Freakonomics Radio XX
[0] Do you think God is real?
[1] I sometimes believe in God.
[2] I sometimes don't.
[3] What situations make you believe in God?
[4] I don't know, like when the wind is crazy.
[5] Every kid is a philosopher until they grow up.
[6] That, at least, is what this man believes.
[7] My name is Scott Hershowitz, and I'm a philosopher of law.
[8] I teach both law and philosophy at the University of Michigan.
[9] Hershowitz got his doctorate in the philosophy of law from Oxford, and then a law degree from Yale, after which he clerked for Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.
[10] He has now written his first book.
[11] It is called Nasty, Brutish, and Short, Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids.
[12] His kids are Hank, whom we heard Hershowitz speaking with a moment ago, and Rex.
[13] Rex is 12 years old, and Hank is nine years old.
[14] And we should say your wife, Julie, is a social worker.
[15] You are a philosopher and a law professor.
[16] who do you think is doing more good in the world?
[17] Oh, there's no question that she is doing more good in the world.
[18] I have long hoped that when you get married, your karma merges so that I can get some of the benefit of all the ways in which she helps people.
[19] Today on the show, the latest installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club.
[20] Warning, we cover a lot of ground.
[21] We discuss revenge and retribution and what's wrong with America's employment system.
[22] We talk Will Smith, Taylor Swift, and what it means to literally spit in the face of justice.
[23] Most of all, Scott Hershowitz tries to persuade us not only that kids are natural philosophers, but that grown -ups can be too.
[24] You might think why worry that the world may not be what it seems when there's laundry to do?
[25] And I just want to invite people to flip that around and ask themselves, why do the laundry if the world may not be what it seems?
[26] So get comfortable.
[27] It's time to philosophize.
[28] This is Freakonomics Radio.
[29] the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
[30] Here's an easy question.
[31] What's philosophy?
[32] That is not an easy question.
[33] In fact, it was a question that my father asked when I first came home and said I wanted to study philosophy.
[34] And I had no idea how to answer the question.
[35] And I was stymied, actually, for years.
[36] And then Rex actually helped.
[37] So Rex was in second grade.
[38] And on the very first day, the teacher was memorializing what everyone wanted to be when they grew up, and she sent home a list.
[39] There were like doctors and firefighters and teachers, and then one of the things on the list was a math philosopher.
[40] And I knew this was my kid.
[41] I said to him, Ms. Kind says you want to be a philosopher of math.
[42] What's philosophy?
[43] And just instantly, he says to me, philosophy is the art of thinking.
[44] And I think that's a phenomenal answer, philosophy is the art of thinking.
[45] So here's what I think marks out a philosophical question.
[46] It's a question that requires you to think in an effort to understand the world better.
[47] You cite David Hills from Stanford saying that philosophy is, quote, the ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children using methods that come naturally to lawyers.
[48] So you are particularly well suited to this, plainly.
[49] Yeah.
[50] So I think that's just a wonderful description of professional philosophy, that here are these questions, am I dreaming my entire life?
[51] Or does God exist?
[52] Or do I see red the same way you see red that occur very commonly to children?
[53] And then professional philosophers come in.
[54] They think about these questions very precisely and mount arguments sometimes in very formal ways that look a lot like a legal brief.
[55] But as I'm keen to say in the book, I don't think philosophy has to be the sort of thing that professional philosophers do.
[56] I think kids are having philosophical conversations.
[57] I think people in ordinary life, even grown -ups, are having philosophical conversations all the time and don't see themselves as engaged in philosophy.
[58] And I think it's fine that they don't see themselves, but they are.
[59] And I wrote the book in part to call people's attention to that.
[60] Even if we do sometimes engage with philosophy in our ordinary lives.
[61] It is plainly lost some of its standing in society.
[62] If you go back to just 1970, nearly one of every 100 bachelor's degrees was awarded in philosophy and religious studies.
[63] Today, it's fairly half that.
[64] Philosophers and philosophy used to figure prominently in statecraft and government, including in ancient Greece, of course, but in the formation of the United States, too.
[65] Our founders engaged deeply with the work of John Locke and Jean -Jacques Rousseau and others.
[66] Today, philosophy is pretty much absent from our political and policy conversations.
[67] Hershowitz thinks that is a shortcoming.
[68] We can do philosophy about anything.
[69] One kind of question we can ask philosophically is, do we think the relationships we have with the institutions that we work for, the institutions that we purchase from, do we think that these are morally acceptable arrangements, and we can see maybe that they're not?
[70] And so philosophy might help you imagine alternative possibilities.
[71] Is there a way to design them in ways?
[72] that remove the features that are disturbing.
[73] Hershevitz's concern is a high -minded one, but he understands that high -mindedness doesn't necessarily make people pay attention.
[74] Instead, he's trying to make philosophy accessible to all.
[75] Here's an example, an excerpt from nasty, brutish, and short.
[76] Why are some words bad?
[77] The idea that they could be bothered me as a kid.
[78] Words are strings of sounds.
[79] How could sounds be bad?
[80] But of course, words aren't just strings.
[81] of sound.
[82] There are strings of sound to which we attach meaning.
[83] And yet it's not the meaning of words that makes them bad either.
[84] Just consider this list.
[85] Poop, crap, manure, dung, feces, stool.
[86] It's all the same sh**.
[87] And yet, it's only shit we shouldn't say.
[88] Why is that?
[89] F*** if I know.
[90] So you actively teach classes in both philosophy and law.
[91] Is that correct?
[92] I teach predominantly in the law school.
[93] Some of my classes are cross -listed and I'll invite philosophy graduate students to come over and take them.
[94] I sometimes say I found a loophole in life.
[95] I get to be a philosopher, but I get to teach in a law school, which has the upsides of getting paid like a lawyer and having a law professor's teaching load, which tends to be a little bit lighter than a philosopher's teaching load.
[96] How would you describe the philosophy you teach in your law classes versus the philosophy you would teach if you were a dedicated philosophy professor.
[97] So I'm interested in the context of law, a question might be like, what does it mean for one person to be responsible for an injury that happens to someone else?
[98] That's a question that tort lawyers ask and raises really interesting philosophical questions.
[99] Like, when do you have duties to other people to protect them against injury?
[100] What does it mean to be the cause of someone else's injury?
[101] There's a weekly lunch here at Michigan called the ethics lunch that a lot of the philosophers who are interested in ethical questions attend.
[102] There'll be some issue under discussion and my philosophy colleagues will be trying to make up a hypothetical that we'd illustrate the issues.
[103] And I get to say, oh, wait a minute, we don't need to make a story up.
[104] There's this actual legal case where these people had this kind of conflict.
[105] And here's what the court decided.
[106] Can you give a quick example of a case or a story or a settlement that might prove really useful in that situation?
[107] The very first case that I teach in my torts class is a case called Alcorn v. Mitchell.
[108] This guy, William Alcorn, sues this guy, Andy Mitchell for trespass.
[109] And Alcorn's a very wealthy guy, and Mitchell is not such a wealthy guy.
[110] And Alcorn loses.
[111] And at the end of the trial, in the courtroom in front of everybody, he walks up to Mitchell and he spits in his face.
[112] And it's not just any spit.
[113] As Mitchell's complaint in a later lawsuit describes its whiskey and various other noisome, filthy, disgusting drugs that have been mixed by him in his mouth.
[114] I assume it's like whiskey and tobacco and saliva.
[115] Can I just say I hope this is not 20th or 21st century?
[116] No, this is 1872.
[117] But Eddie Mitchell sues Alcorn for battery at the end of the first trial.
[118] And he wins a judgment for $1 ,000, which in 1872 is quite a lot of money.
[119] The court in Illinois approves the award, and they say that the act in question was purely malignant.
[120] It was highly provocative of retaliation by force, and the law so far as it may should afford liberal damages so that the necessity of resort to private violence can be avoided.
[121] So, like, what was the picture that was operative in 1872, where the court thought, well, if we don't award significant damages in a case like this, then it's going to be not just attractive to Mitchell to respond violently, but necessary for him to do it.
[122] The answer is that Mitchell's social standing was really called into question by what Alcorn had done, and he needed some way to stand up for himself to say, hey, I'm not the kind of person that you can spit on.
[123] So the court saw itself as having this really important.
[124] important role to play of standing up on behalf of Mitchell, who've been spit on, just to take us back to your original question, there's a lot of philosophy about revenge, and some of the most seminal work treats it as a kind of irrational impulse.
[125] I think one benefit you get from reading these cases and thinking about the people involved is it brings the stories to life and helps you think in a deeper way about just what might have been driving their behavior and their views.
[126] The second chapter of your book is titled Revenge.
[127] You argue in praise of resentment as well as anger as much better alternatives to revenge seeking.
[128] I guess because it can get messy fast, right?
[129] Is that essentially why we should seek to not seek revenge?
[130] Well, say you spit on me. That's a way of communicating that you think you're a higher status than me. There's this tradition that dates back hundreds of years to this Christian thinker named Bishop Butler who says resentment is a matter of self -respect.
[131] I'm protesting your treatment.
[132] I'm saying that was wrong and I'm angry about it.
[133] You don't want to be acquiescing in your own mistreatment.
[134] So even just having the emotion of resentment is self -protective in an important way.
[135] Revenge also does that.
[136] But as you say, it's not just messy.
[137] it's dangerous.
[138] It can get out of control fast.
[139] And that's why I think legal institutions, like tort law, like criminal law, or informal social practices are ways of taking the side of the victim and interaction, vindicating their social status saying, hey, we agree, it's not okay to treat this person that way.
[140] And the hope is that removes the impetus they have to take revenge.
[141] So what did you think as a legal professor and as a philosopher of the judgment passed, or some would argue, lack of judgment passed in the Will Smith slapping at the Oscars?
[142] I was disappointed that they didn't remove him.
[143] I think that it was bad for our culture, that he was seen to have slapped Chris Rock and nevertheless stayed in the room and accepted his award and was the recipient of applause.
[144] I think that we absolutely want to live in a world where people don't think that it's acceptable or something that you can get away with simply because you're high status to physically assault someone else.
[145] So I would have liked to see him removed from the event.
[146] But then once a moment has passed and he wasn't removed and he was allowed to accept the award and address the global public on television, what would the next step be?
[147] If you feel there should have been, let's call it, punishment or removal in the moment, decisions aren't always made that you think are perfect in the moment, especially when there's all kinds of emotion and scrutiny and so on.
[148] I think we can all understand why it was so confounding to people.
[149] What would you propose be done in the aftermath?
[150] So that's a hard question, too.
[151] There's two different institutions, I think, that have to decide how to respond.
[152] So the academy decided how it would respond.
[153] They accepted his resignation and then barred him from attending the Oscars for 10 years.
[154] And I think you're not welcome back at this place for an extended period.
[155] time strikes me as an appropriate sort of consequence.
[156] If we backed up and you said, you know, I think the appropriate penalty right now is three hours, a long timeout, and someone from your family or your management team is going to have to accept the award in your stead, had that happened, do you think the road to redemption or whatever it's the road to next would have been ultimately a better road for everyone?
[157] So I think you want to distinguish two questions.
[158] There's the question of what do you need to do to stand up for the victim and reassert community norms.
[159] That's largely a function of how institutions like the academy and the police respond to what Will Smith did.
[160] There's another kind of question, which is what will our attitudes towards Will Smith be?
[161] And I think that depends on something like, does Will Smith apologize?
[162] I wrote an op -ed years ago about an earlier event at an award show where Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech.
[163] Let me interrupt here to say that Kanye West didn't just interrupt Taylor Swift.
[164] Yo, Taylor, I'm really happy for you.
[165] I'm let you finish.
[166] At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Swift had just won for Best Video, by a female artist.
[167] West, sitting in the front row of the auditorium, jumped up on stage, took the mic from Swift, and basically said that Beyonce should have won the award instead for her single lady's video.
[168] Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time.
[169] One of the best videos of all time.
[170] So Hershowitz wrote an op -ed.
[171] The essay was called Taylor Swift Philosopher of Forgiveness.
[172] His essay picked up on something Swift had said in a TV interview.
[173] She said, look, people in our cold are always saying that you need to forgive and forget to move on.
[174] And that's not her view.
[175] She said that sometimes you just become indifferent and you move on, that you don't forgive someone if your relationship has always been toxic and it's only going to be toxic to forgive someone.
[176] There's lots of literature and philosophy that suggests forgiveness is merited when somebody disassociates themselves from the demeaning messages that their behavior sent.
[177] So if Kanye apologized in a way that was sincere and disassociated himself from the disrespectful thing that he'd done, then I think Taylor Swift would be in a position to forgive him.
[178] And similarly, Will Smith did apologize the next day.
[179] And I read the apology as being sincere and then sort of taking it upon himself to resign from the academy.
[180] Maybe that was further demonstration of sincerity.
[181] You sound like you take Will Smith's apology at, let's call it, face value.
[182] I think you use the word sincere.
[183] So I don't, just because, you know, people always apologize when they got caught for doing the things.
[184] They may regret having done the thing because it got them in trouble.
[185] But I think that's different than apologizing for the actual act or regretting the act fully.
[186] I think you regret that you were busted for it.
[187] And then on the Taylor Swift, the way I read it was that she wasn't indifferent, which is the word you use.
[188] She was like, no, screw him.
[189] He did a thing that was hostile and nasty.
[190] and I have my life, why do I need to forgive him to get on with my life?
[191] So it wasn't so much about even if he had apologized, I liked her attitude more because it was kind of a locus of control attitude, which is I'm going to do my life.
[192] And you idiots out there, you jerks out there, whatever, you can try to invade my life and I welcome you if you're going to behave well.
[193] But if you're going to behave poorly, then that's not my problem.
[194] That's your problem.
[195] So when people in our society are pushing the need to forgive, they're often saying, hey, look, it's bad for you to resent.
[196] It eats you from the inside.
[197] It takes control of your life.
[198] She was saying, I'm going to shake it off, which is not changing my attitudes towards him.
[199] It's just leaving it behind me. So I think that you're basically right about that.
[200] So was Will Smith's apology genuine?
[201] I think that it's a really hard question to answer.
[202] The reasons for skepticism, right?
[203] The very first thing he said in the aftermath when he accepted the award was not at all apologetic.
[204] It was only afterwards, and one imagines that lots of publicists had intervened by that point.
[205] And maybe a lawyer or two, no offense.
[206] That's right, sure.
[207] That's actually like a kind of writ large version of a problem that you have with all apologies.
[208] It's especially acute when you're the parent of multiple children.
[209] And one child has done something bad.
[210] And you've demanded that he apologized to the other child.
[211] My colleague Bill Miller has a parenting view about this in his book, faking it.
[212] There's a chapter on apologies.
[213] And he says, look, there's a million ways to fake an apology.
[214] When you've demanded one child apologize to the other, you're going to get an insincere apology.
[215] And Bill thinks, here's what has to happen.
[216] You've got to demand a second apology.
[217] Now, the second apology is going to be as insincere as the first apology.
[218] But Bill says, you have to stop.
[219] You have to declare the second apology good enough.
[220] Because if you keep going until you get the thing that's sincere, you're never going to get it and you lose this interaction.
[221] You declare the second apology good enough, and you recognize that it serves a purpose.
[222] Even if it wasn't sincere, in Bill's view, it kind of brought the wrongdoer low by being made to apologize not just once but twice, and that's the real compensation to the other kid.
[223] In his book, Hirschwitz tells another story about Taylor Swift.
[224] This one meant to demonstrate how the legal system can help reset social norms.
[225] When I pitch this point to my students, I tell them about Taylor Swift.
[226] In 2013, a radio host named David Mueller grabbed her butt as they posed for a picture.
[227] She complained about it, and he lost his job.
[228] He sued her for defamation, saying he'd never groped her.
[229] Swift counterclaimed for battery.
[230] She asked for a single dollar in damages, and she won't.
[231] What was the point?
[232] Swift didn't need another dollar, but money wasn't what her suit was about.
[233] Swift sued to make clear that her body was not public property available to any man who wanted to touch it.
[234] In other words, she asked the court to reject the message Mueller's groping sent.
[235] The verdict told Mueller, and every man listening, that no one had a right to Swift's body but her.
[236] And because the court applied general principles of battery law, It sent a message about everybody's butt, hands off.
[237] And thus concludes the portion of our program today dedicated to Taylor Swift grievances.
[238] Coming up, after the break, how to exact revenge if someone murders your loved one.
[239] This is Freakonomics Radio.
[240] I'm Stephen Dubner.
[241] We'll be right back.
[242] The title of Scott Hershowitz's new book, Nasty, Brutish and Short, may be familiar to you.
[243] It is part of a famous phrase written by the 17th century philosopher.
[244] Thomas Hobbes in his book, Leviathan.
[245] Here is an excerpt from Hershowitz's book, explaining why he chose the title.
[246] Hobbs was curious what life would be like without any government at all, a condition philosophers call the state of nature.
[247] He thought it would be awful.
[248] Indeed, he thought it would involve a war of every man against every man. In the state of nature, Hubbs said, life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and shrew.
[249] short.
[250] I don't know about the state of nature, but a war of every man against every man is an apt description of what a house with little kids is like.
[251] We are lucky.
[252] Our lives aren't solitary or poor, but our kids are nasty, brutish, and short.
[253] They are also cute and kind, but all kids are, at times, nasty and brutish.
[254] The kids are willing to accept the characterization, at least in part.
[255] Are you nasty and brutish, I asked Hank?
[256] I can be nasty.
[257] he said, but I'm not British.
[258] In a chapter called punishment, you argue that the U .S. imprisons too many people and perhaps even worse that prison conditions are often really poor, sometimes subhuman.
[259] My Freakonomics friend and co -author Steve Levitt wrote a paper years and years ago trying to understand what drove crime up and down in the U .S. roughly from the 60s when it began to really rise until, let's say, the early 90s when it began to really fall.
[260] And even though he's famous for positing the legalization of abortion as one driver, there were actually many factors that he wrote about.
[261] One of them was poor prison and jail conditions.
[262] And the idea being that when the conditions were really terrible and someone was sent to one of them, they really didn't want to go back.
[263] Now, that sounds like a very brute force argument in favor of subhuman prison conditions.
[264] But I did just want to offer that as one small empirical argument about the efficacy of miserable prisons.
[265] So tell me your bigger thinking on that.
[266] One thing that happens in the punishment chapter is I want to use punishment of kids as a kind of springboard to thinking about punishment more generally and punishment of adults.
[267] You know, I could put my kids in really harsh conditions.
[268] And that would be a strong disincentive to their future misbehavior.
[269] So if I had one kid, like, push the other down, I could say you're not just going to your room, but I'm stripping the walls.
[270] and I'm feeding you like a piece of toast a day.
[271] I'm sure that harsh treatment of children could be instrumentally effective.
[272] At least in the short term, I do think there's some kind of worry that when you treat people really poorly, maybe you're changing their psychology such that you can expect poor treatment in return as a kind of long -run worry I'd have.
[273] But it's not actually that worry that keeps me from treating my kids harshly.
[274] It's that I love them and that I receive.
[275] and that I think it's important to respect them as people, even when they've behaved badly.
[276] And when we treat prisoners really poorly, and when we treat them disrespectfully, we're an important way disrespecting ourselves and disrespecting our own humanity because we're treating it as something that's easily lost.
[277] So I think it's important, even if we could achieve something that achieve better deterrence and diminish bad behavior, I wouldn't be with.
[278] willing to do it at the price of treating human beings like animals.
[279] So let me come back to you, Scott, with the most cliched question there is.
[280] Imagine, God forbid, that someone brutally kills your whole family.
[281] How do you think about revenge or punishment in that case?
[282] It's so interesting that you're asking this question.
[283] You called it cliched because this was the question that was put to Michael Dukakis when he was running for president and was opposed to the death penalty.
[284] Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?
[285] And he answered very flatly without much emotional affect at all, that he was opposed to the death penalty.
[286] No, I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life.
[287] I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.
[288] And I remember my older brother at the time who was more engaged in politics than I was when I was 12, thinking that this was a really terrible moment, that people wanted to see his emotion.
[289] And one thing that he might have said that I'd be inclined to say in response to the question you asked is, of course, I would be vengeful, angry, want to see this person suffer.
[290] But that's why we have a society that doesn't put victims solely in control of the most serious, most consequential punishments that we have at hand.
[291] That part of building a society that treats people with dignity is finding ways to constrain these extraordinarily understandable emotions that people have when they're significantly injured or their loved ones are.
[292] Pretend for a minute that 12 -year -old Scott Hershowitz had been, let's say, 25 at the time and was actually an advisor on the Dukakis campaign and had actually prepped him for that question and that you had given him that answer.
[293] What do you think would happen next?
[294] Well, I think it would have made him seem less alien.
[295] It's important in these conversations where you're suggesting restraint to honor the emotions that are leading people to want to be unrestrable.
[296] I think that sometimes criminal justice reformers fail at this task.
[297] We need to find a way to speak to the people who are satisfied with the present state of affairs because they see it as a proper response and to honor the emotions that make them feel that way and then make the argument for nevertheless rising above things and treating other people with dignity, even when they haven't treated us with dignity.
[298] early in the book you write the following every kid every single one is a philosopher they stop when they grow up i'd like some evidence for both those statements let's tackle first that every kid is a philosopher and i could imagine two ways in which that's wrong it could be that your kids are philosophically inclined which would not be that surprising since her father is a philosopher or perhaps your statement is you know, a piece of false self -deprecation.
[299] It's you trying as a professional philosopher to say that anybody can do what I do.
[300] So give me the evidence first for every single kid is naturally a philosopher.
[301] A lot of the evidence comes from a philosopher named Gareth Matthews, who dedicated his career to talking about philosophy with kids.
[302] And he was brought to do that by a surprising conversation he had with his daughter.
[303] Their cat, Fluffy, had fleas, and his daughter, Sarah, who was four, asked how did the cat get fleas?
[304] And Matthew said, well, fleas must have jumped from another cat onto Fluffy.
[305] And Sarah said, well, how did that cat get fleas?
[306] And Matthew said, well, they must have jumped from another cat onto that cat.
[307] And Sarah said, well, Daddy, that can't go on and on forever.
[308] The only thing that goes on and on forever is numbers.
[309] And Matthews was floored by the conversation.
[310] He was teaching a class at the time.
[311] The class covered what's called the Cosmole argument for the existence of God.
[312] And the argument goes like this.
[313] Every event has a cause, but that can't continue all the way back forever.
[314] There had to be some first cause, which was itself uncaused, and that's God.
[315] So he was struck by the parallel of reasoning.
[316] And then eventually what he started to do is he started to visit schools.
[317] And he would tell the kids a story that set up a kind of philosophical question.
[318] And then he'd pose the question to them.
[319] And he just listen to the debate that ensued.
[320] What he discovered is these kids are really sophisticated thinkers capable of much more than what the developmental psychologists at the time had given them credit for.
[321] All the evidence for Matthews is anecdotal, but the weight of the anecdotes becomes at a point overwhelming.
[322] So I think it's totally worth approaching me with some skepticism and approaching Matthews with some skepticism, hey, look at these philosophers who think their kids are philosophers.
[323] But if there's something to that, here's what I think it is.
[324] Because I have some training in philosophy, and I'm familiar with the questions, I'll hear the thing my kid says as connecting up to some question or topic and philosophy that's been debated for hundreds of years, whereas somebody else might pass it by or think, oh, that was cute, but not really be able to situate in a literature.
[325] So the claim I want to make is your kid is thinking philosophically, and it may just be that you haven't noticed yet.
[326] Okay, so on the second point that kids stop being philosophers when they grow up, I'm not going to ask you necessarily for evidence of that because I think that's fairly evident to all of us who live life.
[327] But let's assume that we all could extend our philosophical energy much further into life and that just the ebb and flow of life and the needs and necessities of life take us away from that and push us toward utilitarianism versus philosophy, let's say.
[328] I can empathize with your argument that we should all be more philosophical.
[329] generally, or at least that we should all spend a little bit more time thinking.
[330] But I could also argue that, you know, as you get older, you have people to provide for, you have work to get done.
[331] What kind of loss do you think that is?
[332] I want to answer the question in a few ways.
[333] So first is I want to resist the idea that in all the activities we should engage in, we should be thinking, what's in it for me?
[334] What's the utility of this activity?
[335] I think it can be really rewarding to think about something that you find puzzling and try to understand it in a deeper way.
[336] Part of what I hope the book will do is it will help people recapture a sense of puzzlement at the world that I think all of us had when we were kids.
[337] Another kind of practical upshot I would see is philosophy yields really important insights into the world.
[338] So let me give you one example.
[339] My colleague, Elizabeth Anderson, wrote a book a few years ago called Private Government.
[340] She argues that the most oppressive government that most of us interact with is not actually the state.
[341] We're hyper -concerned about the government and our constitutional rights and whether the government's respecting our rights.
[342] And she says, but wait a minute, I want you to look somewhere else.
[343] Your employer has a ton of power over you.
[344] And you have, as things stand now in our society, very few rights.
[345] And many of our employers treat us in just the ways that we're worried about governments treating us.
[346] One reason to do philosophy is it can help us.
[347] see the world differently and imagine different possibilities.
[348] And so many people have found Liz's work just revelatory.
[349] It's opened up a new way of thinking about what's bothersome about the structure of workplaces in our society and given us a different model.
[350] Maybe we should think about our relationship with our employer in the way that we think about our relationship with the government and that we need something like a Bill of Rights for employees.
[351] When writing about this, you bring in the university setting and you bring in tenure.
[352] You've got tenure.
[353] So you've got the form of protection that you argue all employees should have with their employers, but it's a relatively rare relationship.
[354] So it sounds to me like you would essentially like to flip this.
[355] You'd like to not take tenure from professors, which some people argue should happen, but rather give some form of tenure, some form of protection at least, to all employees.
[356] Can you talk about some things that would need to happen to make that a reality?
[357] Let's just back up a little bit and think about the context in which I approach the question.
[358] I'm not approaching it as a policy person or as an economist.
[359] I'm approaching it as a philosopher in particular, a philosopher who's interested about authority.
[360] So why is it ever the case that one person gets to boss somebody else around?
[361] One answer that's very natural to give in the context of our work relationships is the employee is consented to the boss's authority.
[362] You signed up for this job and you could walk away from this job if you wanted to.
[363] That's, of course, a much different answer that we would give about parental authority.
[364] My kids did not sign up.
[365] We think about workplace authority, people often point to the choice that the employee has to exit the relationship.
[366] And then I've got a concern about that, which is, I think in our society, that's not a genuine option for most employees.
[367] They have all sorts of reasons that they have to work, right?
[368] They need to work to acquire the basic resources that they need to live, food and shelter.
[369] And health care, which is in this country, usually connected to your employment, which is a rarity in the world.
[370] For sure.
[371] And we know, of course, that many people work because of the need for health care.
[372] or stay with jobs longer than they would like to stay with them because they can't run the risk of being without health care for a period of time.
[373] And so at best, they might be in a situation where they can choose their boss, but they're not in a situation where they can choose whether they're to have a boss altogether.
[374] So I look at the employment relationship and I think, well, how do we think that this boss has the right to tell the employee what to do?
[375] the story was supposed to be consent, but the relationship actually seems to be one that people are forced or coerced into.
[376] So this doesn't look to me like people are relating on morally acceptable terms.
[377] So the question is, what would you have to change about the context in which we work in order to bring it about that the relationship between boss and employee was structured in a way we could morally approve of?
[378] I know you think a lot about universal basis.
[379] basic income.
[380] And I don't at all have a view on whether as a matter of economics, this is promising.
[381] But I think here is an underappreciated upside.
[382] I think when people do genuinely have a realistic option to walk away from a job, then their consent to be in that job really counts for something.
[383] Here's an excerpt from nasty, brutish, and short on the relationship between employer and employee.
[384] Change won't come easy.
[385] But there are many ways to make things better.
[386] We could limit at -will employment.
[387] We could give workers a role in workplace governance so that their interests are taken into account.
[388] We could also change the context in which we work by guaranteeing a basic income in health care so that no one feels forced to work for an abusive employer.
[389] Somehow, lots of Americans have been convinced that government handouts hamper freedom.
[390] The truth is, providing for people's basic needs promotes freedom.
[391] It makes it possible.
[392] It makes it possible.
[393] for people to say no to a boss who would treat them badly.
[394] Americans talk a good game about freedom.
[395] We love our constitutional rights.
[396] But if you care about freedom, the American workplace should seriously disturb you.
[397] How would you think about achieving the proper balance between the needs of the firm and its customers and shareholders with the needs of the employees?
[398] because as I hear you speak, one thought that comes to mind is, as labor becomes more expensive or more complicated, firms are just increasingly incentivized to substitute away from humans and toward machines, toward robots, other technology.
[399] So if you had your say in making labor law, much more pro -employee, would that not be a concern for you as well that you'd encourage firms to simply have fewer human employees?
[400] I have a couple thoughts about that.
[401] One is, when we look around the world, we see that other countries have struck this balance differently, and people seem to live well, and maybe also don't have the extremes of inequality that we do.
[402] So that makes me think we have room to move before we undermine people's opportunities to work.
[403] The second thing, I think, is that we should aim to structure our society, our relationships in society, in ways that we think.
[404] are morally acceptable and then work around whatever problems that raises in further ways that we think are morally acceptable.
[405] Wow, that's a big statement.
[406] I need to metabolize that a little bit.
[407] It stuck out to me because even though the DNA of America quite explicitly states its moral premise and reckoning, that's not a part of the conversation we typically have anymore when we talk about our politics or our economics.
[408] Does that make you feel a bit out of step with the mainstream?
[409] It does.
[410] You know, I worry about the degree to which economic concerns and economic tools as a discipline dominate our public conversation and that we've lost a vocabulary for worrying about a different set of concerns, like are people in the workplace being treated with dignity?
[411] Are they relating to each other as equal members of society, even in circumstances where organizations may be arranged hierarchically.
[412] Because we've lost this vocabulary, we're no longer accustomed to having these conversations in public.
[413] There's a lot that's disturbing about the way our society is arranged that's just invisible.
[414] And I think it would be great if that changed.
[415] You know, I was listening to the episode that you had about scale and voltage.
[416] And one thing that I was thinking about as I was listening to it is the ways in which institutions scale they stop interacting with their customers or their workers as people and start to see them as assets or entries in the spreadsheet or contacts.
[417] And many of the frustrations, I think, of modern life are because these institutions that you have to interact with don't see you as a person really your care about you as a person.
[418] The episode Hershowitz just mentioned on scaling and voltage was Freakonomics Radio episode 494.
[419] Why do most ideas fail to scale?
[420] Coming up after the break, what if the U .S. had a secretary of philosophy and what if Scott Hershowitz were it?
[421] Oh, wow.
[422] And please help spread the word about Freakonomics Radio.
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[425] Thanks in advance, we'll be right back.
[426] Scott Hershowitz, who teaches philosophy and law at the University of Michigan, is the author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short, Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids.
[427] What does he see as the purpose of this book?
[428] I wanted to introduce people to real philosophers from history and also some of the super cool contemporary philosophers.
[429] And I wanted to teach them about what their work is really like and why their ideas and arguments are important.
[430] But I thought I can also do that in a way that's going to be really engaging and fun.
[431] I like hanging out with these philosophers.
[432] I should be able to convey that to other people.
[433] This book of yours is plainly written for a broad audience.
[434] It's got a commercial publisher.
[435] It's not an academic press.
[436] And it doesn't read at all like what most people think of as a philosophy book.
[437] Certainly not if you study philosophy at a university level.
[438] It's funny.
[439] It's full of stories.
[440] It's accessible.
[441] I'm not saying it doesn't have philosophy in and it does.
[442] Are you concerned, though, that writing a book like this will somehow damage your reputation in the eyes of the cohort you perhaps care a lot about, which is your philosophical and legal peers?
[443] I think it's a bad thing about the academy that there is this concern that if you're speaking to a broad audience and you're doing it in a way that people are going to find fun and accessible, that maybe it shows that you're not serious or maybe it shows that you were willing to dumb things down.
[444] I sort of made a commitment to myself when I wrote the book that nothing was going to be dumb down, nothing was going to be repackaged as if it's self -help, which is how a lot of popular philosophy books.
[445] are often written.
[446] I think that there's a generational shift happening, certainly in philosophy, maybe in academia more broadly.
[447] A lot of my colleagues, my age and younger, are looking around at all the awful things in the world, and they're thinking to themselves, how can I speak to that?
[448] How can I be engaged with that?
[449] So I think that among my older, more stayed colleagues, they may think, oh, this is an indication that Scott's less serious.
[450] I don't think my younger colleagues will have that reaction, but it's definitely a tradeoff I'm willing to make because I reject the judgment.
[451] I think that philosophy matters to people's lives.
[452] And so if we can't talk to a broad audience about these questions, then we're not doing our jobs fully.
[453] Okay.
[454] Last question.
[455] Imagine there is a U .S. Department of Philosophy and that you are the first secretary of philosophy.
[456] What are your first three directives.
[457] Oh, wow.
[458] Hang on.
[459] I'm just trying to wrap my head around.
[460] What's a really a hard question?
[461] So I'll say this.
[462] I think philosophy is an important part of education.
[463] And I think it's disappointing to some extent for me, frustrating that Americans have lost sight of that.
[464] I think that thinking about philosophical questions, thinking about one's life, what's a good life can be a richly rewarding and valuable activity for people and we ought to encourage it.
[465] So I suppose I'm not recoiling from the idea of a Department of Philosophy.
[466] Maybe just like an office that encourages philosophy education is part of the Department of Education.
[467] So maybe one of your first directives would be to require that every elected official at least have some reading of basic philosophy.
[468] Would that be a directive or is that too harsh?
[469] I don't think exposure to philosophy is going to make those people better at their, I mean, it might.
[470] It might make them better thinkers, but I don't think it's guaranteed to make them, I mean, Plato certainly.
[471] thought that we ought to be ruled by philosophers.
[472] I think that that's actually probably a really bad idea.
[473] Because why?
[474] I think that to make good decisions, you have to draw on wide bodies of knowledge.
[475] Sometimes it's economics.
[476] Sometimes it's sociology.
[477] Sometimes it's psychology.
[478] Sometimes it will be philosophy.
[479] I suppose most of my edicts would be directed towards having it feature in a kind of standard package of education that we expected everyone in a democracy to receive.
[480] But would you want to have a seat at the table in the policy shops?
[481] Yeah, for sure.
[482] Somebody who is thinking about what American workplaces should look like that isn't wrestling with the work of Elizabeth Anderson or somebody who's thinking about what a taxation system should look like that isn't familiar with the work of John Rawls.
[483] These folks are just missing rich resources for understanding how we can make the world more just.
[484] Would you want to issue any directives in the way?
[485] the realm of, let's say, crime and punishment?
[486] I have to say, just from the tone of your voice, you sound very reluctant to accept the Secretary of Philosophy position.
[487] Am I reading you right or are you maybe overwhelmed by the opportunity?
[488] I think I need to understand the job better.
[489] Is the job support philosophy education, then I absolutely want that job?
[490] We're not asking the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Commerce to support education.
[491] We're assuming that those are foundational pillars of a successful society.
[492] So let's just assume that you get over your slight reluctance and maybe, you know, self -deprecation about the value of philosophy and to say, heck yeah.
[493] Philosophy should be everywhere that agriculture is, let's say.
[494] So, you know, in the Kennedy administration, there was somebody who was given the role where the idea was there should be somebody in the White House who should be like the guy who was going to offer the dissenting view or play devil's advocate.
[495] And I do think, It's desirable to have people familiar with philosophical ways of thinking and with the history of philosophical ideas involved in conversations, whether we're making decisions about wars or agriculture or whatever it might be.
[496] So you could be a roving sage through the halls of Congress into the White House once in a while.
[497] You drop into DOD, the Pentagon.
[498] Do you like that role?
[499] You know, sage seems a bit arrogant, but gadfly is maybe a role more suited to me. Gadfly?
[500] Maybe.
[501] But there is another role that seems to suit Hershowitz well, father to Hank and Rex, the inspirations for nasty, brutish, and short.
[502] Here's a bit of tape from the three of them, having the kind of conversation that led to the book.
[503] If God is all powerful, can he create a stone so heavy he himself cannot lift it?
[504] Oh, I like that question.
[505] think, Hank, if God is all powerful, can he create a stone that he can't lift?
[506] I like it because it's not a right answer.
[507] Why do you say there's not a right answer?
[508] Because like if God's so powerful, you could say no, he can't.
[509] But you could say yes, he could.
[510] And both answers could be true.
[511] Well, let's just think about the answers one at a time.
[512] If God creates a stone, but then he can't lift it, is he all powerful?
[513] In some ways, yes, because he created a stone, he couldn't.
[514] But, like, he can't lift it, so it kind of makes him a little bit less powerful.
[515] But he did create the stone, even though he can lift, like, all the stones, but that stone.
[516] I just think about it over and over again.
[517] And it's a constant loophole, because if he can do one thing, he can't do his other.
[518] That was Hank, Rex, and Scott Hershowitz.
[519] The book is called Nasty, Brutish, and Short Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids.
[520] Thanks to them, and thanks to you for listening.
[521] Thanks also to Penguin Random House Audio for the excerpts of Nasty, Brutish and Short, read by Scott Hershowitz.
[522] Next time on Freakonomics Radio, it is a summer rerun that I thought might pair really well with today's episode.
[523] If you plot GDP on one axis and religiosity on the other axis, the U .S. is a clear and distinct outlier with high GDP and high religion.
[524] In an individualistic society, a person is like an atom in a gas.
[525] It can freely float about life is an adventure.
[526] In societies that are tighter, there is more community building where people are willing to call out rule violators.
[527] The U .S. is just different, so let's stop pretending we're not.
[528] That's next time on the show.
[529] Until then, take care of yourself.
[530] And if you can, someone else, too.
[531] Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
[532] This episode was produced by Jacob Clementi.
[533] Our staff also includes Neil Carruth, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Zach Lipinski, Ryan Kelly, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Julie Canfer.
[534] Morgan Levy, Eleanor Osborne, Jasmine Klinger, Emma Terrell, Lyric Bowditch, and Lena Cullman.
[535] We had help this week from Jeremy Johnston.
[536] Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers.
[537] The rest of this week's music was composed by Luis Gera, Michael Riola, and Stephen Ulrich.
[538] Please follow Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[539] My kid will be so upset if I don't say it.
[540] F*** off, Dubner.
[541] Is that what you wanted to say?
[542] On his way out the door this morning, he said, tell him, I think he's a cool guy.
[543] Tell him, thank you.
[544] Then later you can disabuse him of his belief.
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