Free means the opposite of Slave just as tall means the opposite of short. In a recent podcast, Tyler Cowan comments on the 'bimodal nature of the distribution of how people talk about freedom'. Equally there is a bimodal distribution of how people talk about height and weight and other observables which carry a normative charge. Nobody likes being called a short, fat, slave. Nevertheless, there is an underlying continuum.
The philosopher, Rebecca Lowe, asks if countries are the kind of things which can be free. The answer is yes. If the leaders can be easily removed and their powers are strictly limited and subject to judicial scrutiny, the country is free. True, there may be exigent circumstances limiting current freedom but the expectation is that this is a temporary state of affairs.
Cowen replies that 'no one really has a very clear definition of freedom.
They can have clear definitions of types of freedom- e.g. freedom of expression or economic freedom. These are Hohfeldian immunities which, however, are defeasible. One may certainly look at the trade off between restrictions on such immunities and their cost and benefit.
But if so many good things are bunched together so tightly that the distribution of countries as free or not free is so bimodal, it may mean we don't need a fully tight definition.
That 'bunching' may be due to Tardean mimetic effects or else arise by 'convergent evolution'. If so, definitions may be useful for improving mechanism design.
We can simply look around and try to build up the elements of the bundle, which will have these other good effects like prosperity, right? Maybe greater opportunity, better aesthetics in some cases, other philosophic values, and that takes a bit of the pressure off freedom to carry the whole water.
Contracts are about giving up Hohfeldian entitlements or immunities for consideration. The 'Social Contract' as a contract of adhesion can certainly be evaluated in terms of Costs and Benefits. However, it is an incomplete contract. We are having to guess at future states of the world. Provided there is free entry and exit, there will be something like 'Tiebout sorting'- i.e. people move to jurisdictions with the fiscal mix that most appeals to them.
The most important element of freedom to me is what George Stigler called positive freedom,
i.e. an expanded choice menu. It is 'positive' in that people would pay money to have access to that menu- e.g. paying a fee to Costco so as to be able to shop at Costco prices.
which he associated a little too quickly with wealth, but I think it's closely connected to wealth. And it's simply what opportunities do you have with your life and also in terms of purchasing power?
If, ceteris paribus, people are willing to pay to relocate to a jurisdiction where they have a bigger choice menu, then a capital value can be placed on the increment in freedom available there.
Now, negative freedom also matters.
absence of coercive constraint
But I think in a pinch, people prefer positive freedom. And most definitions of negative freedom, in fact, turn out to be parasitic on other understandings of positive freedom and what really matters in terms of consequences.
Rebecca mentions Gerald MacCullum's 'triadic relation', in which "x is (is not) free from y to do (not do, become, not become) z'. Thus I am free from you when it comes to my murdering the Post Man. This is because you live far away. Sadly, I am not free from the Police and thus have decided not to murder anyone today. Speaking generally, there is no 'triadic relation' involving some named third party. One's immunities and entitlements arise under a vinculum juris binding on everyone.
Tyler responds thus- But I bet if you sat down, you could come up with 57 different kinds of freedom that are relevant. Look at Amartya Sen’s Paretian liberal paradox. Well, what would you choose if the choice affected only you? For him, that's a significant part of liberty. I think it's an insignificant part, but if he insists on putting it on his list, okay, it can go on the list.
A Paretian liberal would recommend a Coasian solution. Prude can pay Lewd not to read Lady Chatterly or vice versa. Like 'triadic relation', Sen's contribution is worthless. You can get rid of all 57 philosophical kinds of freedom and just stick with the choice menu. One may say that for prudential reasons, some sacrifices (i.e. choices with an opportunity cost) have to be made to ensure that the existing menu remains available. Consider the UK and France in the inter-war period. Had they known Hitler could endanger their freedom, they'd have happily spent much more on Defence.
REBECCA
So I think, to my mind, one of the things that the Sen paradox shows is that you can't just reduce freedom down to preference satisfaction.
Because of Knightian Uncertainty, expected utility maximization is wrong. You should go for 'regret minimization'. This is the prudential aspect I mentioned previously. 'Guns vs Butter' was a crude utilitarian but wholly misleading and mischievous trade-off. It turned out that the guys with the guns could come and take all your butter. You need guns to keep your butter.
And I think even framing it in terms of ‘it's bad if you don't want to listen to the Benjamin Britten song that I propose that you listen to because I think you’d get value from it’.
That's informative. Regret minimization may cause you to listen to the song just in case you are missing out. If it is horrible, you gain new information- viz. the guy who made the recommendation was either pranking you or is a some sort of snobbish shithead. You give him a wide berth in future.
I feel like this again is just reducing freedom to something too thin. Is that fair?
Either 'freedom' has a well defined extension- e.g. a choice menu- or it is subjective and perhaps ineffable. One may say 'the day I truly felt free was when I was riding a camel in the Gobi desert'. If asked to explain why this was, the reply may be 'I can't put it into words. All I can say was that the feeling of freedom was sublime.'
Rebecca thinks Sen is
getting at something like what's important is you deliberate on your choice.
Deliberating on anything Sen says will soon convince you he is a waste of time.
What's important isn't just that you're allowed to go along with what your base preference is in some first-order sense. It's that you have to have the freedom, the right even, which is the other kind of horn of the paradox, in order to be able to determine how you live your life, even if it doesn't match what your preferences are.
Why stop there? Why not say it is important to have the freedom to have the freedom to have the freedom to have the freedom, the right even, to go on deliberating without making any choice whatsoever because you have lost your job and have no fucking money?
Tyler- But that will typically collapse into positive freedom. So the sheer or mere right of deliberation, even very bad systems, would give you a lot of that. The Soviet Union, you could deliberate all you want. People there, I think, deliberated more often than Americans do. But at the end of the day, you couldn't choose the thing.
Sen and his best pal from Shantiniketan wrote a paper in the early Seventies where they explained that guys doing 'Project appraisal' had no fucking importance whatsoever. He who paid the piper called the tune. He might also pay a bit of money for an appraisal saying the tune was enchanting. If you said something different, you might not be offered another such gig.
So I don't view the Paretian liberal paradox as being about deliberation at all.
It was silly. Still, in life, we find that storing up grievances or bizarre preferences of our own are a good way to checkmate boring cunts who want to gas on about Gaza or whatever. My technique is to start talking about racism in Ireland. Iyers have been expelled from the Emerald Isle by homosexual Maratha leprechauns like Leo Varadkar. The UN is refusing to take up the matter. It's coz I iz bleck- right?
That might make it more interesting, but it's just about can we find a reason why we might object to what are in fact practical gains from trade?
Sen's generation of Bengali economists were against Trade. Sen ran away from India after trading in his wife for that of his best friend. Manmohan, who had studied Trade, remained faithful to his wife and to his country and eventually triumphed. Punjabis are like that only.
And Sen being more or less anti-market is wanting to do that.
REBECCA So when you talk about positive freedom, I think maybe what you're talking about is something like an agent-focused framing of freedom.
Only time-wasters talk like that. Either agents are free, in which case anybody who tries to do 'framing' is just spinning his wheels, or they aren't free in which case they should focus on emigrating or bringing down the regime.
So I think one of the problems with the kind of negative framings generally, so if we think about the classic, particularly on the kind of liberal/libertarian side, people might want to say something like freedom is non-interference, freedom is non-coercion. The republicans might say it's non-domination.
What value are they adding? None at all. Still, if you decide to study stupid shit, you will have to listen to stupid shit.
One risk with these things is I think it avoids centring the person who it is who's doing the free thing, the person who has freedom, the agent. Is that fair?
It is deeply unfair that poor bleck peeps don't know how deeply unfair we think it is that we are so much their superior and they don't even know it because they think we are useless tossers.
TYLER Yes. One way to think about it is let's say you can either be killed by a lightning bolt from the sky, which is not libertarian aggression against you, or you can be killed by a robber.
In both cases there are prudential 'regret minimizing' actions you can take. But there is also a collective action problem. There may be economies of scope and scale in solving it in that manner.
Now, you might prefer to be killed by the lightning bolt because you couldn't say your rights were infringed. And if your rights were infringed, there's something extra bad about that. But at the end of the day, you're dead either way. And if you're too focused on that as truly the big deal, the constituent important part of freedom, I think you're just missing the boat about what people actually care about.
REBECCA I think this is right. I think libertarians who say, look, your freedom is only being infringed if your rights are being violated are missing the point.
Libertarians don't say that. They think the State has limited rights. Individuals don't.
TYLER Right.
REBECCA But I also think there's a sense in which you think about, if you think about something as freedom as non-interference,
why do so? Either there is a Hohfeldian immunity or there isn't. This is a justiciable matter.
then you could say, well, I don't know, the field isn't being interfered with. Or you could say the moon interferes with the tides of the sea.
People don't say that. The moon is inanimate. Gravity probably arises out of the 'positive geometry' of Space Time.
This seems to me to be crazy in an ordinary sense: we don't talk about the sea being free or not free. It seems like you need some kind of agent, some kind of, I don’t want to go as far as to say person, but some kind of living thing that has this capacity. I think this is the advantage of an agent-focused conception of freedom.
It is not much of an advantage to have a conception which applies only to living things when, in fact, no one has ever denied this to be the case.
TYLER I don't know. This talk is making me nervous. So maybe I think more in relational terms. So I don't agree with George Stigler and the purely consequentialist view that all that matters is wealth or opportunity.
But all that matters can be given a cash-value or depicted as a possible trajectory or 'world-line'.
I think if, say, someone comes along and murders an innocent baby, to choose the simplest possible example, there's something wrong with that above and beyond the GDP impact or the suffering of the baby.
We may say the thing is repugnant. Economists know about repugnancy markets.
There's something relational about treating the baby that way, that above and beyond the lost happiness is deeply wrong and bad.
What about a foetus? Is Tyler pro-life?
REBECCA That's right. But we also, I mean, I don't think it makes sense to say freedom is the only element of the good anyway.
But nobody, except some useless philosophers, says anything of that sort. We get that some jurisdictions, at some times, can only be ruled if freedom is severely curtailed. The opportunity cost is what matters. The alternative to this curtailment is even less freedom- e.g. England's Defence of the Realm Act which curtailed freedom but which prevented Hilter conquering and enslaving the country.
So just when we're thinking about is this a good or a bad thing, the idea that we're going to be able to determine that just in terms of whether freedom has been lost seems to me overly thin anyway.
It isn't 'thin'. It is a matter of detailed calculation. Was France right to surrender to Hitler? Yes. It took far less casualties than in the First War and bounced back quicker. The Brit policy of relying on the Air Force wasn't too shabby. Again, the UK took far fewer casualties- though more than the cheese eating surrender monkeys.
TYLER Yeah, I agree.
REBECCA So I guess there's two criticisms here. One is, is freedom just about rights?
Rights without remedies are meaningless. Freedom is about choices directly linked to outcomes.
And the other is, is the good just about freedom, even if the conception of freedom goes beyond rights.
It can be. But many feel 'the good' has something to do with God.
TYLER But practically speaking, I think Stigler's approach, looking at positive liberty and wealth, it gives you the right answer in virtually all cases. Done as a rule at the societal level.
REBECCA That's right. So I think in a descriptive sense, you might want to say something like, if we're considering whether country X is freer than country Y, you want to think about things like opportunity. This seems to me to make sense.
if Norwegians spend good money to emigrate to Switzerland, we can put a cash value on the greater economic freedom they get there. In some other respect- e.g. sexual freedom if they move to Dubai- they may lose out. Again, a cash value can be given to this.
The question for me, the deeper question is, why do we care about opportunity?
Because it is linked to productivity which is linked to prosperity and national security.
We don't just care about it in terms of, hey, counting up GDP.
Forecasts of GDP trends can look at how the configuration space changes as opportunities of various kinds increase or decrease.
We care about it because the kinds of creatures who are in that society are the kinds of creatures that have the capacity to be free.
Hens are the kinds of creatures which have the capacity to be free. We prefer it if they are kept in coops and lay eggs for us to eat.
Is that fair?
It is silly.
Like, why does it matter? Who does freedom matter to? Freedom doesn't matter to the sea. Does freedom matter to your dog?
It matters to a wolf. As for your dog, it doesn't want to be kept chained up all day. It wants to be taken walkies. So do I. Sadly, nobody is willing to pick up my poop. Is it coz I iz bleck?
Does freedom matter to you? There's clearly a sense in which it makes sense to talk about you as free. I think there's a sense in which to talk about your dog as free, at least if you compare your dog with a little electronic dog. But talking about the sea as free doesn't make sense.
It is poetic. My beloved is in America. The sea is free to go and meet her. I am not because nobody takes me walkies and scoops up my poop.
Talking about Belgium as free only really matters if
we are thinking of relocating there. It is classed as 'moderately free' in Economic terms. But financial and monetary freedom is higher than average.
we're talking about what are the conditions that conduce within Belgium for the kinds of things for which freedom matters.
This is well studied by people who advise companies on where to relocate.
TYLER Sure, the Belgians will be happier with a fair degree of freedom.
Maybe not for Islamists.
REBECCA But again, happier. Is it just about happiness? No, I think we've already addressed that.
It's about entry and exit. If smart people are running away that's bad. If rapists and terrorists are running away people feel very happy.
TYLER No, but that's the single biggest and most important component is human well-being, that people flourish…
It really isn't. Survival is what matters. After that the question is whether your progeny will multiply faster than the other guys progeny.
REBECCA But the risk then is that...
TYLER… and then sustainability. So free societies appear to be pretty good at defending themselves against their enemies.
If they have nukes. Ukraine gave them up. Look at it now.
And that's critical. So you need enough wealth and GDP to buy defence and have alliances. And that's going to trump most other considerations, because if you're enslaved by someone else, it's just the end of the line and the debate, so to speak, is over.
REBECCA So one of the objections, the republicans, these people who want to see freedom broadly as non-domination…
Nothing wrong with a bit of S&M between consenting adults and one really promiscuous chicken.
TYLER
You mean the philosophical republicans...
REBECCA Yeah, I mean, that's right, the people like Tim Sellers, and Philip Pettit, Quentin Skinner. These people want to see that the notion of freedom that's operative or should be operative within the society is the idea of non-domination. So this is going further than non-interference. It's saying something like a lack of arbitrary interference.
It can be taken further to mean that Neo-Liberalism and the Cash Nexus and Gender dimorphism and the invidious distinction Society makes between human babies and my cat baby should all be overthrown. Otherwise, nobody is really free. Also, why is the Government not putting LSD in tap water?
And one objection they would have to the non-interference idea is something like, you've got the slave and the slave master, and the slave master seems terribly benevolent. Maybe the slave has all of the opportunities they want. Maybe they live a happy life in the sense of gaining access to the goods and services that they want. Maybe they can get married, all of these things.
Sadly, even the most Islamic states have now abolished slavery- at least on paper.
But the republican objection is: any day now, the slave master could just on a whim, because they're having a bad day, impose some arbitrary restriction on the slave. One thing you could take from this objection is the suggestion that it's not just about how good your life looks. It's also about the power you have to determine stuff for yourself.
It is prudent not to become a slave just in case you get 'sold down the river'.
TYLER It's too loose a concept.
It is the first step to psychosis.
I also would point out it cannot handle what you might call children's rights at all, and especially in earlier societies where life expectancy is not long, being a child is a significant chunk of your life. Arguably, it's the most important part of your life. There's no way to avoid the sense that in some significant regards, children are dominated. You don't have to believe in hitting them or even spanking them.
Students are dominated as are folk who listen to their confessor or Rabbi. Soldiers are dominated. So are employees in most firms. So what?
But at the end of the day, their parents tell them what to do and discipline them and bring them up and sort of induce or force certain views on them.
Kids can sue for emancipation. In some countries, they have all sorts of channels of legal redress.
And that's inevitable. You could even say it's desirable. Maybe today we don't even do enough of it. And if you start with non-domination as fundamental, I just think you hit a huge mess. And a very important question.
REBECCA I generally think that the children objections aren't as strong as people think they are. Largely because you can just deal with it by saying, look, a child isn't yet a fully reasoning creature.
Nor are people who teach Philosophy. So what? Most of us are as stupid as shit. We outsource important decisions.
A child isn't yet the kind of creature that's capable of all of the things that we think, therefore, they should be treated as a free individual in themselves.
No one is as yet. That's a good reason to 'let go & let God'.
TYLER I think they're incredibly smart. And none of us or few of us are willing to take the reductio that therefore say people with Down syndrome are not fully reasoning or have fewer rights. So we're pulling things out of a hat that we don't really need.
Nothing wrong with protecting people with diminished capacity. That may be our own fate soon enough.
REBECCA I totally agree. But I think you can deal with those problems by saying the person with Down syndrome, you can even go as far as to say the person in the coma, has rights qua being the kind of thing that has these capacities, whether they're just kind of potentially held.
Humans have certain Hohfeldian immunities and entitlements. The question is whether an effective remedy will be provided under a vinculum juris. This raises the question of incentive compatibility if the obligation holder is a private entity and of fiscal headroom if the obligation holder is the State. It is likely that, at the margin, the benefit will be rationed.
If you separate out the capacity from the exercise of the thing,
you can also separate out the capacity to have the capacity and so on. Sen's approach sucks ass big time.
which is one way I think you can get into thinking about what freedom means in terms of having freedom, as opposed to doing things freely or being free.
We have already done so by saying positive freedom is a menu of choice.
So if you separate out the noun from the adjective or the adverb. Then you can deal with these objections by saying, look, the person in the coma is still a person.
as is the person who isn't in a coma.
A person, with these capacities.
People who are not in a coma have the capacity to not give a fart for those who are in a coma.
And that's why you need to respect their rights.
I don't need to respect shit.
The risk...
is that if we stop respecting the rights of people in a coma, we may absentmindedly eat them. What if Bleck peeps are disproportionately at risk of being eaten because there is a higher probability of their being eaten. Then, we'd not just be cannibals- we would be racist cannibals! It is to avoid this terrible fate that it is worth doing a PhD in stupid shite.
TYLER The word qua makes me nervous there. [Laughter.] I think I prefer the Straussian view that we're not sure what are the rights of people in comas, especially if they're probably never going to come out. But for slippery slope reasons, and because we want these strict lines around human life as a value, we're going to treat it that way. Though deep down, we're really pretty uncertain about the finally correct philosophic answer. That's how I would handle people in comas.
People who get paid to handle such people, handle such people. We don't. Canada leads the world in euthanasia. Maybe they are onto something.
The word qua, you're getting into metaphysics.
or jurisprudence. Qua links to an identity class.
You're not going to win that battle. And then there's plenty of other intermediate cases. Like try considering abortion. It's a very tough issue. You inject the word qua into an abortion debate, you're not going to get anywhere.
REBECCA Every time I say qua, Tyler, from now on in the rest of our lives, and as you know I think we're going to live forever, please just assume I'm meaning as, or in the state of, or something like that.
TYLER But there's a reason why you pick the word qua. And this Aristotelian sense of these hidden potentialities that maybe, in no feasible universe can be realised, but you still want to invoke them. I'm probably opposed to that, but at the very least, it makes me too nervous to want to embrace it.
Yet Courts and Policy makers have to deal with identity classes which in turn determine entitlements or immunities.
REBECCA Okay, so if you just take a really simple approach in which you compare the person in the coma with the rock, there's a sense in which the person in the coma is much closer to the person outside of the coma than the rock.
The coma patient may have family or friends or may belong to a particular community. I hear that life support has been turned off for a fat Tamil man. I don't like it because I am a fat Tamil man. Is Society discriminating against the likes of me? Fuck you Society! Fuck you very much! Then I learn that the fat Tamil man is that cousin of mine who refused to invite to his birthday party. I think 'good riddance to bad rubbish. Still, I should call. His widow might be hot?'
What are the qualities that these two things share? One way of approaching it is that they are the kind of thing that has these capacities, whether or not they exercise them.
This particular rock has the capacity to cause a horrible Dictator to trip and fall and break his neck. We must protect and cherish this rock. That cousin of mine in a coma should be sent straight to the crematorium.
So a human being is the kind of distinct thing, like ontologically, that has these capacities.
Nobody knows their own capabilities let alone those of other people or rocks or trees or whatever.
TYLER That’s so Aristotelian, come on. [Laughter.]
Aristotle was incredibly stupid. Still, he was Alexander the Great's tutor.
REBECCA What's wrong with that? Isn't Aristotle the greatest thinker of all time?
No. He was a pedant who taught useless shit.
TYLER I'm more or less a nominalist. So the rock is an extreme example. But if you compare the human in a coma to a non-human animal, probably the non-human animal does better.
If its your granny in the coma you don't want life-support to be turned off ever. It is so comforting to visit her. The whole family has come together as never before.
But we do not completely protect their rights, or try to police nature, or promise never to take away their homes by building our homes and so on.
We don't completely protect any rights whatsoever. This is because obligations are defeasible. If the State has no money it reneges on its obligations. Since it has sovereign immunity, nothing can be done about it.
So I think you'll find other examples that will defeat that attempt at a counter.
REBECCA That's right, but if we're really strict in separating out the kind of definitional work,
lawyers have done this well enough. Currently, US courts recognize that a hippopotamus can be an 'interested person'. Sadly, they still haven't achieved legal 'personhood'.
working out what kind of thing the human is, what kind of thing the dog is, what kind of thing the rock is, that seems to me a good starting point to thinking…
in a utterly useless fashion. It is a different matter that studying dogs may enable better techniques of dog rearing such that both the dog and the family get more out of the relationship.
TYLER There's just more Aristotelianism. I think one has to accept the fact, especially as biosciences advance and there's more genetic manipulation, more human evolution, different branches of people may change in different ways, there’s people with disabilities, we just need to accept some of these fine lines aren't there.
Structural Causal Models of rocks or dogs may be very useful. Philosophers can add no value.
Then we need to decide where do we need to draw them. I would be pretty strict with that, because I worry about the actual logic and dynamic of coercive power as I observe it in the real world. But I don't want to rely on Aristotle there. I want to cite public choice theory for these strict lines.
Sadly, it is 'anything goes'.
REBECCA OK, so let's take a step back. What kinds of things does freedom matter for then? You don't want to divide things up neatly into humans and dogs and rocks. Can we say something, though, like there are certain kinds of things in the world that it doesn't mean anything to say that freedom matters for those things?
No. Anything at all can be meaningful to some person. I see a rock. I feel it should be free to fly through the air and hit you on the head. Thus, it will have fulfilled God's plan and get a better reincarnation.
TYLER Freedom for rocks does not matter. Agree.
I throw a rock at Tyler. He catches it. It turns out to be a pure gold nugget. I want it back. He says the rock exercised its freedom to fly through the air and land in his hand. It should be free to depart with its destined owner. That's a case where the freedom of a rock would matter greatly to Tyler.
REBECCA Why is that?
TYLER What's a rock? It's a rock, right?
If it is a rock which is 90 percent gold and is worth 10,000 dollars it is more than a rock.
Until we learn more about rocks, there are a few panpsychics running around out there, but they haven't persuaded me. And in the meantime, you can just kick a rock.
REBECCA Why can you kick a rock? It seems to me like...
TYLER Isn't that how they refuted Bishop Berkeley? [Laughter.] I refute him thus and he kicked the stone. It's fine to kick the stone.
REBECCA Why is it fine to kick the stone, and not to kick the person in the coma or not to kick the baby or not to kick the dog?
It is fine to do so if you are a solipsist. The trouble is you may get beaten or bitten.
I think pretty quickly we're going to get onto something like it's living,
No. If kicking living humans is wrong, kick-boxing would be banned.
and then we're going to want to make some kinds of distinctions like having intentions or being conscious.
No. Intentions or consciousness may mitigate the wrong. But what is wrong remains wrong. Why? The law says so or Society has a norm in this respect.
Even you accept we're conscious, right?
TYLER Right. Sure. Even I, except we're barely conscious, but we are a little bit. There might be some arguments in the biodiversity direction, but with the environment, where kicking the stone can be this big mistake. I'm still not persuaded of them, but I wouldn't rule them out entirely. I could imagine, you know, three years from now, maybe I'm persuaded by them. But that would still be viewing the rock in terms of some larger ecosystem. And the rock per se is not carrying the value.
It is if it contains gold or diamonds.
REBECCA Just one more attempt, though, at thinking about the kinds of things that can have freedom. Can a non-conscious thing be free?
Yes. Researchers can take a bacteriophage out of the wild and reduce its functionality till it becomes a Speigelman's monster which would die if were free.
Does it mean something? If you compare your dog with the electronic dog, the little battery-operated dog running about, you might want to say something like, if nobody's constraining it, if nobody's interfering with the direction it runs in, you might want to say it's free. This seems to me crazy.
It isn't. Depending on the sort of computer chip it has, its 'free' behaviour conveys information.
REBECCA I still think there's a sense in which if we aren't the agents of change, if we aren't capable
then maybe we are women and have to sit down to pee. Also, we are probably being dominated and are being brainwashed into thinking cat babies aren't just as good as human babies.
… I mean, you started by talking about positive freedom. So one reason people might care about positive freedom is they say, look, it's just not enough for there not to be barriers in the sense of interference or coercion or domination. You have to be able to control what you're doing for yourself.
Also, you should have a penis and not have to sit down to pee
Whether that's in terms of project formation, whether that's in terms of having your own preferences that can be satisfied.
I didn't ask to be a woman. The world is totes unfair!
This to me speaks of being an agent in the sense of having some kind of capacity,
like peeing standing up
some kind of control, at the extreme some kind of power to determine things.
Call no man free till he is POTUS. Call no POTUS free till every country does what he wants. Also, POTUS should be allowed to tell Death to fuck off.
How do you have… Why does this positive sense of freedom matter if you think that the kind of thing that has it isn't something that can cause stuff?
Both free and unfree, animate and inanimate, things can cause stuff. The question is what is the 'efficient cause' of the thing? I didn't make my computer. But I was part of the demand curve for it and in that sense am the efficient cause. But what a paltry sense that is! The chain of causation in human affairs may be well enough uncovered for a judicial or commercial purpose but it eludes itself in the process.
REBECCA But what does it mean to choose if choice doesn't mean, if you don't have open choice in the sense that you could have gone for the other option, what does it mean to…
It means ontological dysphoria- you are not at home in the world as it presents itself to you. Do the 'Eat, Pray, Love' thing. There may be somewhere else, this side of the grave, where you do feel at home.
TYLER You're part of the causal chain.
oikeiosis is related to feeling at home in the world. Where it breaks down, there is ontological dysphoria.
But say if you live in the United States, there's 30 brands of ketchup on the shelf. And if you were back in old school communist China, there wasn't ketchup at all. And that's a big difference. And it really matters to people.
REBECCA But does it matter at the level of you choosing?
Nothing wrong with doing 'discovery'. Try something new. You might like it.
That's the question. It's not, are you going to have the better life? It's not, are you passively going to be the recipient of the better life…
being passive is bad. Girls should be on top.
REBECCA You could imagine a kind of zombie society,
apparently there is a type of psychosis where the patient believes everybody else has become a robot
though, where people go around having what seem like more options, having what seems like better access to the bundle of goods, but without having any kind of these other concepts you're talking about, like choosing. Is that fair?
It is very unfair. I used to try to explain to Amartya Sen that it was very unfair that he was forced to devour nothing but dog turds as had been proved by Arrow's theorem. Sen denied he was a Bengali economist. He pretended to be a Punjabi lady. That was very unfair of him. I think it's coz iz bleck.
