Michael Livermore 0:10
Welcome to the Free Range Podcast. I’m your host, Michael Livermore. This episode is sponsored by the program on law communities and the environment at the University of Virginia School of Law. With me today is Dale Jamieson, a Professor of Environmental Studies and philosophy at my alma mater, New York University. He writes on environmental ethics, animal welfare and climate change. His most recent book with several co authors is Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy, which was published by the University of Chicago Press. Dale, thanks for joining me today.
Dale Jamieson 0:43
My pleasure, Mike.
Michael Livermore 0:45
So you have lots of interesting projects these days, but I thought we might begin by discussing the relationship between animal welfare and environmental ethics, which you’ve written about and thought a great deal about. In my environmental law class, I usually urge my students to kind of separate out the law laws that are directed towards animal welfare, you know, things like rules governing animal testing, or humane treatment on farms, from the traditional environmental laws that are oriented towards, you know, general environmental protection, like the Endangered Species Act. And what I’ll normally say is something like, you know, an environmental law, like the Endangered Species Act might incidentally protect individual animals. They’re also consistent with harm to individual animals, even including, like really serious harm, like erratic eradication of invasive rat population that’s eating the eggs of an endangered bird. So when I’m, I want to make sure I’m not saying anything flagrantly wrong, but I’m also just more generally curious on your thought, on the relationship between these two areas of law, or more generally, areas of, of ethical and moral thought
Dale Jamieson 2:01
Well, Mike, I think you are exactly right, in your description of the law, although I do think that some things are perhaps beginning to change. And I really want to go back and talk about how we how we got to where we are in this in this respect, and I think is so often the case, it requires recovering a very naive thought the sort of thought that we probably had, you know, when we were 19 years old, or even children, half. And that thought is really, that protecting the environment. And protecting animals really come from the same sense of compassion, or the same sense of respect for other living things that we that we live with. And, in fact, if you go back, certainly in the animal protection movement, but also in the environmental movement, you really see a lot of the same figures. And you see a lot of crossover in ideas in this in this respect. In fact, I think one little anecdote that brings this out is the first kind of book length critique of factory farming was a book by Ruth Harrison, who was a British thinker, it was published in the early 1960s. And interestingly enough, the foreword to that book is written by Rachel Carson. They had never met each other, they had a friend in common, who saw them as being, you know, sympathetic people, travelers on the same road. And that led to Rachel Carson writing the foreword to that to that book. So I think there’s a lot in our sort of in people’s basic sensibility that brings them to one of these subjects with the other, that leads to a lot of overlap and commonality of thought. But of course, then what happens is a lot of separation sets in. And I think that separation becomes kind of very strong in the later 60s And in the 70s. You know, all of those early environmental laws that you are referring to really have no interest, they show no interest or cognizance, really, at all about individual animal welfare. As the animal protection movement begins to grow, in the 1970s, a lot of people are attracted to the animal welfare movement. We’re interested in dogs and cats and domestic animals and issues like that, and really aren’t environmentalists are sort of don’t self identify as environmentalists. And, you know, by the time we get to the 1980s, you know, as someone who identifies very strongly, both as an environmentalist and an animal protectionist, I would find myself in different communities with radically different values. So I go to environmental events, and you know, people would be serving veal or something for the conference dinner, and I would be at animal events where people were just scoring, you know, keep scoring on environmentalists, I think. I think these movements are being brought together now to some extent around climate change. But this Still a very kind of uneasy and contingent relationship?
Michael Livermore 5:06
Yes, I mean, I completely agree. And so, I mean, maybe we can think a little bit about I’m just thinking kind of almost like practically or, or, you know, kind of can how to think about areas of conflict. So one of the one of the areas that I think is interesting again, this is like a Hypo I use in class sometimes is to just try to can manage this intuition is like interventions in nature. So, if I’m curious what you think of this, so like, imagine someone’s very strong animal welfare orientation, and they kind of reject an action in action distinction. And so the idea is, there’s predator prey relationships, and lots of things that happen out in natural ecosystems are actually really does cause a lot of suffering. And, you know, maybe it would be better if we, you know, fed soy pellets to the lions, and then, you know, the gazelles wouldn’t suffer, you know, as a consequence of being eaten for food all the time. And, you know, it’s I think it strikes a lot of people that that would be kind of bonkers, but at the same time, just for most from straight, alleviating suffering perspective, doesn’t strike me as all that crazy. But But I think the environmentalist instinct would be no, no, no, we don’t want to do anything like that, that would be a really bad idea. And so I’m wondering, is this like illuminating hypo? And does it does it tell us anything instructive about the relationship between this notion of animal welfare and environmental protection?
Dale Jamieson 6:42
Well, it’s, it’s an illuminating hypo. And, in fact, it’s in the literature and I, the person I think of as sort of introducing, this is Tyler, Tyler Cowen, The Economist at George Mason University, who wrote a paper a few years ago called policing nature, which is on exactly this subject. But then, of course, what often happens is that it’s, you know, it’s not always easy to tell, what’s a feature, and what’s a bug when it comes to a theory. And, and this idea has certainly been embraced now by some animal protectionist philosophers. So there’s a lot of work that’s being done on wild animal suffering, and how to think about wild animal suffering. And a lot of people who write in that tradition, really come very close to advocating, you know, all kinds of intervention in nature. Now, I’m on the side of thinking that there’s something kind of bonkers about that, but it’s not so easy is, is I think you were suggesting to sort of say what’s bonkers about that, once you accept certain very plausible assumptions? But I think I mean, we can talk more about this, but I think the diagnosis of this really should, you know, really, you know, really pushes you back into the direction of well, what’s ethics about? What’s moral decision making about? You know, what, what is the center prize about in the first place? And I think it’s granting certain assumptions there that sort of get you to the crazy place at the end at the end of the road.
Michael Livermore 8:21
So is it just to think about candidates, there is something like the action and action distinction where, you know, we’re more morally responsible for the stuff we do and things that we don’t do, because that seems like it could get us, at least potentially out of this problem is to say, okay, when we’re, when you have custodial animals, and you’re running a farm, if you’re going to be running a farm, or you have domestic animals, you have pets, and the like, you know, you’ve taken on a certain kind of responsibility, and you have a particular role with respect to these animals. And that role comes with obligations, and so on and so forth. But you know, with respect to nature, you just haven’t taken on those kinds of responsibilities. You don’t have a role. It’s just an independent system. And it operates by its own logic, and, you know, morality, or at least with respect to certain kinds of moral obligations that one might have you just they don’t apply. So that seems that one road I personally don’t find that all that attractive, I don’t think although it may be it could be brought around. But so that strikes me as one possible way around the issue. And maybe it’s also just think about what matters with respect to animals and why we care about them in the first place. And maybe suffering isn’t the be all end all of of our obligations there.
Dale Jamieson 9:36
Yeah. So I do think the action inaction distinction pushes the issue back in a more foundational direction. But the action inaction distinction itself, poses a lot of the same issues is and I think this is perhaps one of the things that’s on your mind. So intuitively, this is a very strong intuition that people have right that It that letting something happen isn’t morally as bad as actually doing the thing yourself. So, I mean, it’s foundational to Catholic moral theology. And it’s, you know, you do trolleyology, and you see to kind of elicit this, this intuition. But, you know, and there is something right about it. But I think, well, so let’s put it this way, it’s easy to show what’s wrong with it. And the way that you show what’s wrong with this distinction, or at least thinking that it’s a distinction of intrinsic moral significance is to present cases in which in which exactly the same outcomes are produced. But in some cases, they’re produced by action. And in other cases, they’re produced by cost by inaction, when you could actually intervene in a cost free way with no side effects, etc, etc. And that discussion really goes back to Jim racials papers, probably in the 80s on active and passive euthanasia. And this is really, you know, this is where this distinction becomes both important and a bit horrifying. Is it still pretty deep in our medical ethics, in our thinking about medical ethics, that it’s okay to let people die, but it’s not okay to kill them. And in some cases, that can lead to outcomes that at least I think are horrific. Because you let people suffer, not being able to intervene to end their lives. So, you know, so there’s real stuff just about people that that turned on this, but what I think is right about this intuition, and what drives it has to do with really ignorance. And I think, you know, so I think so let’s take yet another step back in a more foundational direction, I mean, the point of ethics is really to, you know, to help guide, what it is that we ought to do, the planet of ethics isn’t to sort of describe the moral structure of the universe, you know, in the way that we might think physics is. And so it’s not at all surprising that when it comes to hypotheticals, that our moral thinking just breaks down, because it hasn’t been trained up to do hypotheticals, that’s not where its value lies, its values about is about guiding our behavior. And when you think about guiding our behavior, then the the fact that we’re in this world that has a certain structure, and part of the structure of that world is natural selection, then, you know, the decisions that we make, and what it is that we can do, and what it is that we can manage, is is all going to go on in inside of that. And I think part of what happens with the concern for wild animal suffering is it starts with, you know, this important, compassionate intuition, that nature is a horrible and a crucial, you know, kind of horrible place in many ways. And then it sort of pulls morality outside of nature, and really asked the question, well, if we were gods, you know, how would we make the world and, you know, and it might be that if we weren’t gods, we should make a different kind of world than the one that exists. But that doesn’t tell us anything about what we ought to do, given that we’re in the world that we find ourselves in, situated in the way we are, and have radically incomplete knowledge of that world that we have.
Michael Livermore 13:32
Oh this is really interesting. And I think, you know, getting into into hypotheticals, just maybe this is a bit of a bit of a digression, but I tend to really agree, obviously, in law schools, we love talking about hypotheticals. And my I think it’d be a new hobby horse of mine is just that you have to be really careful with hypotheticals, you have to be really careful with them, because I think what we sometimes will do so so this, this is one that that is used all the time, it’s the kind of the, you know, torturing someone if there’s a ticking time bomb in downtown Manhattan or something like that. And you know, and this hypo is used kind of as an argument against utilitarianism. It’s argued in favor, whatever. And usually, you take certain things off the table. So this would actually be the case, I think, in the animal suffering, one that we’re talking about is that someone will just say, Oh, just take ignorance, assume that we can intervene in nature in some way to reduce, you know, widespread suffering. And we will understand the consequences of that suffering, you know, or of that intervention reasonably well, or something like that. But he’s put some constraints on the hypothetical. And I think what happens then is it’s very dangerous, because then our intuitions become kind of, we’ll still have the intuition that it’s a bad idea, but we won’t be able to make recourse to the justification that’s really driving that. And so we’ll come up with something else. And so like in the torture case, you’d say, Oh, well, you know that torture is gonna get this information that will, you know, will lead to have, you know million people’s lives being saved? And you still don’t want to torture? You know, you still want to say no, that’s bad. And maybe part of that is, you don’t think torture is effective? And how could you possibly know that it was going to be, you know, it was going to work or even have a good probabilistic judgment about something like that. But you can’t make recourse to that anymore. And so you start talking about rights or some other kind of underlying rationale for your intuition.
Dale Jamieson 15:24
Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. And, and one of the kind of oddities of this is that we know from social psychology, that we think in terms of sort of clusters of features, and stereotypes, and prototypes and so on. But somehow we have this idea that what whether it’s a law class, or an introductory ethics class, that we can just instruct the students to just sanitize the case, from all of the things that being human and having a human brain actually brings into the contemplation of the case. And of course, what’s even weirder is that we as legal academics, or philosophers somehow think that we’re also immune from how human psychology works, and can reason in that kind of vacuum.
Michael Livermore 16:10
Yeah, so but but I do think there’s no kind of related interesting thing going on here, which is the kind of we’re not god’s point, which is that our intuitions about things like intervening in nature, or, you know, pretty much everything for that matter. You know, they come about either, you know, in a kind of very big, I don’t know, whatever, Darwinian psychology way, or just in our, through our culture, that developed in different contexts, right, where humans ability to even contemplate doing something like, you know, again, intervening in nature, or to reduce animal suffering, it’s just, it’s just not something we could have done, even if we had wanted to, at all, like, not even in the realm of something to that would be worthy of consideration. But now, we kind of live in a technological environment where we could potentially, at least in some limited way, obviously, not take over the entire planet, or that we have kind of taken over the whole planet, but but in some limited way, say, within a national park or something like that. manage certain relationships to reduce animal suffering. But, you know, we’re kind of so that I think there’s just an interesting question, are we ill served by our intuitions in that case, the same way that we are about, you know, you know, I want to eat doughnuts all the time. Because, you know, my ancestors, you know, survived more when they when they start out sweet and fattening things. And, you know, that’s that, that doesn’t serve me well, these days. And I wonder if, you know, there’s a similar concern, especially in these areas, where technological development has been so profound, and it really just changes the scope of what we can contemplate, you know, thinking ethically about.
Dale Jamieson 17:49
Yeah, I, I think, I think the way I would put at least a related point is to say that we underestimate the effects the incremental effects of modest actions, and we overestimate our ability to direct and assess and evaluate the consequences of large scale actions. So I mean, just to give you, so a couple of examples, on the ladder point, it’s, it’s just quite obvious, right? I mean, Silicon Valley is full of people who, who think that, you know, immortality is just a matter of getting a bunch of smart coders together, basically. You know, so So that’s the kind of grandiosity of thinking is, is just so obviously prevalent in our culture. But on the other point, I mean, climate change is obviously a kind of classic case of world changing macro level outcomes coming about from small, incremental actions on the part of people. But there’s, there’s other things, you know, prior to that, that we don’t even think about. I mean, I sort of, I grew up in a kind of pre computer world. And that world was really, really different. I mean, it was a world of, you know, file cabinets and letter writing and, and, and things like that. And I’m not, you know, sort of a bad enough person to say, oh, yeah, those were the good old days was so much better, you know, but it’s, but it’s not as though anybody ever did a benefit cost analysis, of computerizing the world. I mean, nobody ever sat down and said, Let’s make everything digital. And we’ve taken into account what the energy demands of that will be and what the privacy implications of that will be in the fact that you will drive all the brick and mortar store you know, you’ve got retail in lots of cities, you know, around the world, because it’s actually all worth it for that reason is that that’s not what happened is you know, a bunch of People made a bunch of decisions about their own products and their own marketing and their own efficiencies. And it led to an incredible remake of the world in ways that nobody really much thought about, you know, in advance. And of course, even the whole thing of shopping on Amazon is like that, for example, right? I mean, the same is the same people who shop on Amazon, namely, all of us complain about what’s what’s happening to small businesses in our communities. Right.
Michael Livermore 20:30
Right. And so this is, I mean, this just gets us to, again, I think it’s a really tough question. In the modern world, which is, you know, our actions can just spin out of control, in some sense, you know, we have our, we have our limited domain of, of, we have a huge amount of influence, actually, in some sense, or especially collectively. And it’s all it’s just very hard to anticipate, you know, kind of what what those consequences are going to be, we have kind of a, there’s a mismatch between our ability to understand, even just simple things like, you know, what’s going to happen when I do this. And our actual consequences put aside, even things like our intuitions and whether those are going to be good guides for us. I mean, this would be a kind of argument against consequentialism, in some senses, that it just requires a capacity that we just don’t have, and we just have to limit our scope. But on the other hand, you know, in cases like climate change, you know, we, you know, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere isn’t, isn’t a harm in any kind of foundational sense. It’s only just because of happenstance of how the atmosphere works. And then reality of like that everybody else is doing it simultaneously, that it becomes bad. So it feels like within the environmental world, at least, we’re kind of stuck between these two positions of, you know, just this very, very complicated world that’s very difficult to anticipate, but where our actions really do have profound consequences.
Dale Jamieson 22:00
So I think it’s an argument against certain direct forms of consequentialism, that we ought to be going around computing, you know, the consequences of all of our actions. But I don’t think it’s an argument against more indirect forms of consequentialism. And I think this really takes us into some issues of policy, public policy in the way that we now think about political issues. As you know, when those first generation environmental laws were passed, that you began this conversation by alluding to, I think there was a pretty strong social consensus, at least among the political elites in both the Democratic and Republican parties. That that, that as individuals, we need to be restrained from acting on the basis of our own perceived short term self interest, because we will collectively produce outcomes that we don’t want. I think that was it, I think it was widely viewed as this is the function of government, at least one of the important functions of government to actually act in those kinds of cases. And the environmental philosopher, Mark, say, Goff, who was also kind of a prankster and jokester. I think, you know, one way that he sort of expressed that in his life is I remember this very vividly he, he used to drive around with a car that had a bumper sticker that said, I am polluting the atmosphere. And it, it really encapsulated this whole thought, because, you know, on the one hand, he’s saying, Yes, I know I am polluting the atmosphere, let’s just recognize that I’m going to drive I’m going to pollute, and that’s why we need air pollution regulations. Because I need to be restrained from the very behavior that I’m actually engaging in here. And now, but I think we’ve lost that consensus about the role of government, certainly in the United States. And I think the pandemic brought this out really clearly, because the kind of public health measures, you know, that, that are the rational ones to take with respect to a pandemic. You know, we’re viewed in great many quarters, as you know, contravening the proper function of government, because precisely because it prevented individuals from acting on the basis of their own perceptions of their own immediate self interest.
Michael Livermore 24:30
Yeah, this seems you this kind of dovetails in the environmental context switch with kind of almost a movement or I’m not quite sure how to how to describe it, but there’s in the last couple of decades, a lot of emphasis on individual behavior in the climate context that you know, we have an individual with responsibilities if you care about climate, you know, you should be putting up solar panels or driving a hybrid vehicle or an electric car or whatever living in a city you know, Doing away with the car altogether. But it’s kind of an individual moral choice, ethical choice. And you kind of get these criticisms like Al Gore, you know, I can’t cleric care about climate change, his house is so big. And of course, that just reframes the whole conversation away from what can government’s do in a kind of question of politics, to individual choice. And, you know, that has always seemed to me to be, you know, kind of wrongheaded and depowering. But I, in a sense, I understand it, because I think for a lot of folks, that political demand just seems like a, like a dead end. Yeah, well, I
Dale Jamieson 25:36
mean, so on most of these issues, I just preface what I’m going to say, you know, there’s so much blame to go around as to why we fail to address these issues, we could, we could spend all day, pointing fingers at everyone, including ourselves, because it sort of goes back to the way we think about these hypotheticals, we’re not immune from these generalizations that govern, you know, our human thinking and human behavior. But one of the ways I think that policy types are to be faulted, is, you know, sort of a lot of the language, cap and trade it just a whole thing. And, you know, stop privatizing everything, you know, volunteerism, bad government, you know, government regulation good, is, first of all, it failed to be sensitive to these changing values in American society, towards greater emphasis on individual on individual behavior, individual integrity, individual rights, etc, etc. And so I think a lot of the sort of policy talk with respect to climate was sort of still living in that late 60s 1970s consensus view about what the role of government was, and we just weren’t living in that world anymore. And that’s part of why people were talking in this more individualist way, it wasn’t the cause of the problem, so to speak, it was just a reflection of these changing cultural values. And then, and then, of course, the more complicated discussion. It is, is the more general one about well, what is the relationship between individual and collective behavior anyway, because any view that sort of tries to detach them from completely from each other, is gotta be wrong.
Michael Livermore 27:34
And so to me, this is really interesting. This is a kind of a political reality that we’re, there’s a disjoint, between the policy conversation and we kind of got stuck in a particular way of thinking about talking about climate change, or environmental issues more generally, while the culture was shifting in a more individualistic fashion. I mean, part of me wonders, kind of two different things. So one possibility is that we could still, it’s just a matter of how we talk in reason, at some level, that we could kind of pursue some more policies or similar policy goals, or even potentially similar policy instruments, by describing them and in different ways and kind of making recourse to the more individual level values. That’s one possibility. The other possibility would just be that the culture has changed in a way, which has just made it much harder for us to achieve collective ends through collective institutions. I don’t know if you have a sense of which, which one of those has you think is more likely? Yeah.
Dale Jamieson 28:37
I, I don’t. But, but of course, it doesn’t stop me from talking. I mean, part of the problem, I think, is that we went from this broad consensus about what the what the proper role of government was, and it included restraining human behavior, you know, our individual behavior to, to, you know, to when we began to sense that there was some separation here, then I think a lot of the policy community became a elitist. In, in political community as well, the political class in the sense of thinking, well, we can still do these things we just have to fool people with, you know, and in a way cap and trade was like that, right? I mean, we’re going to, you know, we’re going to put a price on carbon, but you’re not really going to know that we did that because we’re going to put it several steps back in the supply chain. When you know, and we’re not going to call it we’re not going to give it a nasty name, like attacks or anything or anything like that. And I remember the moment of clarity for me with this in this area, which is, you know, I mean, look, I was, you know, I was definitely on board with this with the view of government was and sort of it, I still am in terms of, you know, what the kind of conventional environmental policies would still do an enormous amount of good if we could only figure out how to enact them. So I’m not some, you know, screaming, you know, we just have to worship Mother Nature, that’s the only solution kind of guy. You know, I’m a good I’m, I’m a nice, neoliberal, intellectual, like, you know, to, at least to some extent, like all of us, but But I remember one moment, you know, we would talk about taxes, and all this kind of stuff. And I remember looking at some interview data, where, you know, we’re asking people about what they would accept in terms of taxes on gasoline. And this was actually in the Clinton years, you know, when there was during the BTU. Tax in the early 90s. And, and what you got, if you looked at the interview data was overwhelming, yeah, people would actually be willing to pay more for gasoline. But but almost inevitably, they would say, as long as it doesn’t mean that I have to drive less,
Michael Livermore 31:06
whatever that means, well, I mean,
Dale Jamieson 31:09
what that means is that they would not accept the level of tax, that would change their behavior, which was the whole point of imposing the tax from a policy perspective. And once you get that dissociation, then the policy community has to sort of then figure out how to impose these behavior changing policies, without people actually recognizing that that’s what’s going on. And, of course, I think that’s one of the things that sets up a lot of the political failures for liberal liberals, you know, in subsequent decades, but it also abandons another kind of deep strand of liberalism, American liberalism that goes back to people like John Dewey, and I think is still hugely important, which is, you know, the only way we get anywhere is to do stuff together. And the only way to do stuff together is through transparency and education.
Michael Livermore 32:07
Yeah, so So this kind of gets us into some other really interesting issues. But but one related one, I think this kind of builds off of this is, you know, I think a lot of the the concern at some level, or the underlying challenge is, you know, the kind of there are lots of kind of important values, questions that are at stake in something like, you know, whether we want to address climate change, and how and how much and, and all that, and, you know, just kind of moving forward with the elite versus, you know, a broader group of people in society. I remember, at some point, again, years ago, I was when the social cost of carbon was first being discussed as a way of valuing benefit of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I was at a conference of economists. And one question that was just very briefly noted was, well, of course, we use a global social cost of carbon. So we use the, the estimation of damages based on damages that are caused worldwide from from the release of, you know, a ton of emissions in the US or wherever else. And, and I agree with that, you know, as a, just that sort of, I think, the right thing to do. But it also was very clear to me that that was going to be at an angle of attack on the social cost of carbon. And, of course, under the Trump administration, it was the point there was to say, you know, what the Trump administration said, basically, that we should focus on just the effects in the United States, from reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that we undertake. And of course, the effects in United States are only a small part of the effects on the world. And that’s a values question about, you know, are we cosmopolitans, are we nationalists? What obligations do we owe to folks outside the United States when making decisions here? And, you know, I think for a lot of folks in environmental community, who would, I think, take a more cosmopolitan orientation towards these questions? They’re just, you know, there’s, there’s some serious space there, between where they are and where, you know, a lot of other folks are, and I’m just, I’m just not sure. I think there’s an instinct to want to then translate the whole conversation into a technocratic conversation, because folks are afraid that if we really confront the values question head on, they’re just going to lose.
Dale Jamieson 34:28
Yeah. So I think you’re so right on about that. And I remember thinking, those same thoughts during that whole discussion, but the thing that in a way surprised me is that I don’t think that certainly, economists in general or even environmental policy people are generally such consistent cosmopolitans in the first place. There, you know, I mean, if you just think a lot of the economic analysis that gets done, it’s very good. ethically oriented, generally? And if you do raise questions about well, you know, what would be the impact of this and developing countries? People look at you, you know, in in basically, you know, that’s an irrelevant question that’s not even thinking about. But yet in some contexts, like the social cost of carbon, the assumption just gets made without any discussion or noting or noting it at all. And I actually think, to a great extent, I mean, this is a hunch, a hypothesis, you know, that it’s, it’s, it’s driven more by sort of technocratic ease than it than it is by moral commitment. It, you know, just given the kind of, you know, if you just think about the Nordhaus models or something, and you think about damage functions, it’s just kind of easier to throw the whole thing into one big model, than to just try to figure out what the impacts would be in the 50 states, you know, North America that constitute the United States. I think that drives it as much as any cosmopolitan values.
Michael Livermore 36:04
Oh, that’s really interesting. That’s is your theory, it’s definitely true. It’s way easier to estimate. I mean, today, it’s hard to do any of this, but it’s easier to estimate damages at a global level than it is to try to then parse them out. I mean, to do it in the state of Virginia, or, or something like that would be speed, it would be guesswork at best. But so, you know, that’s an interesting. That is an interesting point, I think that may, they may that may well be part of part of what’s going on. I do think that there is a broader instinct in our system, and it’s not nefarious, it’s just something that’s part of our debate, or part of our political culture, is when there are deep values questions, to then translate those into technocratic forum, forums or technocratic language or present them as kind of purely scientific inquiries. And that’s just as a feature that happens in environmental law all the time. So you know, we, instead of asking about what our responsibilities are to future generations, we start talking about discount rates, when we instead of talking about how to balance the the economic effects of improved air quality against the value of reducing mortality risk, we talk about, you know, protecting public health with an adequate margin of safety, that’s the national ambient air quality standards. And so we kind of treat questions that are really fundamentally values laid in, in a in a technocratic way. And I was, you know, I can continually turn over in my head, whether this is a good or a bad thing that the, you know, the part of me that likes clean thinking, doesn’t like that. But then, you know, as a pragmatic response to the reality of kind of deep pluralism and political disagreement, maybe maybe it works well enough. This is something I know that you’ve given some thought
Dale Jamieson 38:01
yeah, I mean, so I agree completely with what you’re saying about the phenomenon. And I think, in fact, it’s, it’s becoming more extreme all all the time. And, and let me just give you something about what I think is the genealogy of the phenomenon. And then And then, and then come back with something that is going to sound either deeply depressing or unreasonably optimistic. But I think the genealogy goes something like this. So so when there is a broad consensus that we face some problems, and we all agree with the problems are the sort of, you know, that the stereotype of the sort of 50s 60s view, right, where the idea was, there were no more deep ideological divides, you know, we have these social problems, and we just need to do a bit of engineering, you know, to lead us off into the evermore glorious future. You know, then thinking of these problems in a technocratic way, is, at least in principle, supported by this broad social consensus, consensus about values about what the problems are and what and what counts as solutions. But then, when this starts getting to be dissociated, which was what we were talking about earlier, right? Where the sort of policy elite sort of is sort of banding about these solutions to things that people don’t necessarily think are problems or if they think their problems there, they’re not sort of on the same wavelength about what they would be willing to do to address them. Then that’s when we start getting into sort of smuggling the values into the technical analysis, right, because that’s been, you know, we can sort of we can, so to speak, make people better off they would be willing to do them themselves. Voluntarily accepted. Right? That’s, that’s, that’s where the difference goes. And, but of course, you know, almost inevitably, that leads to this kind of populist outrage against policy elites, you know, which Hillary Clinton symbolized. And in the, you know, for so for so many people, I mean, now what’s so I mean, that’s the sort of diagnosis of the problem, the natural history of the problem. But now, going back to the solutions, or whatever, you know, I mean, first of all, it’s not clear to me that the value divides in America are really as great as they seem. And the reason for that is because we don’t actually talk about values, we just scream at each other on Twitter, you know, mainly manipulating symbols and memes. The problem with values and with value differences, is that to even get to mutual accommodation, and respect, requires long in deep conversation, and we’re actually back to Socrates, you know, I’m now going to do a pitch for philosophy, you know, is that, again, the sort of thing do we talked about when he talked about democracy as a way of life? He didn’t see it as being even primarily about voting in the way that we do today. And sometimes when this issue is raised, to me, it’s like so so what do you do you know, when people have these really deep differences in their views? And I say, Well, you know, if I had a semester to talk to them out, I’ll bet they would come out with different views. And there would be more mutual respect. But who has this semester, except for 18 year olds, basically. Right. And so I think that’s part of the problem. I mean, I think there is a path forward to, you know, what do they call that in military campaigns they call it, conflicting, the, the battle zone. I think we could, we could deconflict some of this Battlezone. But it would require dealing with value problems in a more direct way, and involve accepting some rules of the road about how to discuss them, and about some serious time commitments about how to work through them.
Michael Livermore 42:24
Yeah, that that is, yeah, that’s a it’s a heavy lift. I think that’s that’s the tricky part of this. And part of what I, you know, this like leads us into thinking about kind of deliberative democracy and and you know, that that way of understanding what it means to live in a democratic society that we’re kind of consistently interacting with each other. And and in an open minded way, there, I think there’s two interesting challenges to that. I’m attracted to this, of course, you know, naturally, I think it sounds like a very attractive version of of how democracy works, or what politics can be. I think there are two interesting things that I’ve kind of experienced or seen that create some skepticism for me. So one is the conflict between, like kind of interests and deliberation. So in many deliberative institutions, what can end up happening is that the the liberators, it’s kind of a hawk dove situation where the deliberative, the doves, and the non delivered haters of the Hawks, and that delimiters can be very easily manipulated and kind of overcome by the Hawks. So like, the classic example, I think of is the filibuster rule in the Senate, which is actually intended to protect debate and deliberation, and protect, you know, just create a forum where minority voices are heard at least. And of course, it just gets turned into a tool of partisan manipulation. It’s got nothing to do with actually facilitating deliberation. And so it’s kind of the person who’s open minded and enters into a deliberative forum, ends up being kind of exploited, exploited by the people who are not open minded and just kind of have a set of interests that they want to achieve through the forum. So that’s kind of one problem. Then there’s a another set of issues, which I think is just, again, I just don’t know how to get my head around, which is the social science evidence that people, the folks who are interested in participating in politics, when they’re exposed to other views, they become less interested in participating in politics, there seems to be some kind of tension between deliberation and open mindedness and exposure to alternative views and all of that, and just participation. And if you look at American history, the periods where you see the most participation in the most interest in politics are the most polarized and just in in in the course of my life. I’ve seen that as well. I mean, we are in a moment where people are more engaged in politics than I’ve ever seen. And people are paying attention. They’re, you know that people vote, they talk about politics, they’re really engaged. And it’s very different from when I started off in all of this couple of decades ago, and you know, that’s a good thing in some sense. And but if it always rides along with partisanship and polarization, then it’s, then it’s not all that attractive. So I’d be curious, curious to hear your thoughts on I just found those to be dilemmas .
Dale Jamieson 45:29
Right. So this, I mean, so there’s a fork here between going deeper and going cruder. And so I’m going to, of course, do a little bit of both. So the deeper thing goes back to what do we mean by politics? And I actually think there’s very little I mean, there’s very little going on. Now that’s written politics. I don’t think I don’t think you can, the best way to understand the Trump phenomenon is through concepts like fandom. And through various kinds of social psychological processes. It’s not really much of a political movement. That’s interesting. And I mean, let’s put it this way, it certainly would be unrecognizable as politics by much of the history of political theory and political philosophy. So So it’s one of those things where actually to move in a more deliberative direction, you just have to go deeper and even more foundationally. I mean, the other thought that I’ll add to that is, I think it was Keynes who, who said that when the economy is, is working, is functioning, economists should be thought of as being like plumbers, they should basically be invisible, and just keep the pipes going. And I think something like that, it’s reasonable to think something like that could be true of politics as well, that, you know, in a certain sense, a well functioning political system is not one that’s characterized by what we think of as political activism. But that doesn’t mean that people aren’t interested in concerned. So, you know, so there’s a lot to talk about, and think about there. Now, just for to bounce it up to the cruder thought I, I myself, am not sure that even the best kind of democracy can successfully address problems, like climate change. And in a way, you can think of the world as being involved in a kind of natural experiment, where we have these validly democratic states, and we have these not perhaps validly but definitely authoritarian states. And they’re both dealing with many of the same kinds of issues, including climate change. Now, what is amazing to me, if you look at how this natural experiment has evolved over, say, the last decade, is that the resources of democratic states have been flagging, and the weaknesses of democratic states have become ever more prominent. So, so the Democ, the Democratic states, have, are leaning heavily in the direction of something like some version of sort of anarchism, or pop, you know, sort of popular standard, and it’s hard to even find a language for it, but not expressing the democratic virtues. And, of course, what’s happening on the other side is the authoritarian states are becoming more authoritarian. So the world that we’re living in is one where increasingly, the options of business as usual politically, as well as business as usual, and all sorts of other areas are just looking less and less and less attractive all the time. So there needs to be you know, it again, it’s like, it’s, it’s like, it’s like the old the old joke. If, if, if we keep, you know, if we don’t like where we’re going, then, you know, we better stop walking in that direction. And try something new.
Michael Livermore 49:36
Yeah. I mean, you know, I think there’s this kind of related interesting phenomena that ties back to the point you make a little earlier, which is about the unintended or unforeseen or unforeseeable consequences of technology and the digitization of everything. I think there’s an argument to be made that essentially that’s what’s kind of happened is that the most recent wave of tech analogy, at least within the political domain has had a pernicious effect on democracies. This is arguable, but I think it’d be the line of thinking. This may be maybe paradigmatically in the US, but but maybe elsewhere as well. And has kind of made it more difficult to achieve anything like a social consensus, and it exacerbates division and undermines our institutions and so on. Whereas the same technologies have actually empowered authoritarians. So now, you know, in Russia, people are just being bombarded with with false information about what’s happening with respect to Ukraine, and the Chinese government can can monitor folks at at a deep level through facial recognition and other this kind of the social merit system and, and other digitally empowered tools of oversight that just were unimaginable. A little while ago. And, and all things being equal, this is just reduced the relative attraction just as a functioning polity as a way of setting up a society of democracies versus authoritarian states. I don’t know that I buy that full story, but it’s a very depressing one. I think so then the question is, you know, if it sounds a little technologically determinist, which I suspect is a position you don’t endorse. And so I wonder, we do have to recognize these things are happening in our environment, though, and respond accordingly. So I’m wondering if you have thoughts about, you know, given that the technology is with us, and probably is going to continue to grow, and become more prevalent than what is what are some of our options, or at least what are some of the experiments that we might contemplate?
Dale Jamieson 51:50
Yeah, well, so here’s the thing, right, I’m not a technological determinist. But technology looks deterministic when you have the gutting of the state, basically. And and I’ll just give you an example of this from some work that I’m I’m doing now, I’m working on a project with some people at Harvard Law School, which is a 15 country study of live animal markets. This was a study that was sort of set off in the wake of the, of the COVID epidemic, but it’s not just about the COVID epidemic, it’s generally about zoonotic disease, evolution and transmission. And one of the things that’s clear from this study, so far, we haven’t published anything yet. And it’s not gone public. But so much of these live animal, I mean, we have this image of live animal markets, which you know, are these nasty, horrible things like, odd or whatever. But a lot of the live animal trade has gone online. And and so you sort of begin with the weaknesses of most nation states in regulating this trade in the first place. And then you just move all this stuff online. And suddenly the regulator’s if there are regulators are all sitting in Silicon Valley, basically. Right? So nation states even lose the, you know, the power to regulate in that way. So that I mean, that’s not a feature of the technology. That’s a feature of the way that we are organizing the world and the relationship between corporate power and, and, and state power.
Michael Livermore 53:29
Right. So that’s another kind of dimension of the in the equation. At some level, there’s, there’s the kind of democracy versus authoritarianism, but then obviously, the kind of political inequality and economic fast economic inequality that we have in society that that, you know, that plays a tremendous role in affecting how all this stuff plays out. I mean, I think of the whole cryptocurrency question in the capacity of the state, and I think of that technology is almost explicitly oriented towards it derives its value in substantial respect from its ability to help act or circumvent state oversight. And yet we seem to be embracing it as a society, you know, really? I don’t know if we’re, it seems like we’re moving embracing in a pretty substantial way. I mean, maybe it will all collapse tomorrow. But that doesn’t seem like the way things are going
Dale Jamieson 54:27
right. Now, I mean, I mean, one of the interesting, I mean, it goes going back to that thought that authorities, authoritarian states are becoming more authoritarian and democratic states are beginning to show increasingly the defects of democratic systems that go back to, you know, the critiques of Plato and Aristotle and others. You know, I mean, I don’t want to be misunderstood about this, because it’s not like I’m a cheerleader for the Chinese government or anything. But but in a way, the Chinese state is almost, it’s almost like a demonstration project to see whether the state can remain in control of the society and the economy in a globalized world. I mean, in the European Union, there are these attempts to do that, as well, I think modulated through democratic norms and institutions. But I also think it’s pretty clear that in the, that the EU is, is increasingly losing control of corporate power. And in the United States, we’ve just given up on it, I mean, all the, you know, the students I teach, who really want to change the world and do something wonderful, or what have become work in social investment in social entrepreneurship, because the way that they think you change the world is by becoming capitalists, basically, because they don’t take the idea of state power and authority seriously anymore.
Michael Livermore 55:51
Right, which is not, you know, in fairness, and I see a lot of this in my students as well. And these are law students, of course, and, and the In fairness, you know, on what seem a lot of pressing social issues, you know, we don’t seem to be able to arrive at the kind of consensus necessary to bring to bear the power of the state. And I think that what is what we need to be reminded of in some levels is that there is dissensus on important questions, actually, the state is incredibly powerful in the US, and it can really engenders all kinds of economic growth and just kind of makes everything runs on the state in some level, right? There’s there is no Twitter. Without all of the incredible capacity of the state that we have in the US, it’s just that I think that what is often very troubling is that you look at an issue like climate change, especially if you’ve been working on it for a little while. And it is incredibly pressing, incredibly important. What frustrates what I find infinitely frustrating about it is I don’t think it would actually be personally, especially if we had gotten ahead of it all that costly to address, we could have done it in a fairly low cost manner. And I still think we could do it in a fairly low cost manner. And we’re just, we just do not seem to be able to reach that level of social consensus, that would be required to do that, for many, many different reasons, but in part due to valid real value differences, and I think that’s part of the question, too, maybe just to stick with the authoritarian versus democratic question is, you know, part of what’s going on with respect to climate change is people just have real values, disagreements on things like commitments to or obligations to folks overseas, or obligations to the future, how they want to trade, you know, consumption against other forms of, of improving their their well being. And these are just real differences. And I think there are right answers, and other people think they’re right answers, and there were as far apart as can be. And, you know, in a sense, it’s a bug of democratic society that we can’t seem to address this really sitting, you know, really pressing problem. On the other hand, we don’t agree with each other about how pressing the problem is, and how to address it. And so, you know, that’s just the given that a democracy is not going to let us move forward. So So in a sense, is is the failure of democracy there is it just, this is a hard problem that we disagree about? And it’s in some ways, right, that we aren’t taking aggressive measures, because to do so would just be to override that, that disagreement, somebody wins and somebody loses?
Dale Jamieson 58:30
Yeah, I sort of agree with half of what you said, and I think I disagree with half. So the half I agree with is out Absolutely. So as this problem would have been really manageable, if would have behaved rationally, basically. You know, that’s by climate change book is called reason and the dark side. I mean, they’re, you know, in 1992, there was a Senate, a bipartisan Senate bill to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2019 90 levels, you know, if if that would have passed, it would have been a completely different world. So So I agree. I agree with that this is almost like a self inflicted wound, at least to the degree that it is what I think I disagree with you about, and I’ll put the point a little bit, you know, really provocatively, and then I’ll, of course, retreat quickly. But to put it provocatively, I think the value differences are as much a function of the failures, as the failures are a function of the value differences. I mean, why did we not act? When we could have acted we? The reason we didn’t act to a very great extent, is in this gets into the power of the state is because the state chooses not to exercise its power to prevent massive misinformation campaigns on the part of fossil fuel producers. And because we have a system of campaign finance, that, in some other jurisdictions would just be playing illegal, and from a moral point of view, can certainly be described as corrupt. And that has a lot to do with why that sort of consensus of the 60s and 70s broke down, you know, had to do with private actors, essentially being able to assert power and government not acting against them. I mean, the weird thing about state power is I think that a place like the United States goes back to something you said earlier, the state does have enormous power, when it chooses to act. I mean, look at what it’s done to people who who have spent time in Guantanamo, for example. I mean, it’s just an almost unthinkable exercise of state power. But, but the American state chooses to act remarkably arbitrarily, from any reasonable point of view, you know, if you want to, you can talk about gun violence. You, you can talk about, you know, policies, with, just broadly speaking, anti monopoly policies in this world that we’re now increasingly moving into which, you know, at one point, I was thinking we were going to be in a pre New Deal, world, and increasingly, I’m thinking we’re going to be in a pre Progressive Era world. If we go much further down this, this this path, but of course, the state will still have enormous power to imprison people and to do all kinds of other things. So you’re right, the potential power is there. There, the question is organizing it and getting it to act in the ways that it should.
Michael Livermore 1:01:48
Yeah, I mean, it’s a very, it’s a very interesting kind of feedback cycle in terms of the, you know, Democrats think of the structure of democratic deliberation feeds into values, which then feed into the, you know, the that structure over time, and we course, we’re recording this on, shortly after the news that the richest person in the world has, I believe, and certainly, some just with enormous economic power is is proposing to buy one of the major forums where political deliberation takes place. So this is Elon Musk’s attempt to, to buy Twitter. And, you know, it does seem to be that there’s almost an amplification of some of the, of the of the dynamics that you’ve been talking about.
Dale Jamieson 1:02:40
There’s a lot of amplification, some of which you’ve talked about, on this on this podcast, Mike, one of the things I become interested in lately is the power of asset managers over over the economy. And, and, you know, and increasingly, at least some parts of the environmental community, thinking of asset managers as the ultimate regulators, and potentially the ultimate knights in shining armor. What a terrifying world in which, you know, anybody could have such a bad
Michael Livermore 1:03:14
I hate to end the podcast on such a dire note, but I feel like I’ve taken up, you know, a good chunk of your time. I don’t know if you had any, any concluding thoughts to move us in somewhat of the direction of hope? Or, or maybe we should just end it there?
Dale Jamieson 1:03:32
No, no, no. I mean, I think the the conversation which I’ve enjoyed very much, and I hope it’s helpful to the listeners, has been in a certain note, but I think, again, if we want to be really serious about thinking where we are part of our disappointment, part of our apathy part of our depression, part of our anger has really come from unrealistic aspirations. I think we need to set our sights lower, not in the sense of, of accepting things that ought not to be accepted. But but in recognizing that much of the job of government much of the job of living an ethical life, is to just make things a little better than they are. In fact, I’ll end with an anecdote. A friend of mine, who, who is a white Nigerian, he was he was he was born in Nigeria. And at the time of decolonization, you know, most of the white people fled. He stayed, and he became a very deeply respected person in Nigeria. Kind of a national hero in Nigeria, and I remember he’s very old now and I remember him Once telling him how, how much I admired him and the choices that he made in his life, and you know how much he’d accomplished. And he just kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, Look, he said, if I’ve done anything at all that’s useful. It was just in trying to make people a little less stupid than they wanted to be. And I think that’s in its own way inspirational. And I think if we could succeed in doing that, we would have lived our lives very well. Indeed.
Michael Livermore 1:05:33
Yeah. Well, that that is that is I think it profound wisdom and so the perfect way to end the the conversation. Dale, thanks so so much for joining me. This was a lot of fun.
Dale Jamieson 1:05:44
Thank you, Mike. I enjoyed it.
Free Range Podcast 