Nussbaum's interest in it.
Mounk: If somebody listened to what you've been saying for the last minutes
and isn't laughing themselves silly at Nussbaum's delusions regarding her own importance.
and is broadly sympathetic (as I certainly am), what consequences should we take from that?
Stop eating meat. Vote only for dolphins in the primaries.
I'm somebody who does eat meat, who doesn't have particularly radical views about animal rights, but who certainly rationally knows that everything that you've been saying rings true: that, of course, there are a huge variety of animals, including those we eat, that clearly have not just the ability to feel pain, but great cognitive skills that are worthy of respect.
Plants have feelings too. As for rocks, don't get me started.
But what's the next step here? Do I need to become a vegetarian or a vegan?
Why not? It will probably make you healthier.
Am I simply being morally lazy by not taking that step? How should I reflect on this?
You shouldn't. Veganism is merely a way of becoming a bigger bore than God intended.
Nussbaum: I am very opposed to making people feel shame. I think the first step is to listen and learn.
It is also very important to sniff the farts of your interlocutor in an appreciative and emotionally supportive manner.
But there's so many places where you can engage and make a difference, that I think there's just, it's just endless. One way would just be to teach your children about animal lives and let them make their own choices,
they may decide to become dolphins. Surely there's elective surgery or gene therapy for that?
and to foster programs in the schools that show videos of animal lives that educate in the broadest sense.
Chinese kids learn Calculus. American kids should watch videos of animals- unless those animals are fucking or eating each other.
Another would just be to engage in politics at a local level. So the city of Chicago, for example, has a very active set of lawyers thinking largely about companion animals, because that's what they deal with most, and they've succeeded in banning puppy mills that raise these dogs under very bad conditions, often with parasites.
Chicago is considered the most corrupt city in the US. Naturally, lawyers who engage in politics at a local level, would prefer to go after 'puppy mills' rather than gangsters or corrupt politicians.
Now, the problem is that the puppy mills are mostly in other states. They're in Missouri, most of all, and Missouri is in the grip of that industry; they did pass a law against it, but then the governor vetoed it. The City Council of Chicago actually voted that no pet shop may sell an animal that might be from such a puppy mill, so the only way to do that, because they conceal their origins so well, is to say you have to adopt a shelter animal. That's the only way you can legally acquire an animal in the city of Chicago. And then it turned out that the puppy mills got around that one by saying, “Oh, we're a legitimate shelter,” and they had these bogus fronts under which they’ve smuggled the puppy mill dogs as shelter animals. Then they had to pass a different law to define a genuine shelter animal in a tighter way. So you have to keep working, because the opposition is always trying to get ahead of you.
No. You raise funds by showing pictures of cute puppies. Then you do useless shite so as to burnish your reputation. The puppy mills get together and hire lobbyists to protect their livelihoods. They then get more by way of USDA subsidies because of their new found political clout.
The most qualms I have about my own diet is dairy, because there's no way to think of the dairy industry that doesn't involve taking the calf from his mother. And that's a terrible loss to the mother and to the calf, of course. You could imagine how to reform it, but it would not be profitable at all.
If we stop drinking milk and eating beef then either the cow population plummets or else there are more and more stray cows wandering around the place.
So I'm worried about the dairy industry. But right now, I still eat yogurt quite a bit. I think we shouldn't judge. We have to be people who are trying to do the best we can. And if we try to contribute in some way, I don't think people should be wagging the finger. First of all, it's very counterproductive. But it's also not a good way to be in the world.
If you are paid to wag your finger you may well feel you should be paid even if you don't wag your finger. Having to work for a living is not a good way to be in the world.
Mounk: I think that spirit of being a “happy warrior” for animal rights is an important model. When it comes to climate change and the environment, I'm quite attracted to a tradition that’s sometimes called “ecomodernist”—that is, I think it's a great mistake when it comes to climate change to basically tell people that the way to fix the problem is for all of us to go back to being poor and not having access to energy and not be able to go on holiday, and be a little uncomfortably hot in the summer and a little uncomfortably cold in the winter. But there are, in fact—with investment, trade-offs, costs, and regulation—ways to build an economy of the future in which we continue to be affluent, in which the many people around the world who have a great dearth of energy, of mobility, of access to all of those wonders of modern civilization do get access to those things, and nevertheless we've transformed our economy in such a way that we don't make the morally indefensible choice of making life miserable for future humans.
Sadly, people who are wasteful of scarce resources get disintermediated from resource allocation. Gassing on about what is or isn't 'morally defensible' is not itself morally defensible because it does not raise productivity. Sooner or later, resources get transferred to those who use them more productively.
I wonder whether there's a kind of parallel here, where there is a decent part of a technological solution to the question of animal rights, which is these meat products that don't involve having to raise and kill sentient beings. I very much hope that we're going to get there technologically so that people can have a delicious and nutritious meal but without that suffering.
The problem here is that people in many societies enjoyed 'delicious' cruelty-free diets. Then they got conquered or turned into Malthusian shitholes.
Nussbaum: Absolutely. I agree with pretty much everything you say. In fact, it reminds me that Gandhi had exactly the view you were criticizing, that we should go back to the village-level of life, spin our own cloth, etc.
No. Gandhi's big idea was that Indian mill-owners would pay him to get Indians to boycott British cloth. Since what the weavers really wanted was high quality imported yarn, Gandhi spent some money on 'khaddar'- i.e. people spinning their own yarn and pretending this was helpful to the wavers.
And Nehru just couldn't stomach that.
Nehru didn't like mill-owners. He believed that Indian Society should be 'Brahminized'- i.e. more high falutin' bollocks should be talked- while the people starved and the Chinese invaded.
Their letters are really interesting because Nehru says, “Why do you think that life in a village is so great, it's usually not very good. And therefore people are not more virtuous, but they have more incentives to behave badly because they're under such stress and unhappiness.”
To be fair, villagers chased away both Gandhians and Socialists if they made themselves a nuisance. But Nehru and Gandhi got their revenge by bringing about partition
So yes, I totally agree that we should prefer technological solutions whenever there are some.
Only technology matters. If you are studying a non-STEM subject, you aren't really studying.
Now, in general, I have this position that I derived from Hegel, namely, that when you're faced with a tragedy—two things you have to choose between where both seem wrong
choose the lesser of two evils
—what you must do is to look way ahead and say, “Is there a solution that could obviate the dilemma?”
you can't see 'way ahead'. The future is unknown.
And so one case would be the stem cells. Another would be medical experimentation. Now, right now, these experiments on animals are necessary to provide drugs that do great good, not only for humans but also for other animals. But of course, they're really very objectionable. And if you look at how animals are treated, it's not acceptable. But if you look way ahead, and it's not even that far ahead, computer simulation and robotic techniques will soon displace this flawed medical experimentation. I'm quite delighted by the future in that respect.
But you don't know the future. Nobody does. Maybe it will feature viruses genetically engineered to target specific ethnic groups. Perhaps, humans will be genetically modified to live off solar energy.
Every time that we have an impasse, we should look at it in that spirit and see what else we could do. There were cases in India that I've studied in my work in development, where parents thought, “How can I send my child to school? I need to use the child for labor.” But then what the governments of, first, Tamil Nadu and then Kerala did was to say the government can intervene in a helpful way: we can have flexible school hours so that the children can do both.
A Princely State in Kerala first paid poorer families to send kids to school and only made attendance compulsory after enrolment was very high. T.N gave free school meals and created a supportive environment for teachers. To some extent, this was because leaders like Kamraj were from poor families. In much of the North, there were low returns to education. Also teachers ran away from places where they were raped and robbed on a regular basis.
But then we will provide in the school a nutritious midday meal. And now it's been generalized to the whole nation. And the Supreme Court of India even prescribes how many calories and how many grams of protein must be in the midday meal in the school. And that cuts through that dilemma to at least some extent, because then it's a win-win rather than a win-lose in sending your child to school.
Parts of North Bihar have less than fifty percent attendance. Moreover a large number of school leavers remain functionally illiterate. Passing laws is all very well. But there have to be incentive compatible mechanisms for the thing to actually happen whether or not there are any laws regarding the matter.
Sometimes, people are clever, and they can innovate their way around a lot of these terrible problems, if they just are approached with goodwill, rather than the sense of, “Oh, humanity is bad. This is the Anthropocene and we're all bad creatures.” No, I think we're resourceful creatures who can solve problems.
You can't because you studied stupid shit.
Mounk: I just have a final question. We were chatting before we started this interview and you mentioned to me that you're writing a book about opera next.
Opera is nice but it can also be naughty. We should listen to people gassing on about the niceness or naughtiness of opera. Maybe the scientists will find a way to make opera nice and not naughty at all. After that, I will write a book about penguin ballet dancers. Penguin ballet dancing is nice. But it can also be naughty. Scientists should do something about this.
Now, you've written about a great many different subjects.
But not yet about ballet dancing penguins. Why is this? Is it because Nussbaum is naughty and not nice at all? Science may discover the answer.
So it's less surprising in your case than it might be in some. As I mentioned to you, my mother is a classical music conductor who's conducted a lot of opera in her life, more opera than anything else. I myself was slightly traumatized in childhood by her friends asking me casually what instruments I play, with a subtle emphasis on the ‘s,’ and having to answer that I play none at all, sadly, because the musical gene had not been passed down to me, or perhaps it has skipped a generation.
You don't have to have a musical gene to play an instrument or two when you are at school.
But what is it about opera that you're writing about? Why should we care about opera if we're not already fans?
Opera can be nice but it can also be naughty. We should all listen to people gassing on about this. Otherwise cats may start sodomizing dogs.
Nussbaum: Well, first of all, I'm a lifelong music lover and an amateur singer and I just love music in many different forms. But opera has been my particular favorite, largely because I am an amateur singer, and I love the human voice as a medium of expression.
as opposed to the human voice as a medium for the sodomization of dogs by cats.
Verdi’s Don Carlos is what I'm writing about now, a very deep and penetrating look at how a certain religion—and of course, he was talking in the libretto about an earlier version of the Catholic Church during the Inquisition, but he was really talking about his own time: Pius IX and his Syllabus of Errors, and his dogged opposition to the republican movement in Italy, of which Verdi was a leading proponent. So he's thinking the trouble is that people are afraid, and religion can get a grip on their minds through fear, but then also through resentment, and he shows how the weaker people feel, the more they want to attack and get the better of other people.
Verdi was nice. Pope was naughty. But Wagner was not nice. Science should find a way to ensure Opera is nice nice, not naughty at all.
And we see this in the tremendous auto-da-fé scene in Don Carlos where, of course, the church is getting you to urge that the heretics be burned at the stake.
No. Verdi was reflecting Italian nationalist sentiment at the time. It was only in 1870 that Napoleon III withdrew his troops from Rome. But, the Pope's response was to proclaim the dogma of Papal Infallibility. This meant that people like Brentano moved in a 'phenomenological' direction.
Don Carlos is about the question of whether the State is justified in insisting on conformity in matters of Faith. Verdi and others thought that a Garibaldi or a Mazzini was just as much a patriot as Cavour. Italy should be unified even if some didn't like the House of Piedmont or would have preferred a Socialist Republic.
And opera could show this better than straight theater because straight theater can't really show you the way crowds behave.
Yes it can. Schiller's play had an impact though it was way too complicated and the character development was poor. But his language was musical. Verdi's Opera was too long and fell rather flat.
Julius Caesar tries to do that, but it's not terribly successful.
It is immortal.
Verdi was the great master of the chorus and choral emotions. And he's really onto something very powerful about the interconnection of weakness, fear, and the desire for revenge on your enemies.
No. Like Schiller, Verdi fails. The thing is just too complicated. An old monk saves Don Carlos. Is he a ghost or the Emperor Charles V? Fuck knows.
It's something we need to think about now, I think, more than ever, because we have a politics that's increasingly driven by a kind of resentment and the hatred of vaguely-specified others.
America has a politics that's increasingly driven by fear of demographic replacement. Whites are currently projected to become a minority by 2045. But there could be a big influx before that. Essentially, if you are going to become a minority anyway, why pay a lot in taxes to keep foreigners out?
Verdi wrote this fantastic, happy, comic opera Falstaff at the very end of his life, and it's a wonderful comedy showing the love of life, and how we should respect people who are older, even if they’re fools, and even if they're making lots of mistakes, because they have this passion for life.
The libretto is written in a manner which suggests that Shakespearean comedy has a pure, Tuscan, source. But, it is true that the Italians have always had great joie de vivre.
At the end of the opera, Falstaff’s been thoroughly humiliated by the Wives of Windsor. But nonetheless, he says, “I'm a cause of merriment in other people. And that's how you should accept me.” As somebody who's growing older myself, I think it contains this dizzy love of life that helps us think respectfully about the aging people in our societies. Because our societies do not respect aging people.
Which is why the next American presidential election will feature an 82 year old going up against a 78 year old.
Every time I go to the doctor, I have to choose whether I tell them who I am or whether I don't. And if they know who I am, because it's the university hospital, then they tend to be a little bit respectful. But with just any old 75-year-old person, they're very disdainful.
Unless you are as rich as fuck or look like you might shoot them in the head.
And there's a lot of research on how people who are aging are treated with condescension. So I really feel that is a problem for a republic based upon love.
George Washington wanted to kiss and cuddle Injuns and Niggers and Mad King George's booted Hessians.
We have to love the bodies of aging people, and we don't.
Nobody gets to love up my aging body unless, obviously, they are willing to pay top dollar.
And so I feel that was a good place to end the book.
Nice opera teaches us to lovingly finger aging people. Nasty opera suggests we should keep our hands to ourselves. Science should invent a way for nicely fingering the elderly while listening to non-naughty Opera. This is a good place to end this blog-post. Next time I will turn my attentions to ballet dancing penguins.
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