Thinking Philosophically

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0:00:07.3 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts, I am Trevor Burrus.

0:00:09.4 Aaron Ross Powell: And I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:11.5 Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Michael Huemer, professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and my former philosophy professor for both Metaphysics and Epistemology. He is the author of many books including The Problem of Political Authority, which is the subject of a previous Free Thoughts. His new book is Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy. Welcome back to the show, Mike.

0:00:32.3 Michael Huemer: Thanks, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

0:00:33.5 Trevor Burrus: Why write another introduction to philosophy? There’s a lot out there, so why write another one?

0:00:40.5 Michael Huemer: Yeah, I mean, well, there’s none by me out there…

[chuckle]

0:00:44.3 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. That’s important, yes, that’s…

0:00:46.7 Michael Huemer: That needs to be done. So there’s a lot of philosophy books. Most textbooks are not very well written, partly because the author is sort of talking over people’s heads. And because the author has kind of lost touch with what parts of his subject are difficult and whatever. I’m much clearer than most authors and more organized, and also more amusing. And because… I think that if you publish with a traditional textbook publisher, besides the fact that your book winds up being three times more expensive than it should be, then you have somebody looking over your shoulder and saying, “Oh, you can’t make this joke,” and like, “This is too flippant and this doesn’t sound professional,” or whatever. So if I had a regular publisher, they would say, “I can’t get endorsements from Plato and Aristotle on the back cover,” they just wouldn’t believe that those were genuine endorsements.

0:01:49.6 Aaron Ross Powell: Most of our listeners are not philosophy majors, not philosophers, probably not, at this moment, taking or planning to take a philosophy course. And I’m sometimes struck by how many people tend to question the value of philosophy. Not of like specific, “Let’s talk about libertarian political philosophy,” but just philosophy as a broad category compared to, say, like, “Well, I could be studying history.” Or “I could be studying Economics,” or something that’s real. So for those… For people with that kind of attitude like, what is the value of an introduction to philosophy?

0:02:27.9 Michael Huemer: Yeah. So it kind of depends, but if you’re interested in politics, a lot of philosophy is closely related to political issues. So if you’re interested in political issues, well, you kinda have to know something about moral issues. Because it’s like… That’s the foundation of a lot of people’s political positions. Sometimes epistemology comes up when people are like, “Oh, what’s your justification for that?” And especially when you’re talking about morality, people start wondering about your justification for your beliefs. Like the reason why I thought philosophy was important, like the best thing about philosophy to me is that it causes you to think more clearly. And in my view most people are confused almost all the time and they probably spend their entire lives confused, and they don’t even know it. So they say stuff that makes no sense and they don’t even notice that they did that. It was kind of like… This is an analogy I use, it’s like when you’re dreaming and stuff happens that makes no sense, and you just take it in stride. You just don’t even notice that this dream is not making any sense until you wake up and then you realize, “Wow, that was weird.” Anyway, okay, so that’s like most people and waking up is like after you studied philosophy.

0:03:46.1 Aaron Ross Powell: That’s a big claim, and I can imagine a lot of people being rather skeptical of it because it doesn’t seem to meet their own… All of us have had the experience of confusion, we know what that feels like. And most people don’t go through their lives or don’t often experience something that sounds like confusion and they carry on and we have conversations and we go to work and we go to school, we do all this stuff and we don’t feel delusional or like we’re dreaming. So, what do you mean by being confused or thinking confused things?

0:04:20.3 Michael Huemer: Yeah so I thought of an example. I told somebody one time that I was writing a book about infinity or something, and there was an issue about whether infinity is a number. And the person said, “Isn’t infinity a concept?” So that to me was an example of a very confused concept. A very confused remark. So first, there’s a presumption that in whatever sense infinity is a concept, whatever that means, that numbers aren’t, because otherwise how is that relevant to the issue of whether infinity is a number, okay, but no, it’s not a concept. The concept of infinity is a concept. Infinity isn’t a concept. It’s like, “It’s not a concept of a concept,” but that’s a term that’s very commonly used in a confused way. Yeah, this is another thing, people talk about the nature of ethics.

0:05:19.5 Michael Huemer: A very large number of students have a hard time understanding how different meta-​ethical theories are different from each other. Like a large number of students don’t see the difference between subjectivism and non-​cognitivism and maybe even nihilism. And if you try to tell them what these three are, they confuse them with each other. But, actually, these are incompatible. They’re different forms of denying objective values, but they’re incompatible with each other, and it’s important that they’re different because the objections to them are different. And then somebody responds to an objection to one of these theories by appealing to a different one. And then you try to tell them, “Okay, so you just switched your theory. You just switched from non-​cognitivism to subjectivism.” But if they don’t see that there’s a difference between those, then they’re not going to get the point. So now, if you don’t know what those things are that I was just talking about, then this explanation probably wasn’t very helpful… Okay.

0:06:20.8 Trevor Burrus: Well, you can give a little… Yeah, what non-​cog… What those three things are, and why they’re incompatible.

0:06:27.4 Michael Huemer: The non-​cognitivists think that moral statements do not express propositions, so they’re not true or false. It’s like, “It’s not true or false, that abortion is wrong.”

0:06:38.1 Trevor Burrus: It’s like rooting for a sports team, basically…

0:06:40.0 Michael Huemer: Yeah, abortion is wrong.

0:06:43.4 Trevor Burrus: The Packers are awesome, yeah.

0:06:45.1 Michael Huemer: Yeah, abortion is wrong, is like, “Boo! Abortion.” [chuckle] Okay, so that’s neither true nor false. Okay, and then you raise an objection that says, “Okay, well consider a sentence like, if abortion is wrong, then fetuses are people.” Okay, so that was not expressing an emotion. I didn’t say abortion was wrong, I just said, “If it’s wrong, then it’s something else.” Okay, what does that mean? If boo on abortion, then it’s something else, okay that doesn’t make sense. And then, students will commonly be tempted to say, “Oh, it means if I disapprove of abortion, then fetuses are people,” or something like that.

0:07:25.3 Michael Huemer: Okay, and then you have to point out that, “Okay, so that’s not non-​cognitivism. That is a subjectivist theory.” It’s a subjectivist theory that abortion is wrong means something like I disapprove of abortion. Notice that that’s a proposition that’s either true or false, it could be true as a matter of fact that I disapprove of abortion, whatever. So anyway, okay. But so, if you’re confusing these two ideas with each other, the one idea that it’s neither true nor false and the other idea that it could be true, but it depends upon your attitudes. If you confuse those with each other, then you’re going to sort of like not follow the dialectic.

0:08:00.6 Trevor Burrus: I feel like I’m back in Mike’s class [chuckle], but we had a lot of conversations like this. Why should people try to be rational?

0:08:09.8 Michael Huemer: Oh yeah, so to me, that’s kind of like asking for a reason for doing what you have most reason to do. If you’re not kind of like that, I think that’s what it is, that’s what that question means. The rational thing to do is by definition what you have most reason to do. So I don’t have to give you a reason for doing that, ’cause we’ve already stipulated that that’s what you have most reason to do.

0:08:33.1 Trevor Burrus: Alright. So is it immoral to be irrational?

0:08:36.6 Michael Huemer: Is it immoral? I guess I would say, not necessarily. Okay, so… You’re buying lottery tickets, it’s a waste of money, okay. It’s not immoral, but it’s kind of… It’s slightly irrational. ‘Cause it’s a bad deal.

0:08:56.5 Trevor Burrus: But it can be. There are times when being irrational can be immoral, right?

0:09:00.0 Michael Huemer: Right, yeah. Yeah, so… In my view, there’s a tight connection between morality and rationality. If something is rational, it cannot be immoral, however, I note that I have a… Maybe not the same view of rationality that other people have. So…

0:09:20.6 Aaron Ross Powell: So what is your view of rationality then? What does it mean to be rational versus irrational?

0:09:30.7 Michael Huemer: Yeah, so just… So there’s rational action and there’s rational belief. So rational action is just the action that you have most reason to perform. So this view, I’m pre-​supposing that you can weigh different kinds of reasons. So you have prudential reasons, like from the standpoint of self-​interest and you have moral reasons, and there’s sort of a thing that’s overall most rational to do. So like you have a moral reason to give your money to charity and you have a prudential reason to spend it on yourself. And you can sort of weigh these reasons against each other and decide whether the moral reason is strong enough to sacrifice your interests and vice-​versa.

0:10:13.5 Michael Huemer: And so after you make that weighing, that’s the most rational thing to do. I also think that, that is at least a morally permissible thing. If it’s overall rational, then it has to be morally permissible because morality can’t demand that you be irrational. About rational belief. The rational belief is, it’s the thing of… Well, it’s the doxastic attitude that you have most reason to adopt. So you have reasons for believing something, you have reasons for disbelieving it and maybe reasons to withhold judgment. And the rational attitude is the one that you most reason overall for.

0:10:55.1 Aaron Ross Powell: What I wonder about then is though, if rationality is that whatever it is that you have the most or best reasons to do, lots of people disagree about what we ought to do or have the best reason to do at any given time, and it’s not obvious to me that… All of that disagreement stems from, well, one person’s being rational or the other person’s being irrational, or both people perhaps are being irrational, but rather that we have principled disagreements about what we ought to do or that we have different… We see this, there’s been… Public health has been in the news lately, and one of the things that we see is public health professionals essentially taking a zero risk position on, say, COVID. If there is any risk, then we need to be masking, we need to be locked downed, and so on. And other people pushing…

0:11:54.5 Aaron Ross Powell: And this doesn’t seem to me like this is a disagreement about rationality. It’s a disagreement about we have different risk tolerances, different preferences, different tastes, and then acting upon those means acting in different ways. And those are determining to some extent, what is the best for me at any given time. But it would seem like… Like if rational seems like an all or nothing thing, like you’re either being rational or you’re not, and so then all disagreement to sound very Randian for a second would then look… Would be irrational.

0:12:28.8 Michael Huemer: So two comments. So some things are more rational than others, so you can be slightly irrational or very irrational, etcetera. So it’s not all or nothing, and the other comment is. Yeah, you know… Different people have different reasons for acting and people can have conflicting reasons. So in an obvious sense, like your interest might conflict with mine, and therefore you might have reasons to try to bring something about that I have a reason to try to prevent… Okay, so if we play a chess match, like I want a certain thing to happen and you want a conflicting thing to happen, so… That’s okay. So rational for me to make this move and rational for you to try to trick me into not making it or something like that. Okay, so now about the public health thing, I think some of what’s going on could be that people have different goals and different interests. So maybe if some people are at greater risk of getting COVID than others, so if you’re a very young person, maybe it makes sense to just go out without the mask because maybe you don’t care that much about the old people or whatever [chuckle]

0:13:52.9 Michael Huemer: You should care about old people, okay, but anyway, it’s sort of like, but you should also care about yourself reasonably. So okay, that’s part of what’s going on, but also I think part of what’s going on is a kind of irrationality, where people are kind of switching what they consider to be a good argument based upon ideological considerations or the tribe that they belong to. So somebody gave this example, one of my Facebook friends is giving this example. That earlier he the Facebook friend thought that, “Oh, we should put off giving people second doses of vaccine until we get a first dose to everyone.” Like prioritize getting first doses out, and then a bunch of people were opposed to that… Okay, and then now there’s a question of whether you should hold off giving people third doses until everyone gets the second dose. Okay, so then this person was commenting there, a lot of people who flipped their opinion about this, and what changed… It’s a very similar issue, but what changed was, I don’t know what the status quo is. What the currently existing policy was, people are just biased in favor of.

0:15:12.0 Trevor Burrus: Does the external world exist? And do we have a good reason to believe that it exists in general?

0:15:17.7 Michael Huemer: Yes. [chuckle]

0:15:19.7 Trevor Burrus: What are some of those reasons?

0:15:20.3 Michael Huemer: Yes I…

0:15:20.6 Trevor Burrus: ‘Cause I had a really vivid dream last night. So I’m pretty… I think it might have existed.

0:15:26.8 Michael Huemer: Yeah, you’re talking to part of the external world right now, “Hey, I’m in the external world.” I’m external to you anyway. [chuckle]

0:15:32.4 Trevor Burrus: I guess that’s evidence of something yes.

0:15:36.5 Michael Huemer: And you’re external to me. Oh, yeah so although that’s a little bit funny, there’s also a serious point, which is people sometimes are confused about what the external world is. Or students are. So my mind is external to you, so skepticism about the external world that… That’s not the view that we don’t know about the external world. ‘Cause if you don’t know about the external world, then there’s no we. You don’t know if there are any other people, so anyway, just keep that in mind. And that is of some importance because that reportedly is why Thomas Reid gave up idealism. So Thomas Reid, the 18th century philosopher, apparently he was initially convinced by Bishop Barkley’s view that physical objects don’t exist, there’s only ideas in the mind. Alright, but then when he thought about it a little bit more, he thought, “Oh wait, that means that these other person shaped things that I’m seeing are just ideas in my mind. And when people talk to me, that’s just more ideas in my mind, and so there’s no reason to think that there are any other minds except for maybe God.” And then he thought, “That’s too much. I’m not going there.” [chuckle]

0:16:53.8 Trevor Burrus: So does the fact that they’re are like… The fact there are a lot of people who agree on something, it seems to be one of… We all agree that we’re looking at computers right now, if we were looking at the same wall or the same tree, the fact that we agree, is that good evidence for something being true? Generally speaking.

0:17:13.5 Michael Huemer: Yes. Yeah, that you… So…

0:17:17.0 Trevor Burrus: So therefore God exists ’cause a lot of people believe in God.

0:17:21.8 Michael Huemer: Yeah, so… Okay so question one, the fact that many people believe in God just by itself with no other information, that’s the only thing you know. You just popped out of the womb and somebody told you a lot of people believe that there’s this thing called God. Okay, and you’re a remarkably smart and good reasoning baby, so now should you increase your credence that there is this thing called God, which you know other information about except that a lot of people believe in it. Yes, you should absolutely raise your credence in that you’re a very bad baby if you don’t. [laughter] But second question, is it really powerful evidence for me right now? No, given everything that I know, is it really powerful evidence? No, not really. I think I have some explanations for how it could come about, that there were a lot of mistaken beliefs about that. It’s some evidence, still some evidence. If everybody disbelieved in God, then I should lower my credence relative to right now, I guess. Okay, and why is this true? Well, how can this not be true? How could it not be that people believing something is evidence, that it’s true, and by evidence that is true, it raises the probability. Like when you…

0:18:45.1 Michael Huemer: When you acquire this information, you should increase your degree of credence that the preposition is true. That’s the nature of evidence. How can that not be the case? It would have to be that when human beings form beliefs in general, they’re just like random guessers, no better than a random guesser. And if that was true, we would all be dead, if our beliefs were just like random guesses. And think about anything else, like, “Okay, you heard that there was a traffic jam on the freeway, but you didn’t see it with your own eyes.” Fifty people told you there was a traffic jam. Do you increase your confidence that there was a traffic jam? Yes. Now, people might get confused when you introduce an example of something weird, like 50 people told you that they saw a UFO and you’re like, “Well, I don’t believe in UFOs to begin with.” Should you increase your credence that there was a UFO? Yes.

0:19:43.9 Michael Huemer: Should you raise it to 100%? No. Distinguish these two questions. Should you outright believe that it was definitely true, probably not. But, should you think it’s more likely to be true? Obviously, yes. And like that might be easier to see if you imagine like, and what if, if nobody ever saw a UFO, should you have lower credence. Nobody’s ever seen something that looked like a space alien ship, should you have a lower credence than now? Obviously, yes. Yeah. If there were no UFOs, it would be more likely that nobody would see them.

0:20:22.1 Aaron Ross Powell: I guess it feels like the world is from an evidentiary standpoint, more complicated than that, or at least the way that a lot of us think about evidence or the evidentiary problems that we run into. Aren’t these kind of stark examples of 50 people said they saw a UFO or I don’t think that trees exist, or that kind of thing. It’s more like there are… If we’re… We’re not writing philosophy papers, we’re not trying to come up with these perfectly rational things, we’re trying to get by in life and use philosophy to inform, to help us clarify our thinking and so on, that a lot of the times when we’re dealing with evidence, it is… There are competing evidentiary sources, there are the consensus view looks to be largely right, but there are reasons to think it’s wrong on the margins, but there are potentially different ways it’s wrong on the margins.

0:21:22.8 Michael Huemer: You also have people, there’s… On the left you have the reality-​based community that says, believe in science. Which seems to… They care about scientific evidence, but then that leads them to a lot of questionable views or accepting and rejecting different scientific beliefs based on how they align. On the right, you see this kind of like the rational community, the people who put that they are rational in their Twitter bio often aren’t. And this seems so… How do we use philosophy to navigate, say, that kind of world or a world where we’re encouraged to do our own research, these seem like harder problems of weighing and figuring out not just what counts as good evidence, but what counts as evidence in the first place.

0:22:14.8 Michael Huemer: Yeah, so that’s very general. So, I can’t give very useful advice in general for solving problems where there are controversies. ‘Cause if there’s a controversy, it’s probably complicated and probably requires knowing the specific details of that. I’m gonna comment on the stuff about trusting science, I guess… Yeah, so generally, if there’s a consensus among the experts on something, generally speaking, that is better than… That consensus view is better than the alternative views. Okay. And so, I tried try to put that carefully because very frequently the consensus view is wrong. Like in the History of Science, there have been a lot of consensus theories which were later found to be wrong, and it’s quite likely that a lot of the views that we still have are still wrong. Okay. But nevertheless, they’re better than the other views that people have.

0:23:17.3 Michael Huemer: Like Newtonian physics is, in some epistemic way, is superior to Aristotelian physics, even though they’re both false. So, that in some ways, closer to truth or whatever, it helps you or helps you make more correct predictions. Okay, so I wanna say that. I wanna say also that I think that people kind of pick and choose what experts they want to listen to, and that’s not a good thing, and so I would like people to kind of reflect and see whether where they’re doing that. Alright, so one thing is, people might decide that they like to listen to climate scientists, but they don’t like to listen to economists or vice versa, depending on your political orientation. And that would be based upon not liking what the economists are telling you or what the climate scientists are telling you to suggest that people try to avoid doing that.

0:24:15.5 Trevor Burrus: Probably a good general rule. When it comes to ethics, now this seems… For most people, this seems very different that we talked about the external world and whether or not trees exist and walls and whatever. But people have pretty stark disagreements on ethics, so does that indicate that ethics are a different type of thing, than the things in the external world?

0:24:38.8 Michael Huemer: Yeah, it depends on what you mean different type. They don’t have a different kind of truth, it does indicate that it’s maybe harder to know ethical truths, the greater amount of disagreement. I would point out that this is true about philosophy more generally, there’s a lot of disagreement in all areas of philosophy, including ethics, but also metaphysics and epistemology and meta-​ethics. This is also interesting because somebody is trying to give an argument for anti-​realism, like somebody’s trying to argue that morality isn’t real in some sense where… And then they’re using the argument from disagreement. It’s good to note that a lot of people are gonna disagree with that argument, they’re going to disagree, that disagreement shows that it’s not real, and so if you accept the argument from disagreement, then it cuts against itself because people disagree with it.

0:25:36.9 Michael Huemer: Anyway. Okay. No but… So, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t really ethical truths, it does perhaps mean that they’re harder to know, which does perhaps mean, or it does mean that you should have a lower confidence when you have ethical beliefs that other people disagree with. Not all ethical truths or controversial, some of them are. So, people like to give examples of ethical issues that are much debated, we don’t talk about the ones that are uncontroversial. So, we talk about whether abortion is murder, but we don’t talk about whether murder is murder. We don’t talk about whether Jeffrey Dahmer picking random people on the street and murdering them so he can eat their body parts, we don’t talk about whether that’s wrong, that’s not a topic that comes up in philosophy classes because it’s uncontroversial.

0:26:31.5 Trevor Burrus: But there have been entire societies based on human sacrifice, child sacrifice like large scale murder.

0:26:38.1 Michael Huemer: Yeah.

0:26:38.7 Trevor Burrus: That seems to be the case, it’s not as clear.

0:26:40.5 Michael Huemer: Yeah, there have been many societies where it was common to go to another tribe and attack them, go on raids or have wars with the other tribe. I don’t think there’s any society in which it was accepted to just murder anyone, like you just kill your neighbor, the fellow tribes member, for no reason. Now, you might think, “Oh, so what does that mean that murder is clearly wrong for people in your own society, but not so clearly wrong if you kill people in other societies?” Well, it was less clear to people in primitive societies because they were biased because there’s sort of like a genetically programmed bias against foreigners or people from the out group, and so because of that bias, we sort of didn’t apply the same rights to the out group that we do to the in-​group.

0:27:42.2 Aaron Ross Powell: You said that this disagreement in ethics means that we should maybe less firmly hold some of our beliefs and ethics be less certain about them, but it seems like ethics is an area where we ought to hold pretty firmly if we think we’re right. If I’m in metaphysics, if I think the nature of the universe is X and you think it’s Y, me acting on that is not likely to impact you a whole lot, or if I have scurry beliefs about the existence of cryptids, that doesn’t have much impact, but ethics is about how we treat each other and what’s permissible and our actions in that area can have very profound or ultimate impacts on other people, and so it seems like if I’m pretty… If I think something is ethically right, or I think that what you’re doing is ethically wrong, I ought to hold to that pretty firmly and I ought to try to convince you of that as opposed, this seems like the last area where we should be wishy-​washy.

0:28:50.7 Michael Huemer: No I don’t think… I think that’s false, it seems false. So I want to distinguish two things, one is your degree of confidence in a belief, and the other is how much you care about it; so there’s your emotional attachment or whatever, or you’re a degree of motivation. And so if the ethical belief implies that there’s something extremely bad or something extremely good, then maybe it’s appropriate for you to have strong feelings about that. So that’s different from having a very high degree of confidence. You should not have a very high degree of confidence in ethical beliefs and the fact that there are practical implications only makes it more important to not be over-​confident. Almost everyone has a tendency towards overconfidence, almost no one has the opposite problem. So by overconfidence, I mean they attach a higher probability to the things that they believe, then the evidence really warrants, when they have a belief more confident than it should be, and also it’s harder for them to revise the belief. Most people under-​revise their beliefs like they get contrary evidence and they make less adjustment than they should, almost no one has the opposite problem.

0:30:13.1 Michael Huemer: Okay, and this problem of dogmatism and overconfidence, it leads us away from the truth. And if there are practical implications than the importance, the practical importance of the question makes it all the more important that we not be led away from the truth in the way that we standardly are by our natural biases.

0:30:35.2 Trevor Burrus: So here’s something that a lot of people believe in, based on some of what you’re discussing at least gives evidence to this belief, which is that the state and governments are not just legitimate, but even necessary, but we can start with legitimate, the belief that the state is not legitimate is extremely marginal if we’re just taking a poll. So does that matter when we’re talking about politics.

0:30:58.6 Michael Huemer: Are you calling me marginal?

0:31:00.5 Trevor Burrus: I am, yes I am.

0:31:03.0 Michael Huemer: Yeah, yeah. I’m a fringed political philosopher. Yeah, so in the problem of political authority in that book, in chapter six, I discuss some of those kind of psychological explanations for why people are attached to the authority of the state, why they think the state has authority and why they feel emotionally like they have to obey. So part of the story is, I have an explanation for why people would feel like they have to obey authority figures, even if in fact there wasn’t any authority. There’s number of these factors, but they’re status quo biased, which I think we have excellent evidence for, that is people are biased in favor of whatever is the current way things are done in their society. And you can see this because you can see lots of other societies where people have all kinds of crazy horrible practices, and the people there are like, “Yeah, it seems great. Yeah, we’re doing human sacrifice, forcing gladiators to fight to the death.” And the people at the time are like, “Woo, this is fun!” Okay. And then people today are horrified and… Well, that was the practice at the time, there’s a practice now. So there’s good evidence that people are extremely biased in favor of whatever they see people doing around them, you can’t…

0:32:37.0 Michael Huemer: There’s not an alternative theory where you say, “No, no, the way that things are currently actually done is generally correct.” That can’t be because the way things are currently done has changed a lot and varies in different societies. So it can’t be that in general, however things are done in your society tend to be correct.

0:32:56.5 Trevor Burrus: What’s the different bias and knowledge here though? They know it was more about this, so they tend to believe in it.

0:33:04.8 Michael Huemer: Yeah. Well, yeah, so take the example of having a gladiatorial combat, they know more about that. That’s true, I guess. I mean they know how fun it is to see people dismember each other in front of a crowd, I guess. So if that was the issue. So if the issue was, is it fun to watch? Then maybe the ancient Romans would be the experts on that, but is it wrong to force people to enduring, and kill and torture each other? Even if it’s fun. ‘Cause that’s our view, even if it’s fun to watch, it’s still wrong. Then I don’t see that the Romans have extra expertise.

0:33:49.9 Aaron Ross Powell: Is there a pragmatic angle, not to gladiatorial combat, but to this say the question of political authority in that you can say, “Look, okay, philosophers have mounted very strong arguments against all of the theories of political authority, I.e. The theory that we have like a moral obligation to obey commands from political leaders and so on, and had knocked them all down. And so from a strictly philosophical standpoint, political authority is either groundless or has very shaky foundations. However, truth in that sense is not the only thing that matters. That how we act upon that, what the world looks like matters a lot too, and political institutions are fragile things, societies and civilizations are fragile things. Most attempts to radically change the nature of our institutions have not turned out terribly well. And so you libertarians, you anarchists, you philosophical anarchists, you can make those arguments, but the reason that we should believe in political authority is because not believing in it is dangerous. The radicalism is dangerous, we shouldn’t… We can tinker on the margins, but if we have something that seems stable and seems relatively the liberal institutions of a democratic society seem relatively okay compared to a lot of the alternatives, we should can put our efforts instead into propping those up instead of attacking their moral foundations.”

0:35:43.5 Michael Huemer: Yeah, good so… And I periodically comment that things are going extremely well in the United States compared to most societies. Most societies in the world today and most societies in history. Things are going great actually. So you should… We should be concerned to preserve what’s going well and not totally mess things up. And then there’s this political philosopher like me who comes along with some very radical views, like I’m an anarchocapitalist. And you think, “Yeah, maybe he seems like he’s got good arguments, so maybe we just shouldn’t change anything.” Because things are going great compared to the way they usually go. But this is part of why I suggest… This is what I suggest in my book, The Problem of Political Authority, that we should try to move gradually. So my proposal is not, immediately abolish the government. Like just kill all the government officials and then just see whatever happens. That’s not what I would propose. I propose, well, let’s try outsourcing some of the government’s job. So like, ” Oh, policing, that’s part of the government’s core job. Let’s try outsourcing that.” So let’s try having private security guard companies who’d be hired to patrol neighborhoods instead of the government police. And there could be multiple competing private security companies, so different neighborhoods could choose different companies to patrol their area.

0:37:12.0 Michael Huemer: Okay, let’s try that and just see how it works, if it doesn’t work, then we could go back to the government police, but I think it’s gonna work a lot better than the government police. And then if it works and we just expand it, and then eventually it could be where every place is patrolled by private security instead of government police, and then we don’t need the government police anymore. And I don’t see at what point some big disaster is going to happen. I wanna comment that I think the transition to Anarchocapitalism matters. If the way that you make the transition is by the government just suddenly disappearing and that’s it, and then the next day we have to figure out what to do, that would not go well, especially starting from where we are now, where almost everyone believes that you need a government, so then they would immediately set about trying to create another government. And then some people would set about trying to become the dictator or whatever.

0:38:06.7 Michael Huemer: Okay, but if you imagine this gradual transition where the government is outsourcing its duties, so the alternative institutions are growing at the same time that the government is shrinking, that looks to me… Okay, that looks to me safer. Okay, and then you can do a similar thing with the court system. So you have a court case, you wanna sue somebody, the court could say, “Well, here’s some private arbitrators, here’s a list of private arbitrators in your area, you guys pick one of them, ’cause we don’t want to do this, we have a big backlog of cases, whatever. We don’t have time here, just go to the private arbitrator.” I don’t see any disaster that’s going to happen there. And if that works out okay, you could imagine expanding it to where every case, almost every case could be handled by private arbitrators. And then we’re getting really close to Anarchocapitalism without any big disaster happening.

0:39:00.1 Trevor Burrus: Well, you talked about… You mentioned before that there is a tribalism, there’s a thing in people that has a sort of bias, and it seems like part of this will require a bunch of people to think more like you. But people are bad at thinking more like you as a general rule, as you’ve written about in your book, so are you being kind of Pollyannish about people changing their mind and becoming more like Mike Huemer?

0:39:30.3 Michael Huemer: Yeah, well, when I describe this transition, there could be a number of motivations. So an anarchocapitalist would hear about this and say, “Oh, good, we’re moving towards anarchy. Yeah!” But also my story about the police, outsourcing the police duties, you can easily imagine people who are not necessarily libertarian anarchists thinking this is a good idea. Like all of the Black Lives Matter protesters think, “Yeah, the cops are…

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0:39:57.8 Michael Huemer: “With us too much and whatever, killing too many innocent people, and I don’t hear a lot of stories about private security guards murdering innocent people or using excessive force and whatever, so maybe this would be better.” You could also imagine it from the standpoint of the government officials, because frequently they feel like they have too much to do, they don’t have the resources or whatever. So I mentioned the court system is really backlogged, I bet a lot of courts would be happy to have fewer cases, they’d be happy to outsource their cases to private arbitrators.

0:40:34.7 Michael Huemer: The people involved in disputes would like to go to a private arbitrator. I don’t know why more people don’t, ’cause they can, maybe they just don’t know about it, I don’t know. But then when they see that their dispute gets resolved in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost, they’re gonna be happy about it, so you don’t have to be a libertarian ideologue for a lot of this stuff to make sense.

0:40:58.4 Trevor Burrus: You’ve written… Well, you’ve given a talk, including a TED Talk, which we’ll put in the show notes, but that people are irrational about politics. That may not be striking to some, or it may be, but you think it’s a pretty deep problem, so why is there a problem of irrationality in politics?

0:41:18.2 Michael Huemer: Yeah, so I gave some examples. So at the time, this was shortly after the Iraq War, and I pointed out that, whatever, we killed something like 300,000 people, there are different estimates, I don’t know how many people, but something like 300,000, mostly civilians were killed in the Iraq War, and what problem did this solve that was more… That was bigger than the 300,000 almost all innocent deaths? Bush tried to draw some connection to terrorism, but the terrorism had only killed 3000 people total, but slightly over 3000 people total in the history of the country, the whole history of the country. Anyway, so it seemed like… I don’t know, it didn’t seem like it was going that great. But anyway, but if you’re a conservative, you might have not liked that example. Okay, but anyway, the reason why there’s a lot of irrationality is that when people form their political beliefs, they don’t have much stake in it, so that is, you know that when you form a political belief that’s not actually going to affect your interests. Or, I guess, to be more clear here, the correctness of your political belief is not gonna affect your interests.

0:42:41.3 Michael Huemer: If you form the political belief and it’s false, the fact that it’s false is not gonna make any difference to your interests. Your forming the political belief can affect your interests in the sense that it helps you bond with people that you like, or if you form the wrong political belief and then you happen to accidentally express it, then it causes you to be oppressed, it causes you to get cancelled or fired from your job or whatever, so it affects your personal interests in that way, but the actual truth or falsity of the belief has almost nothing to do with how well it affects your interests, so therefore you don’t have an incentive to be rational. It doesn’t particularly serve your interests to be rational. Maybe you can vote better in the election, but the probability of that making a difference to the outcome is like one in a million, one in 100 million or something like that. So it’s just swamped by the other effects on your personal interests like getting along with other people. And so this is what people do, they form their political beliefs in order to get along with a particular group. They’re like, “Yeah, I like this group, or I like this tribe that I want to affiliate with, so I’m gonna say the things that this tribe says.” And then they use the political beliefs as tools for kind of expressing their affiliation.

0:43:57.6 Michael Huemer: Lots of examples of this, but there’s evidence that people are being irrational, if you just think about it. Some of the evidence is just sort of obvious, if you think about it, like there are a lot of beliefs that tend to go together that have no logical connection. There are even some cases where you have beliefs that you would think the opposite beliefs would go together. Okay, so unrelated beliefs like if you think that fetuses are people, then it’s a lot more likely that you think people have a right to own a gun; these are totally unrelated. And if you think that fetuses are not people, then it’s more likely that you support socialism; these are totally unrelated. And then for an example of the opposite related beliefs, if you think that fetuses have rights, it’s more likely that you don’t think that animals have rights and vice versa, which is quite strange.

0:44:55.0 Michael Huemer: You would think a priori that there would be the reverse correlation, like if you have a more expansive conception of rights, if you think that all sentient beings have rights, then you would think that both animals and fetuses have rights, so you’d be against factory farming, you would also be against abortion, like that makes sense, but that’s the opposite of the correlation that happens, and so that’s some evidence of irrationality. Something else is going on in people’s beliefs besides just thinking about it and trying to figure out the truth.

0:45:26.6 Aaron Ross Powell: You recently had an exchange with Walter Block, who some of our listeners might be familiar with, and there was a line in your reply to him, and this was about… He was critiquing a piece that you had written about vegetarianism and the moral case for vegetarianism, but there was a piece that spoke to a broader issue, I think for libertarians, and where you say, “Many things are extremely important, even if they’re not addressed by ones preferred political ideology, to declare that one does not care about any problem that is not addressed by one’s ideology is simply not a reasonable position, and this is an issue within libertarian philosophy because there’s a connection or maybe not between political philosophy and moral philosophy. And some Libertarians are of the belief that the only thing that we should care about as libertarians is state coercion, specifically state coercion, what actions the state does or does not take, and anything else that people decide to do outside of that particular coercive relationship. It’s not just that libertarian political theory, has nothing to say about it, but that libertarians should not care about it because it’s just consenting adults say… ”

0:46:47.8 Aaron Ross Powell: And you are in this issue, you’re pushing back against that, but can you unpack a bit about that disagreement, and how you think that we as libertarians ought to think about it?

0:47:00.6 Michael Huemer: Yeah, I would point out that not all coercion is state coercion, there could be coercion by non-​state actors, which we’re against, we’re against violating people’s rights, even if you’re not the state. And most libertarians, I think are minimal state libertarians, not anarchists. And so the whole reason why you need a state is to stop other kinds of coercion. And that is relevant to the vegetarianism issue, because the animals are not consenting to be killed and tortured and whatever else, that I don’t know whether they have rights or not, but they’re definitely being maltreated and okay so… But yeah… So if you believe a certain political philosophy, political philosophy sounds better than political ideology, but they’re basically the same thing.

0:47:54.3 Michael Huemer: Okay, you believe this political philosophy, which has this stuff about when is the state allowed to do things, what actions is the state allowed to perform, and then you come up with an issue that’s not addressed by that it doesn’t follow it. It’s not important like, “What’s going on? How could you think that?” And I think that a large part of what’s going on is people do… People talk about politics and engage in political activity, activism, whatever, for entertainment for their own entertainment, they tell themselves the story that they’re doing it to help society or whatever, but periodically, some evidence comes out that reveals that they’re really doing it for their own entertainment, and that they don’t care about whether making the world a better place.

0:48:42.3 Michael Huemer: And this is one of them. When you get an issue where there’s something that’s clearly very bad or there’s clearly a huge problem, but it’s not connected to your particular tribe, it’s not connected to your ideology, or it’s not one of the issues that your tribe and the opposing tribe are conflicting over, and then suddenly you do not care about it. Okay, if that happens, that shows that you never gave a shit about society or the world or whatever, and you’re just doing your own entertainment like trying to be a tribal human, my tribe over the other tribe. But then I think if you realize if that’s the case, then you should feel bad and you should reform yourself.

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0:49:33.3 Aaron Ross Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

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