Elucidations

In this episode, we are joined by Lainie Ross (University of Rochester Medical Center) and (once again!) Christos Lazaridis (UChicago Medicine), this time to talk about the different ways of defining death.In our previous episode with Christos, we talked about death and the vexed history of attempts to define it. Prior to the advent of modern life support technology in the 1950s, it was usually enough to check whether a person had a heartbeat and could breathe to determine whether they were dead. But once machines were invented that could breathe and circulate blood in patients whose lungs or hearts were failing, a new moral conundrum was born: how do you decide whether a medical patient is dead when it is now possible to keep their lungs breathing and their heart beating indefinitely?In this episode, our distinguished guests talk about the actual criteria that physicians use to determine whether a patient is dead, as well as some possible criteria that no one has tried applying but which some doctors think would be more appropriate. Furthermore, Lainie Ross argues that every person has the right to choose which criteria will be used to determine whether they are dead. These two topics interact in interesting ways.For example, I might have a strong preference for my doctor to pronounce me dead only if I have permanently lost all consciousness, even if I can still spontaneously breathe. Although we currently have no good method of objectively measuring whether a patient has permanently lost consciousness, Dr. Ross argues that I have the moral right to sign an agreement stating my preferences. Specifically: the agreement could state that if, in the future, the technology for determining whether someone has permanently lost consciousness gets invented, and, at that time, I have permanently lost consciousness, then I should be declared dead. On the flipside, some patients prefer a stricter criterion, often for religious reasons. Perhaps it is my religious belief that if I am breathing, then I should be considered to be alive. Lainie Ross argues that in that case, I have the moral right to sign an agreement stating that that is the criterion that doctors will use on me, in the event that I lose consciousness but am still able to spontaneously breathe.As of right now, people only have the legal right to sign these types of agrreements in a handful of states in the US. Join us for this episode as Christos Lazaridis and Lainie Ross argue for making this legal right more widespread! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Matt sits down with Christos Lazaridis (University of Chicago Medicine) to chat about what brain death is and whether brain death should count as, like, death death.Modern life support technology really hits its stride in the 1960s, allowing doctors to buy themselves more time to save their patients by connecting them to machines that can assist with breathing, blood oxygenation and/or heart pumping. But the flipside to that incredible technological breakthrough was that the medical community now needed to get more precise about the moment at which a person goes from being alive to being dead. After all, what had previously been a quick window between the two was now, due to life support technology, happening in extreme slow motion. In addition, organ transplanation was becoming more and more commonplace, meaning that it was no longer as simple as saying e.g. ‘I count someone as dead just in case their heart has stopped.’By the early 80s, the United States had settled on a standard definition for when someone counts as dead, which states that a person is dead if they have either permanently lost consciousness or permanently lost the ability to breathe and pump blood with their heart. That criterion makes certain life-saving practices possible; for example, it legally feasible for organ transplantation to begin once a patient has fallen into an irreversible coma, provided they agreed to donate their organs in advance.But should a person really count as dead just because they fell into an irreversible coma? We call that condition ‘brain death’, or sometimes the wordier ‘death by neurological criteria’, and we legally count it as a full death. Critics of the notion of brain death say that it should not count as death, because a person in this condition is still biologically alive. Their argument is that saying a person in this condition is dead is just a story we’re telling ourselves.In this episode, Christos Lazaridis—who is a practicing neurointensivist—argues that even if that is a story we’re telling ourselves, that’s fine, because this is a corner case in which it makes sense for the social/legal status of being dead to come apart from the biological status of being dead. Tune in to hear why he thinks this is the case! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Matt talks to Gabriella Gonzalez about how basic concepts from the branch of math known as abstract algebra can help us simplify our computer programs and organize our thoughts.Algebra. That thing they make us do in school. What was that again? Oh yeah, that’s right; it’s where you get to manipulate equations containing variables. Like, if I have an equation that looks like this:2⋅x = 16Then I can divide both sides by two and get a new version where x stands alone, i.e. solve for x:(2⋅x) / 2 = 16 / 2x = 8If you took algebra in school, you might remember learning a bunch of tricks for pushing parts of equations around to get one of the variables to appear only on one side and thus solve for it. Being able to solve for variables in equations proves useful for lots of things: like, if you can translate a word problem into one of those equations, finding the answer is often as simple as tinkering with the equation in some obvious way.Abstract algebra is somewhat similar in that it also involves manipulating equations containing variables, except the twist is that now you aren’t necessarily manipulating numbers anymore. The variables can stand for something else, and there are more general versions of plus-like, times-like, etc. operations that you can do on these other things. You might be wondering: what on earth could a variable in an equation stand for other than a number? Well, in this episode, Gabriella Gonzalez gives a bunch of examples. You can have equations for cooking recipes, for computer programs, for transactions performed on databases, and for regular expressions. (A regular expression is a special type of computer program for identifying strings that fit a particular pattern and pulling information out of them.)Gonzalez then goes on to argue that the point of all this is to avoid re-inventing the wheel. Often, when you write a computer program to add some numbers, though this isn’t necessariy obvious at the time of writing, you aren’t actually drawing meaningfully on the fact that they’re numbers. If that’s the case, then what you can often do is make your code that adds things abstract so you only have to write your program once, but then you can re-use it on all these different other kinds of entities other than numbers.The overall payoff of all that, according to this month’s distinguished guest, is that by following algebra-driven design, you can keep your code simple and easy to understand, while still having it do fancy things. This is particularly important today, when our software just seems to keep getting fancier and fancier, but the usual ways of accomplishing that goal make it unreliable and well nigh impossible to keep up to date.Join us as Gabriella Gonzalez gives us the tour through various algebraic systems that occur all over the place in computer science, philosophy, and linguistics!Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Matt sits down with Gaurav Vankataraman (Trisk Bio) to talk about how human memory is physically realized.Where do your memories live? In the brain, right? They’re, like, imprinted there somehow? We often think of memories as analogous with recordings, like when you do an audio recording and the air vibrations get translated into an electrical signal which reorients the magnetic particles on some tape. But is that really how it works? Is the brain some tape waiting to get recorded to, or a hard drive waiting to get data written to it? We don’t exactly have definitive answers to those questions, but in this episode, our distinguished guest discusses a line of research into whether memories could be stored outside the brain, in RNA. He then notes that there is also a lot of RNA in the human brain itself, which means that a similar mechanism for storing memories could exist there as well.This research, as it turns out, originated in some rather astonishing scientific work from the 1950s involving planarian flatworms. Planarian flatworms have the extraordinary ability to regenerate: if you cut one in half, each of the two halves can actually grow back into a new worm. At that time, there was some preliminary evidence to suggest that if a planarian flatworm learned something, and you cut it in half, when the half that didn’t have a brain grew back, it still retained what the original worm had learned. What the what? It could remember something even though it had a brand new brain? Those initial studies went through a period of being discredited, but in recent years a number of researchers have been exploring new, more rigorous evidence that something of this nature could be going on. Perhaps the flatworms could actually be storing some of their memories in their RNA or DNA, and perhaps RNA has the ability to preserve some of that information both in and outside of the brain.In this episode, Gaurav Venkataraman argues that the RNA in the brain not responsible for making proteins (called non-coding RNA) has a specific type of mathematical structure that is particularly well-suited for transmitting information both fast and accurately. Not only that, but entities with that kind of structure transmit information more accurately the faster they transmit it. So the fact that RNA in the brain is structurally arranged in the way it is actually makes it a viable candidate for being sort of like the brain’s “software” for storing and manipulating memories. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode, Matt and Joseph sit down with Andrew Sepielli (University of Toronto) to talk about metaethical quietism. His new book on the topic, Pragmatist Quietism, is out now from Oxford University Press. Click here to listen to episode 145 of Elucidations.Metaethical quietism is the view that ethical statements—or anyway, a large portion of the ethical statements we’re usually interested in—can’t be justified or disproved by statements from outside of ethics. There’s something autonomous about the topic of ethics (or rather, about a lot of ethics). Consider the question: in the scenario where a trolley is barreling down the track, on its way to clobber five people, and you have the ability to divert it to the other track where it will only clobber one, should you do so? According to quietists such as our guest, you can’t answer this question by asking metaphysicians or logicians for help. It won’t do to investigate whether moral facts are part of the furniture of the universe, or to study the grammar of words like ought. The only way you can answer a question like that is, well, whatever we usually do to answer ethical questions.Why are philosophers often tempted to think we can turn to metaphysics, logic, or the philosophy of language to help answer ethical questions? Andrew Sepielli thinks it’s because we conflate two different kinds of ethical statements: the statements he calls deep and the statements he calls superficial. A deep statement is one such that, if you believe it, that belief can impact your mental picture of how things are laid out in the world and guide your action. The fancy word for this mental picture of how the world is laid out is non-conceptual representation. A superficial statement is one belief in which does not influence your non-conpceptual representation of the world. The questions that moral philosophers often write about—such as whether one should divert the trolley, or whether utilitarianism is true—are superficial, which is part of why you can only answer them from within ethics. But there are also deep moral questions, such as: will the party we’re thinking of going to be attended by a bunch of jackasses? When you ask that question, you’re deploying moral language—jackass, specifically, so it is definitely a moral question—but you’re also trying to find out which individuals are going to be at the party. And which individuals happen to be at the party is part of the information in your non-conceptual mental map.In this episode, Sepielli argues that keeping track of when we’re having a superficial debate vs. when we’re having a deep debate can make it seem less mysterious how ethics could be its own autonomous area of inquiry. Tune in to see why he thinks this is the case! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode, Matt talks to Christopher Beem (Penn State University) about how we can cultivate those skills that conduce to having a functioning democracy. His book on the topic, The Seven Democratic Virtues, is out now from Penn State University Press.The storming of the US Capitol Building in 2021 was an eyebrow-raising event, to say the least. It prompted historians, political scientists, and political philosophers to ask whether deep down, everything was going okay with our democratic system. Was this event some kind of sign that the voting process was under unusual strain? Was it time to start thinking about measures we can take to try to support and maintain it?Our guest says yes: that time is upon us. In light of evidence from evolutionary psychology that natural selection imbued us all with an instinct for tribalism, he argues that there are pretty strong causal forces working to congeal us into increasingly disjoint political camps. If we don’t do anything about it, members of these communities may one day no longer be willing to vote in the same elections. But what are we supposed to do about it? Although no one simple trick is likely to work, Beem argues that there are personal moral virtues that we can all work on developing. Democracy doesn’t just function by default; we have to actively work on ourselves in order to make it function. It’s not like we wave a magic wand, follow a couple simple steps and then we’re “done”. Rather, it’s always going to be an ongoing process to keep this crazy thing afloat.Tune in to hear Christopher Beem’s thoughts about what these virtues are and how exemplifying them can get our democracy back into whack! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode, Matt Teichman talks to Mark Linsenmayer about alternative models of education. Mark is creator and host of the Partially Examined Life, Nakedly Examined Music, Pretty Much Pop, and Philosophy vs. Improv podcasts. He is also the author of the recent book, Philosophy For Teens.There’s going to college and there’s listening to podcasts. Both can give you a way to learn new things, so in that general sense, both can count as forms of education. Going to college has advantages over listening to podcasts when it comes to learning—a college class can kick off a feedback loop where you’re given work to do, then you’re given one-on-one feedback on that work, then you do more work, and so on. In the best college classes, there’s a dynamic interplay between the state of your understanding and what happens next in the lesson. That means that at least for people who end up connecting with the college experience—not necessarily everyone, but some significant number of people—being in college has a certain intensity to it. It feels like you’re gaining understanding at a more concentrated dose.That said, though, in addition to these upsides, there is a downside to college, which is that it ends! The learning is nice and concentrated, but it’s also relatively short compared to listening to podcasts, which you can do for way more than just four years—theoretically, it’ll be possible for as long as the technology exists. (And it’s showing no signs of ever going away.) Sure, people can’t just go to college forever. If literally every single person went to college for their entire lives and no one ever did any of the work that makes society function, it wouldn’t be clear how we’d keep the lights on, run hospitals, create enough food for everyone to eat, build houses for everyone to live in, etc. At the same time, a lot of college students have the joyous experience of having their intellectual horizon expanded for four years, only to get suddenly thrust into a demanding work environment upon graduation that may not afford time for all that. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to embark upon your career while not giving up on exploratory learning? At least not entirely?This is where podcasts come in, according to our guest. They let you continue to explore new topics with a more free-form, lower-stakes structure. Maybe you don’t know whether you want to know more about something yet, but you suspect you might, and that’s enough. The fact that listening to a podcast doesn’t have to end means you can do it at your own pace, and more fundamentally, that you won’t suddenly go from having it to not having it anymore—the way it always seems to happen with formal education.Tune in to hear Mark Linsenmayer explain the kind of experience he seeks to foster in his listeners by way of four (!!) different podcasts! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Elucidations, Matt sits down with Emily Dupree to learn about whether it’s rational or irrational to try to seek revenge.As a culture, we kind can’t decide what we think about revenge. Out of one side of our mouths, we talk a big game about letting bygones be bygones, about how revenge and retaliation lead to cycles of violence, and about how nothing good can really come of getting back at people. But acts of revenge, where clearly warranted, also have a visceral moral appeal that it would be absurd to deny. If we didn’t think there were at least some situations in which a person ought to get their comeuppance, then there wouldn’t be so many heroic adventure movies centered around the protagonist’s quest for revenge. When the hero gets back at the villain, it just feels right, like the movie needs to end here and we can all go home; and no amount of pedantic, post-hoc reasoning can ever make that feeling go away.Solving that dilemma is hard, but as a way of working up to it, our distinguished guest decides to tackle a slightly different question. Not: can seeking revenge ever be the right thing to do—but: can seeking revenge ever be a rational thing to do. Traditionally, most philosophers have answered that question in the negative. Calling it irrational means that it’s senseless and unintelligible, like anyone who does it is undergoing a (possibly temporary) lapse in their basic mental faculties. The reason most philosophers think that it’s irrational to take revenge is that there’s no way to undo the wrong that was done to you in the past. If Person A did something truly horrible to Person B, that thing doesn’t get undone when Person B does a new horrible thing to Person A. And if that’s the case, why do it? Doing it is all cost and no benefit.In this episode, Emily Dupree argues that in fact, it can be rational to take revenge. How come? It isn’t all cost and no benefit, because in some cases, successfully taking revenge can lead to a unique benefit: namely, the restoration of the vengeance seeker’s moral personhood. For the unique benefit to come, certain background conditions have to hold: the original harm has to have been genuinely morally wrong, it has to have been as egregious as it can be (so it can’t be minor/inconsequential), it has to have taken place under conditions of the political state failing, and it has to have undermined the vengeance seeker’s moral personhood. In that case, it is possible for an act of vengeance to be intelligible as an attempt on the part of the vengeance seeker to get their moral personhood back. Note that our guest isn’t saying the vengeance seeker is right to seek vengeance in these circumstances. The view is just that seeking vengeance under these circumstances can be comprehensible, rather than just bonkers.Tune in to hear our guest discuss some historical examples of revenge that we can comprehend!Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This time around, Matt sits down with Rob Goodman to talk about political eloquence. Goodman is the author of a new book on this topic called Words on Fire, which you can pick up a copy of wherever you like to get books. Can you think of the last time you saw someone give a rousing speech? They step up to the podium with throngs of onlookers staring at them. Somehow, rather than nervously scampering offstage or melting into a puddle, they speak off the cuff in a way that transfixes everyone listening. Their words feel fresh, sincere, and yet somehow also perfect, like a movie star nailing their big scene on the first take. You’d think that someone speaking from the heart would falter or stumble the way the rest of us do, but against all odds, this feels both maximally authentic and maximally polished.What is it that makes a speaker compelling to listen to? Rob Goodman thinks that in order to understand what eloquence is, we need to look not just at the person up on stage and how they’re talking, but how the people in the audience are responding, and how the speaker is responding to their responses, and how they’re responding to the responses to their responses, and so on, ad infinitum. What makes eloquence happen isn’t really individual speakers talking in vacuum, so much as it is groups of people conversing together. Or at least that’s his idea. Eloquence isn’t just one person speaking skillfully; it’s several people conversing skillfully.In this episode, our distinguished guest also argues that when a public speech goes well, it goes well because both the person speaking and the people listening are taking some risks. The person speaking is sort of on the spot, risking embarrassment, and the people listening might have to rethink their prior beliefs, which takes a lot of work, at least assuming they make an effort to live by their beliefs. When a speech does what it’s supposed to, these risks are shared between all parties, rather than farmed off onto just one. But when the speaker tries to give the appearance of taking risks without actually doing so, you end up with the audience shouldering 100% of the burden, and the exchange ends up somewhat dysfunctional. This, argues our guest, is what happens when politicians go to great lengths to control or sanitize the environment in which they speak, so that no matter what, they don’t embarrass themselves. Sort of like riding a roller coaster with a safety bar.Tune in to hear more about what makes for a great speech!Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Intro philosophy classes often get stuck in a rut. Some philosophy classes go through a list of old dead people and try to understand excerpts from some of their most influential writings, over the course of a semester. Could be something like: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche. Other types of intro classes go through a list of topics that contemporary philosophers feel are canonical and have students read papers on those topics. Could be something like: the problem of evil, the mind-body problem, arguments for the existence (or non-existence) of God, the is/ought distinction, and external world skepticism. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that type of class per se—I’d bet a lot of listeners tune into Elucidations precisely because of a kickass class they took on those lines. But sometimes, an instructor will quickly throw a syllabus like that together just out of a general feeling that that’s what you’re supposed to do. Not because the syllabus consists of material that they personally feel excited about. When that happens, what we often end up with is a room full of people who kinda don’t know what they’re doing there, including both the teacher and the students.This month’s Elucidations guests have a different approach. Their first-year students come from all different backgrounds and majors, and when they walk in, Sullivan and Blaschko immediately ask them: what are you planning to do with your life? Why? What do you hope to get out of it? What is it that makes this plan superior to others? This format still gives the usual suspects like Aristotle, Mill, etc. a seat at the table, but now they’re brought in specifically to help students figure out what they’re going to do when they graduate. Part of what makes this work is that Sullivan and Blaschko are completely open about sharing their own life stories, including big decisions from their past and the reasoning that went into them.With these background conditions in place, the class turns into a vibrant debate about how to make a future for yourself, thus bringing philosophy back into contact with its original mission from 2500 years ago in ancient Athens. Namely: to give everyone the skills they need to live a good life, to understand what makes the life they’re living good, and to define what a good life is going to look like for them personally, as opposed to for other people.Their course at The University of Notre Dame, God and the Good Life, has taken the higher education world by storm, and in order to bring some of what they’re up to to a bigger audience, they have adapted it into a new book from Penguin Press, called The Good Life Method. Tune into this month’s episode to learn all about how to live your best life!Further ReadingIf you’re interested in getting a glimpse of the book, you can look at excerpts from it here:The Good Life Method, Meghan Sullivan and Paul BlashckoYou can also take a look at the authors' personal website, which contain links to many of their writings on this and other topics:Meghan SullivanPaul BlaschkoHappy reading!Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This month, Jessica Tizzard (University of Tuebingen) makes her second appearance on Elucidations to talk to Matt about pregnancy.Human pregnancy is weird. Try talking to a reproductive endochrinologist about it, and you’ll soon find that there’s a lot we don’t really understand about it even at the scientific level. But even when it comes to thinking about pregnancy at the commonsense reasoning level, puzzles begin popping up the second you start trying to think about it systematically. Like, consider the commonsense idea that a fetus is ‘inside’ the person who is pregant with it. They clearly are, in the sense that they aren’t out and about in the world the way a marsupial fetus is. But if you think about how containment and interiority are defined mathematically, there’s also a sense in which the fetus can’t literally be inside the womb, because in order for one thing to be inside another they have to be physically disconnected.In this episode, Jessica Tizzard argues that our commonsense thinking about pregnancy is dominated by ‘container’ metaphors: i.e. we think about a fetus inside a womb the way we think about a cookie inside a jar. However, she thinks that ‘parthood’ analogies are often an equally good fit for how a fetus relates to the person pregnant with it. That is, there are also biological analogies you could draw between a fetus and a body part: a body part is seamlessly physically connected to the body it’s a part of, and a body part is subject the same organism-level system of homeostatic regulation that the rest of the body is.The next step is to start thinking about how these observations ramify morally. Can acknowledging that the ‘parthood’ way of thinking is at least as biologically accurate as the ‘container’ way of thinking help shed light on what kinds of duties a pregnant person has to their as-yet unborn fetus? Join Matt and Jessica as they dive right into these thorny but important questions!Further ReadingOur distinguished guest recommends the following literature on pregnancy, which she draws on heavily in her own work:‘Lady Parts’, Elselijn Kingma‘Were You a Part of Your Mother?’, Elselijn Kingma‘9 Months’, Elselijn Kingma‘Neonatal Incubator or Artifical Womb?’, Elselijn Kingma and Suki Finn‘Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate’, Margaret Olivia LittleHappy reading!Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This month, Toby Buckle, host of the Political Philosophy Podcast, returns to talk about John Stuart Mill’s liberty principle! (Also sometimes called the ‘harm principle’.) The occasion for the episode is the recent release of Toby’s cool new book, What is Freedom?, which is out now from Oxford University Press. Get it while it’s hot!John Stuart Mill is probably one of the most influential intellectuals of the 19th century, having penned treatises on markets, logic, feminism, utilitarianism, and freedom of speech that people continue to pick up and read today. In this episode, we talk about how he had one foot in the free market-oriented tradition of liberalism and another in the more social justice-oriented type of liberalism, how he was raised under the world’s most ambitious parenting/education regime, and how he had a lifelong collaboration with Harriet Taylor. We also introduce what gets called his ‘liberty princple’.The idea behind the liberty principle is that we want as much freedom for each person as possible: they should have the ability to set their own agenda and carry it out. But we also need to limit it somewhat, because if everyone was completely unconstrained in how they set their agenda and carried it out, they’d interfere with each other. We’d have one person’s freedom detracting from other people’s freedom. So in order to achieve the perfect equilibrium we want, the thing to do is aim for sort of a greatest lower bound: every person should be allowed to do whatever they want for whatever reason they want, only stopping shy once they reach the point where doing whatever they want would harm another person. It might seem like an obvious principle to us now, but arguably that’s because we’re all living in the shadow of Mill!Part of the background context for this principle is a worry about paternalism. There’s a natural tendency for Person A to prevent Person B from doing what they want because Person A thinks it’s obvious that what Person B wants to do right now is harmful to them. The liberty principle tells us that that’s not a good reason to have laws prohibiting some course of action. We should only have a law prohibiting some course of action if allowing that course of action would interfere with other people’s freedom. That way, Mill argued, we keep the decision about whether to pass a law prohibiting something grounded in empirical facts about what would actually happen if it were passed. He also wanted to emphasize that each person has the right to be their own arbiter of what kinds of risk they will assume.I hope you enjoy our discussion! It was a fun one.Further ReadingIf you’d like to hear more along the lines of what Toby and I discuss in this episode, you can do no better than to take a look at Mill’s exquisite On Liberty, which you can get for free here:https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34901And if you missed the link up at the top, definitely check out Toby’s edited volume, which gathers together a number of the interviews from his own podcast. The overarching theme is what freedom is and what it can be.What is Freedom?: Conversations with Historians, Philosophers, and Activists, Toby BuckleHappy reading!Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This month, I talk to Bryan Caplan (George Mason University) about what a world without immigration restrictions could look like. The work discussed in this episode comes out of Bryan’s incredible non-fiction graphic novel, Open Borders, which I highly recommend checking out. Don’t let the comic-book-iness of it fool you; it is 100% accessible and entertaining, but it is also written at the level of detail you’d normally expect to see in a peer-reviewed research paper.One basic fact about the world today is that it’s kind of a pain to move from country to country. You can maybe pull it off if you’ve already landed a fancy job where you want to move and if you’re coming from a first-world country, but even then, there are more complications than you might think: work visas, sponsorships, visa renewal, permanent residency, possible eventual citizenship. Basically just a ton of red tape. And if you’re coming from a third-world country, forget it: you typically either have to be a political refugee or enter a lottery that leaves you with a vanishingly small chance of getting in. So although it is technically possible to immigrate, assuming that planets are aligned, the fact remains that in most situations, there are strong legal pressures locking us into whatever country we live in right now. Bryan Caplan thinks that we should essentially just eliminate the bureaucratic machine that makes it so difficult to live wherever you please. Sure, there can still be customs, and nation states, and basic security checks—but other than that, make it as easy as possible for everyone to move around.Let’s take the US as an example. One obvious benefit of opening up our borders is humanitarian: anyone living in poverty would be able to come here and with no difficulty whatsoever be able to start earning ten times as much money as they could back home. But far beyond that, there is a growing body of research within economics which suggests that having a large influx of formerly poor, newly productive people will lead to a boost in our economy. So everybody wins. And it isn’t just any old boost; it’s a massive boost. If these models are correct, everybody wins big time.Tune in to hear our guest run through some of the empirical evidence for this prediction and find out why, according to him, the supposed dangers of an open boders policy are greatly exaggerated!Further ReadingIf you’re curious to learn more about the arguments discussed in this episode, you can do no better than to turn to the book:Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, Bryan Caplan and Zach WeinersmithYou might also enjoy Bryan’s blog post at Econlib running through the many topics the book covers.Finally, our distinguished guest recommends the following paper by Michael Clemens, which was part of the inspiration for his work on open borders:‘Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?', Michael A. ClemensHappy reading! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This month, Yuezhen Li and I sit down with Christian Miller (Wake Forest University) to talk about how to be virtuous. Also known as how to be good.‘Virtue’ is sort of an old-timey word. But the concept is still alive and well today, even though we tend to use different words for it. The idea behind a virtue is: there’s such a thing as being a good person and doing good things, and that there are different ways of being a good person and doing good things. For example, you can be good in the sense that you’re honest, or you can be good in the sense that you’re brave, and you can definitely be one of those things without being the other. In philosophy, the name we give to character traits like being honest or brave is ‘virtues’.We talk a big game about being great people. Maybe I love to tell my friends about how I donated money to a charitable cause, or how I forgive people who did bad things when they apologize, or how I like to help people when they’re in trouble, or whatever. Blah blah blah. Christian Miller wants to cut through the all the talk and find out how virtuous we actually are, as a whole. What does the empirical evidence from psychology suggest? In his book, The Character Gap, Christian Miller finds that we are, on the whole, a mixed bag. On average, we aren’t particularly good people, which is maybe a bit of a bummer. But on the plus side, we also aren’t particularly bad people. We’re all sorta meh, in the middle. And there is a full range of variation in the population, with small numbers of extraordinarily good people and small numbers extraordinarily bad people at each of the tails.What should we do about all this? I guess all you ever can do is follow your bliss. But the fact is that most of us want to think of ourselves as good, regardless of how good we actually are, so why not try to be our best selves? Join us for this episode, as Christian Miller discusses some strategies we can employ to nudge ourselves in the direction of being a bit more honest, or a bit more brave, or a bit more whatever we want to be.Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This month, Charlie Wiland and I sit down with Sara Protasi to talk about envy. Which she just came out with a whole book about! Awesome. Click here to download episode 135 of Elucidations.You might think that it’s pretty clear what envy is. Isn’t envy just when someone else has something you want, you don’t have it, and that makes you feel annoyed? Well, kind of—but there’s a little more to it. For example, you have to view yourself as similar to the other person in the relevant respect; as in contention for the same resources. If I have no ambition to get promoted into upper-level management, I’m not in a position to get envious when that happens to someone else. Another subtlety is that if you look at how we use the word ‘envy’, we often use it interchangeably with other words like ‘jealousy’ or ‘resentment’. And although the everyday meanings of these terms are probably at least a little bit fluid, there are sharp distinctions between different related emotional reactions that it is useful to draw.In the context of the academic literature in psychology and philosophy, envy is an amoral emotion, which means that it isn’t connected up with feelings of who truly deserves what. It’s just a feeling that you want the envied thing no matter what, and you aren’t really thinking about who deserves it. One test that Sara Protasi proposes for differentiating between envy and resentment is the following. Say you have sort of an angry feeling about your lack of something that another person has, and you want to figure out whether it’s envy or resentment. What you should do is ask yourself: if the roles were reversed, and I had the desired thing while someone who really deserved it didn’t, would I be indignant on that other person’s behalf? Or would I just think: no problem, I’ve got everything I need? If you would be indignant in that scenario, then what you’re feeling is resentment. If you wouldn’t, then what you’re feeling is envy.Sara Protasi also advances the adventurous claim that some forms of envy can actually be good. If I find that a friend has some quality I wish I had, and that realization spurs me to self-improve in some way so that I can bring myself up to their level, then I’m feeling what Protasi calls emulative envy.Join us as we get to the bottom of what kinds of envy are, when they’re good, when they’re bad, and why! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This month, Josh Kaufman and I talk to Claire Kirwin about whether things are objectively good or bad, or whether it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Professor Kirwin is a fan of peanut butter cup ice cream, and Josh and I are fans of mint chocolate chip. Is there an objective fact of the matter about whether either is good, or whether one is better than the other? Or are we all just expressing our preferences, i.e. doing nothing more than providing information about ourselves? Can goodness be ‘in’ ice cream, or is it just ‘in’ the person eating it? If we think peanut butter cup ice cream can be objectively good, is that somehow disrespectful to people who prefer something else? Does everyone have a moral right to have their ice cream preferences respected by others? The example may be somewhat frivolous, but it ties into lots of similar questions that many of us think of as more weighty, like whether classical music can be objectively great/terrible, or whether a given behavior can be morally objectively great/terrible.Value realism is a catch-all expression for the belief that all of these things are objectively in the objects themselves. Peanut butter cup ice cream deliciousness is in the ice cream itself, not in the person experiencing it, and classical music greatness is in the music itself, not in the audience member listening to it at Carnegie Hall. Claire Kirwin espouses value realism across all of these cases, but we focus on ice cream in this episode because, uh, hopefully it’s a little less of a hot button thing than some other topics. We’d like to be able to talk about it without raising an undue amount of ire.Kirwin’s two main ideas are as follows. First, you might wonder how the heck there could even be some sort of objective deliciousness in ice cream itself. Doesn’t everyone disagree about that? Her general line of response is that there can be experts in the flavor of ice cream, and if there can be experts in the flavor of ice cream, then there must be something about ice cream that they’re especially good at picking up. Maybe you’re a master chef, or maybe you’re a food critic, or maybe you’ve just eaten more ice cream than most people. Whatever. There are lots of different ways of being an expert. The point is that if you understand a lot about ice cream it can sensitize you to little details in its flavor that other people haven’t been trained to notice.Her follow-up idea is quite interesting. She argues that when one person prefers mint chocolate chip ice cream and another prefers peanut butter cup ice cream, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the two people disagree. It could very well be that peanut butter cup ice cream is objectively good, and mint chocolate chip ice cream is also objectively good. It’s just that one person only has the expertise required to discern the tastiness of the one flavor, and the other person only has the expertise required to discern the tastiness of the other flavor. So saying that some flavor you have expertise in is objectively good is actually potentially remaining neutral about other flavors—at least the ones you feel like you don’t have a good grip on.Join the three of us as we entertain a peaceful solution to the ice cream wars!Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This month, Agnes Callard and I talk to Aristotle about his philosophy, including his work on physics, biology, and ethics. Featuring an introduction by our awesome intern, Noadia Steinmetz-Silber! Click here to download Episode 133 of Elucidations.Not everyone is familiar with Aristotle’s work today, but the case could be made that science, political theory, logic, ethics, and philosophy exist in their current form largely due to the precedent he set. That said, in this episode, Aristotle opens by telling us a little about how the foundational assumptions made by a number of today’s scientists and philosophers differ from his. One distinctive feature of his work—both as compared to today’s intellectuals and as compared to his peers in 4th century B.C. Athens—was how his philosophy was meant to accommodate the possibility of different types of phenomena requiring totally different types of theoretical explanation.Today, this is reflected in the fact that we have different departments for different sciences in universities. Like, we don’t have a ‘science’ department. We have a physics department that aims to explain the behavior of physical matter and energy, a biology department that aims to explain the behavior of living organisms, a chemistry department that aims to explain the behavior of chemical compounds, a psychology department that aims to explain the behavior of minds, an economics department that aims to explain the behavior of markets, and so on. Could all of these things be reduced to one fundamental science? Maybe, maybe not. It’s possible that there’s a way of, for example, reducing all of biology to physics, but if there is, we haven’t figured it out yet. Aristotle’s main thought here is that that’s fine. If we have to have separate scientific fields for physical matter and biological organisms, that isn’t necessarily a failure on the part of the hard sciences—it could just be that different types of entities in the world need different types of explanations.Aristotle then observes that if you’re okay with the idea that there could be different types of phenomena that need to be explained in different ways, that goes along with believing that things can be created and destroyed. How come? Well, at the level of common sense, you and I would say that when a dog is born, the universe now has a new thing in it: this dog. But if you’re one of these ‘nothing exists other than fundamental physical particles’ people, you think that nothing is ever created or destroyed. It’s just that the atoms—or maybe the quarks and leptons—are just rearranging themselves, and the nickname we give that at the macroscopic level is that ‘a dog came into existence’. One of the main tasks that Aristotle set for himself was explaining how it makes sense to take talk of things being created and destroyed literally, at face value.Join us as we discuss the ancient Greek perspective on causality, matter, biology, physics, and whether or not people have a purpose!Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This month, we sit down with Rebecca Valentine (co-founder of Queerious Labs) to talk about anarchism, feminism, tech culture, and creative hacking. Hack this, hack that. What is a hacker, anyway? In pop culture, it’s common to use the term ‘hacker’ as a synonym for ‘cybercriminal’—that is, a person who engages in illegal activity over a computer network, usually involving gaining access to something they shouldn’t. But if you’ve ever spent any time in the tech community, you’ll know that there, the term is used in a very different way. It’s complicated to define precisely, but generally, ‘hacking’ involves taking apart a ready-made product in an exploratory way, whether to understand how it works, or to put it back together in a different, more customized way.We live in a world of mass-produced artifacts, each of which is manufactured in bulk to serve a specific purpose. But despite that fact, we are all individual people, many of whom want different things out of their artifacts. For example, maybe I have a car and want to give it my own paint job that it wouldn’t have gotten in the factory. Or maybe I have a handbag and would like to embroider a cool pattern on it. Those are simple examples, but our guest stresses that hacking often involves going further and subverting the original intentions behind the thing being hacked. For instance, there are people who have managed to get Alexa and Siri to talk to one another, each device responding in speech the way it would respond to a person. Neither was designed to talk to another device in English—rather, each was designed to provide a voice interface to a single human owner. The result can be pretty bizarre and interesting to listen to!In this episode, Valentine discusses why she founded Queerious Labs, a public nonprofit whose purpose is to encourage these sorts of tinker-y explorations. Most other spaces of this kind tend to be dominated by men, especially straight cisgender men, and often that can have the effect of alienating people who aren’t men, or who aren’t straight, or who aren’t cisgender. In addition, Queerious Labs is intended to be a friendly environment for people with socialist, anarchist, and feminist backgrounds. In the course of laying out how all those things hang together, we have the chance to dig in a wide range of topics, including political power, bottom-up vs. top-down organizational structures, mass culture, the patriarchy, natural language, theory vs. anti-theory, and how gender roles are in flux across time and history. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This month, Greg Salmieri (University of Texas at Austin) returns for his third appearance on Elucidations, this time to talk about doing right by yourself.What was the last thing you did? The last thing I did was pull a shot of espresso. I wouldn’t say I made coffee as an end in itself, even though I love the taste of the roast I just used. If I had to tell you the main reason I made a coffee, it was in order to speed along my transformation from groggy podcast host to awake podcast host. But why do that? Hmm. I guess I wanted to wake up so that I could start writing this blog post, pay a couple bills, and put together a cool new IKEA lamp? But why pay a couple bills or put together a new IKEA lamp? So that I can continue to live in my apartment, be able to see things in it, and so on, maybe? Plato and Aristotle were interested in these ‘but what are you doing XYZ in order to accomplish?’ type questions, and they had the idea that if you keep re-asking the question every time you come up with answer, eventually you’ll get to something that is the ultimate reason you’re doing everything for. Once you get there, there won’t be any further justification for anything you do.‘Ethical egoism’ is a nickname that philosophers give to the idea that being a good person means that everything you do, ultimately, at the end of the day, you do in order to benefit yourself.Note that there’s already a lot of subtlety in this idea as we’ve defined it. For example, if you’re deceived about what’s good for you, and the thing you think is good for you is actually bad for you, then if you do everything you do in order to bring that about, you don’t count as a good person. Maybe I think that fame will be great for me, because of all the money, power, and attention that comes with it. But in a few years, once I actually become world famous, I realize it’s actually pretty miserable to be hounded by paparazzi, speculated about in the tabloids, and subjected to intense scrutiny every time I make a comment about anything. Once that happens, I might decide the whole get famous plan was misbegotten, longing for the days before I was a celebrity. So one point of subtlety is that what’s good or bad for a person can be complicated to determine—there are lots of cases where you can make a mistake about what’s really good for you.A second point of subtlety is that how your everyday behavior corresponds to what you’re ultimately doing everything for can be complex. Maybe you’ve adopted a monkish lifestyle, sacrificing the day to day comforts we take for granted so that you can help as many other people as possible, volunteering, donating to charities, and so forth. An ethical egoist would say that if you’re ultimately doing all those things because of the deep, persistent, long-term satisfaction it brings you—because of how it enriches your life to the fullest possible extent, then that counts as being a good person. So it’s not like commonly-held stereotypes about what selfishness is necessarily line up with what ethical egoists recommend.Due to those two factors, there’s a lot of wiggle room in what concrete behaviors can count as acting in your self-interest, and different behaviors are going to count as self-interested for different people, because different people often have fundamentally different needs and abilities. And I would say that’s what makes it especially interesting to think about whether ethical egoists have it right.Join us this month as our esteemed guest defends the viability of ethical egoism! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This month, Long Dang and I sit down to talk to Jessica Tizzard (University of Connecticut, Storrs) about weakness of the will.You’re at a party hosted by a close friend. It’s been three hours since you got there, and the evening thus far has been chock full of scintillating conversation, a fun round of Charades followed by Assassins, first rate cocktails, and a dessert to die for. You’ve just now been invited to play one of your favorite games, which usually takes about 90 minutes to complete—when out of nowhere, the onset of a yawn yanks you back into reality. Suddenly, you remember you’d promised yourself that you weren’t going to stay out late, because you’ve got to get up early tomorrow for an important meeting. You realize that now is the time to go home and get a good night’s sleep. And yet, the allure of the game pulls you in. Against your better judgment, you play the game deep into the night, future consequences be damned.Since the time of the ancient Greeks, some of the sharpest thinkers in philosophy have tried to figure out what is happening in that scenario. Obviously, we frequently decide that X is the best course of action, and yet our willpower falters and we decide to do Y, even though we know full well that doing Y is counterproductive or self-destructive. But why? In what world does that make any logical sense? Surely, if you decided that X was the thing to do, the natural next move is to do X. Not do the thing you convinced yourself was going to be bad for you. Right?The trouble is that every obvious answer to this puzzle feels unsatisfactory. You could be like: well if I did Y, then I must have really decided Y was best. But if that’s the case, why do you feel so terrible when you do it? Why do you feel guilty staying at the party until deep into the night, if you’ve supposedly decided that staying at the party is for the best? Taking that stance is effectively saying: no one ever has a crisis of willpower. Whenever you do anything, that is definitive proof that you believed it was the best possible thing to do. But insisting that everyone always has the willpower to do everything they think they should just seems to fly in the face of what we know about the human experience.Another option might be to say: well, ok, I did decide that X was the best thing to do, but when the moment to suck it up and actually do X came, I was overcome with desire. The feeling of pleasure at the prospect of partying hard swept over me and signal jammed my rational faculty, blocking me from doing what I knew I should. So I stayed, and had to suffer the consequences the next morning. But then that feels unsatisfactory as well, because if I really was overcome by the pleasure instinct, blocked from doing what I thought I should do, then what I did was really involuntary. Like a muscle spasm. Or a brain tumor that made me do it. That just seems wrong: clearly, in these types of situations, I actively chose to e.g. stay at the party and suffer the consequences. Staying at the party didn’t just happen to me, like a headache.Jessica Tizzard thinks that the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant offered an interesting and novel way to understand what’s going on in these moments when you’re weak-willed. Step one in his approach is to take cases like the one described above and assimilate them all to what is often thought of as a different situation: the moral dilemma. A moral dilemma, as standardly construed, is a situation where you really can’t decide which of several options is the best to take. The idea here is that what look like situations where you knew you should do X but instead did Y are often, upon closer examination, really situations where you genuinely couldn’t tell which of those two things you should do. Sometimes, perhaps, when I thought I was having a crisis of willpower, I was in fact just torn and couldn’t decide.Number two in Immanuel Kant’s bag of tricks is to accept a version of the ‘I wanted to go home, but the desire to stay swept over me and made me stay at the party’ explanation, with one key difference: namely, he has a different take on what a desire is. Maybe a desire isn’t some physical pleasure sensation seizing control of your body like a puppet and forcing you to do something other than what you really want to do. Maybe a desire is really more like another set of factors to consider in your reasoning—it may come with a feeling, and present itself to you with a certain urgency, but really what it is is a set of reasons that you’re weighing up like any other. Understanding desire on those lines puts Kant in a nice position to say that lacking the willpower to do what you think is right is actually just a case of being racked by indecision.Tune in to hear Jessica Tizzard lay out the Kantian story about what happens when we act against our better judgment!Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.