Michael Livermore 0:11
Welcome to the free range podcast. I’m your host, Mike Livermore. This episode is sponsored by the program on law communities in the environment at the University of Virginia School of Law. With me today is Leif Wenar, a philosophy professor at Stanford University and the author of blood oil, tyrants, violence and the rules that run the world. Hi, Leigh, thanks for joining me today.
Leif Wenar 0:34
Thanks so much, Mike. I’m delighted to be with you.
Michael Livermore 0:37
So, several years ago, you you wrote and published the book Blood oil, which deals with the problem of the natural resource curse that afflicts many countries. And, and in the book, you detail many of those problems and a lot of ways that, that having natural resources can actually be really bad for the for the folks who are unlucky enough to live on those lands because of the relationship that exists delete both the legal relationship and the kind of power relationship that exists between governments and, and those resources. And, and you provide a kind of a landscape and a moral landscape, you discuss the legal landscape and something of a blueprint for what folks in the kind of the rich world, places like the United States in Europe could potentially do, to try to make some progress on improving, improving that situation, given the degree to which natural resources, especially fossil fuels are just so fully built into, into the fabric of economic life. And it’s not like we could just tomorrow say, it’s very difficult to make a case to say, Okay, I’m just not going to use any sources of energy. And so you provide something of a blueprint so so maybe what we could just kind of start off with it is that problem of the natural resource curse and, and how you, you kind of argued that we all end up implicated in this really often quite devastating situation.
Leif Wenar 2:13
Thanks, Mike. You’re right. The resource curse is a serious international problem that drives many of the headlines that we see in our newspaper every day. So think about the huge money that can be gained by selling off a country’s natural resources like its oil or its metals or its gems. Today, that money empowers some of the most coarse of men in the world. So autocrats from Russia to Iran spend their resource money on weapons and repression aren’t groups like Wagner and the Congo is militias spending their resource money on atrocities and ammunition. Somehow, the business that we’re in with these coercive men, funds their violence and repression, we’re in business with the men of war and blood whenever we shop for everyday goods online, or in stores whenever we fill up with gas. And that leads to this phenomenon called the resource curse. And let me just give you some headline figures on the resource curse to give you a sense about how big a problem it is. So most of the world’s autocrats today stay in power by selling off their country’s oil. Most of the most corrupt countries in the world are oil states. Most of the world’s recent violent civil conflicts have been in oil states, most of the countries suffering hunger crises are resource rich states. Most of the countries from which refugees have been fleeing are resource rich states. And soon most of the world’s poor people will be in resource rich countries. So the resource curse is a serious problem that we inadvertently drive by buying everyday goods because of the way the international trade system is set up.
Michael Livermore 4:19
Right, so So this is, you know, it is as you note this one of the most serious kind of or at least, maybe a better way to say is that it drives some of the most serious harms kind of in the world and, you know, it’s kind of drives the, just an enormous amount of suffering really, when you when you get down to it, so. Okay, so So, so we’re kind of implicated and as you know, part of the issue is that we’re implicated in this in this system that keeps really bad folks really doing really bad things in power. One of the things you know, obviously one of the developments since since the book came out, it was the is the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, obviously, Russia had been aggressive and has been going increasingly aggressive. And the relationship between Putin and kind of contemporary Russia, and Natural Resources is well known. But it’s really exploded into the popular consciousness in the last couple of years, and the West has taken steps to try to D link our economies, I guess, from from Russia and to try to starve Russia of resources by making it difficult to export their natural resources, oil and gas, primarily gas. So what are your I mean, given the degree to which you’ve, you know, been thinking about this over the years, how is how do you how does it land? How does this land with you the kind of the contemporary attention is paid to, to Putin and Russian natural gas? Is it is it kind of good that folks are realizing the the nature of the inner linked problem of the resource curse? Is there too much focused on on Russia alone? Yeah, so I’m just curious how that recent development kind of has played into your your argument broadly about the resource curse and what we can do about it?
Leif Wenar 6:16
Absolutely, Russia is a huge and a hugely important story. So in 2016, I published an article in Foreign Affairs saying that the West should start to get off with authoritarian oil. And I got together with a leading oil analyst, and we did some numbers. And we set for Europe to get off authoritarian oil, including Russia, you could probably take a few years and 10s of billions of dollars. Of course, that didn’t happen in 2016. Instead of doing it peacefully, slowly, responsibly, and on principle, what happened is the West kept buying oil from Putin sending him 10s, hundreds of millions more dollars, with which he then is launched another invasion of Ukraine. And now, it’s war. And now all of our options are bad. It’s a disastrous situation, of course, we have put on sanctions, but sanctions now look just like another weapon of conflict. Instead of all of this conflict, we could have taken a peaceful, principled approach those years ago. I’m not telling you, I told you so. But I am saying, I’m telling us so we really should stop funding our worst crises in the world by sending all this money to authoritarians and armed groups, and empowering them with unaccountable money. Resource money is unaccountable power, whoever can control all holes in the ground, these oil wells just gets 10s hundreds of millions of dollars with which they can launch invasions oppress their own people, by dachas by off opponents fund the oligarchs. This is unaccountable power, we keep sending these men, and that’s behind some of our worst threats and crises for so long in our history.
Michael Livermore 8:25
Yeah, yeah. I mean, so So let’s talk a little about that about Principle and and what kind of principles we could use? And what are what principles are the principles in place, because as you know, this the kind of current sanctions regime, visa vie, Russia looks like not necessarily an instrument of war, although it’s certainly a kind of cousin in this context, but it certainly looks like an instrument of policy. That’s just kind of directed towards a particular geopolitical actor that is engaging in behavior that we have good reasons to not like contact principal reasons not to like but also kind of just geopolitical concerns with you. I don’t think anyone would argue that the sanctions are kind of purely a matter of principle that the West has engaged in this is this is very pragmatic set of behaviors. So how do we distinguish between a principal policy of say D linking a country’s economy from, as you call it, authoritarian oil or authoritarian natural resources, presumably, maybe we could, what that entails is just, you know, something like a sanctions regime, but it’s a refusal to purchase these goods that have been abstracted in a particular context. So how do we distinguish between using a regime like this for purely policy reasons which I policy, that’s a tough word, but say for kind of pragmatic geopolitical reasons, versus the kind of principled approach that you that you argue for in the book
Leif Wenar 10:01
The key to seeing this is looking at the strange way we run the world when it comes to natural resources today, for natural resources, all of our countries still use the same bad old rule that used to legitamate, the Atlantic slave trade and genocide and apartheid. It really is the old rule of might makes right. So let me give you an example. Years ago, when Saddam Hussein’s junta took over Iraq in a coup, it became legal for Americans to buy Iraq’s oil from Saddam. And then years later, when ISIS took over the some of those same oil wells, it became legal for Americans to buy Iraq’s oil from ISIS, the default of American law of every country’s law is might makes right, whoever can control resources in another country, we make it legal to buy the resources from them. Now, that’s an old rule. But if you look at it, it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, if armed robbers sees a gas station down the street from you in Charlottesville, Virginia law doesn’t give that gang the right to sell off the oil and keep the money. But when Gadhafi took over Libya, in a coup, we do with our own American laws, give someone like that the right to sell the country’s oil to us. So whoever has the guns, we make it legal to buy a country’s resources from them. That’s the law that puts all of us consumers into business with these repressive and coercive actors. And that’s the law that we need to replace, because it doesn’t make sense. And as you can tell, it drives the resource curses of authoritarianism, civil conflict, corruption, refugees, all those other things. The law itself doesn’t make sense. And luckily, there is a better principled law that the world has already signed up to, which we could put in place in our own legal regimes, to get us out of business with the men of blood abroad. And that principle is just the principle that every country belongs to its people, the resources of a country belong to its people, not the powerful not to whoever has the most guns, but the people of the country on the resources. If we really believe that principle, that great principle of Gandhi and Mandela, the great principle of the 20th century liberation movements and self determination, if we believe that principle, it shouldn’t be legal for us to buy oil from any autoCrat or armed group who can seize it by force, it should only be legal for us to buy resources, from those people who are minimally accountable to the owners of the resources, that is the people of the country. So the principled approach is to live up to the principles we proclaim, and disable only by resources from people who are minimally and I do mean minimally accountable to the citizens of their own country.
Michael Livermore 13:31
Okay, great. So the so that gives us a principle, right? We’re this isn’t just purely an instrument of kind of nationally oriented policy that there you know, there’s, there’s a principle in play, which is popular sovereignty, the notion of natural resources belong to the people in the countries where they’re found. So of course, I’m, I’m a lawyer at a law school. So then the immediate question is kind of how do you how do you implement this? What are some of the what are some of the complexities that are going to arise so that and you deal with this a lot, a lot in the book, but just to kind of, kind of get them out there. So one, is making judgments about what you just said minimally accountable to the people of the country. Right. So, you know, that can be tricky. Putin is elected, presumably, I mean, I believe he is with like, huge margins. And, you know, there’s going to be some borderline cases, and it’s going to involve an often a somewhat uncomfortable exercise for say, the United States or France or whoever else is engaged in this policy of making judgments about the legitimacy, essentially, of government in, in in places around the world that are that are very different from them culturally, economically, historically. And so, so yeah, so how do we do this just to is there how do we know make those judgments substantively. How procedurally Do do you see that working out? And? And how do we avoid charges of kind of Neo colonialism and ethnocentric study that are kind of very naturally going to arise in a context like this?
Leif Wenar 15:16
Those are fantastic questions, and they’re absolutely vital for any approach like this to answer. Let me pick up on one thing you said, and make the problem a little bit easier. When we say that we believe that the resources of a country belong to the people of the country, we’re not going to buy them from anyone who’s not accountable to the people. Were not questioning the legitimacy of any government. Right? commercial engagement with a country is different than diplomatic recognition. And let me give you an interesting example of that. So you may remember, in 2011, when the rebels in Libya started opposing good off his regime, the American government first did something not surprisingly, put sanctions on Libya, which meant that no American person could buy Libya’s oil from the government that shows that we control our commercial engagement. But then, in April of 2011, the American government went even farther. And the White House issued an electorate and an executive order saying that, from this day onward, Americans may buy Libya’s oil from the rebels, so long as no money from the sales go to the Government of Libya. So here we have a situation where America recognizes the Libyan Government, as the government of the country, and Qaddafi was the head of state. But it says Nevertheless, Americans now have the legal right to buy Libya’s oil from those people, the rebels who had no official status whatsoever, we can engage commercially, with anyone we want to that’s our sovereign, right. That’s our power. We’re not bound by who’s the head of state and another country, and we’re not making any judgment on the legitimacy of any government. If we stood up for our principles and decided not to buy oil, say from Libya now, we would say, look who rules in Libya is none of our business. But right now, Libya will get none of our business for oil, because no one accountable to the people can sell it to us right now. So the problem is a little easier than the legitimacy of governments. We’re just saying, Look, we can buy that stuff from you right now, any more than we could buy, say, enslaved people from you. It’s just not something that our principles allow us to do. All right. But that still leaves us with your tough question, which is, how to have a rule to distinguish, say governments that are minimally accountable to their people from governments that aren’t. Let me say first, that our rule right now is a bad rule. Our rule right now is whoever has the most guns and controls the oil wells will give them the right to sell us the oil, that is a bad rule that’s causing a lot of problem for them for us, we can do better than that rule. But how do we do it? We need standards that aren’t ethnocentric or Western, we need standards that everyone in the world can see are good faith standards. And here’s three minimal signals of a place where the people have some accountability over their resources. First, can the people of the country find out what the government is doing with their resources? Second, can the people of the country protest what the government is doing with their resources without fearing imprisonment or death? And third, if a majority of people in a country don’t like what the government is doing with the resources will the government’s policy change in a reasonable time? So the test is minimal. And I do mean minimal civil liberties and political rights. And luckily, there are well respected metrics of civil liberties and political rights for every country in the world. The World Bank has won Freedom House has one The Economist has one policy has one. My NGO has made a metric of metrics, and it does draw a line of countries where the citizens could not possibly be holding the people who are selling off their resources accountable. Those are the places where we shouldn’t be in business with those who are selling the resources of the country off.
Michael Livermore 19:51
And this would it sounds like we’d be made on a country by country basis, the State Department or some other entity within the US equivalent bodies and other countries would be Have some kind of process and maybe even allow for due process if whatever Venezuela is on the wrong side of that standard and wants to have an appeal, presumably, we could allow for that kind of thing.
Leif Wenar 20:13
Absolutely. And I’m gonna say it might sound politically challenging to do that. But a country in the global south has already started the process. So the Brazilian Senate has drafted what we call clean trade legislation, which would disallow any imports of oil from authoritarian countries into Brazil. And also, as it happens, stop their national oil country company from making any new deals with authoritarian regimes. So Brazil has this bill, and they’ve got a part of the bill where they show how they’re going to set up their own standards for which countries are disqualified from this kind of trade. It sounds challenging, but it can be done.
Michael Livermore 20:59
Yeah. Great. So yeah, again, I think the the appeal of, of pulling resources, or, you know, making it more difficult for authoritarian regimes to do bad things is very strong. And so I think a lot, I suspect, and at least in my mind, a lot of the objections that would come up would be very practical kinds of objections that people are delegating. And maybe, maybe I’m wrong about this. But my guess is that you don’t get a lot of pushback on the well, actually, I do like the idea of supporting authoritarian regimes. Right? Most people don’t like that. It’s just a question of, can we figure out how to do it. But another, you know, kind of issue that’s going to naturally come up is, is just the I mean, the reality that the in the current world, a lot of countries are going to fall outside of, I think, a minimal standard of accountability. China, Saudi Arabia, Russia. You know, Brazil is an interesting case. And there are there are elections in Brazil. But in any case, a lot of the global economies actually going to fall outside of, I would think this a standard that you would set or that one would probably reasonably set. So so there’s going to be this issue where there’s, if the idea was kind of fully implemented, where, let’s say, minimally democratic countries, were kind of in one block, authoritarian regimes were in another block, there would be a lot of D linking in the in the global economy. So So then, I guess, kind of two concerns come up. So one is that that would, that wouldn’t be sufficient to really undermined the authoritarian regimes, they would just form another block, that would, you know, the authoritarians would still be able to sell their sell their oil or sell what other resources, prices for natural resources would be lower in the authoritarian block than they would in the non authoritarian block? Because I think I think the natural resources are less scarce or less scarce there. So in the wealthy part of the world, the less authoritarian part of the world, we would have more resource scarcity. So prices would be a little higher, they’d have in the authoritarian block, there’d be prices would be lower. But it wouldn’t necessarily have kind of that’s, that’s an equilibrium state that we could find ourselves in. So I guess the question is, twofold. One, do you? Do you find that equilibrium state to be just like implausible? So we don’t have to worry about it? Or if it is plausible. Is that okay, is that is that superior, at least to the status quo? It’s not ideal, obviously.
Leif Wenar 23:43
Yeah, that’s a really important question, too. So let’s look at it. Let me again, try to make a big policy issue a little bit easier for us. The policies we’re talking about here only have to do with a country’s natural resources, right, we really are trying to fight the resource curse, which strikes countries with a lot of oil, gas, metals, gems. So the rules for commercial engagement, really just to apply to those kinds of natural resources. It’s only when we’re dealing with the resources of resource cursed countries, that we put these questions about minimal accountability in play. So for example, China is not resourced cursed country and direct trade with China wouldn’t be affected by this policy. And since you mentioned Brazil, and we say Brazil is way way over the line of public accountability. Even I could mention Kuwait is over the line of public accountability. So not all countries have to be Norway, for us to trade with them. And there will be enough energy for all of the West to us. If we implement these policies. We just don’t Need to buy oil and gas from the authoritarians at home or groups anymore? Okay, but then the question still are emerges if we don’t buy oil from, say, the countries in the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, well, then maybe our prices will go up. And maybe China will just buy that oil anyways, good for
Michael Livermore 25:23
China. Yeah, good for China.
Leif Wenar 25:25
So, as far as we can tell, price rises for energy, like gasoline in the West will be moderate. And of course, we can phase the process in to make the price rises as moderate as we want. As far as we can tell, getting off of authoritarian oil, for the United States states might mean five to 10%, more paid for a gallon of gas. And that’s well within the range of normal variation that we see for gasoline all the time. So it would be expensive. But it actually would help us get off from fossil fueled cars. Anyways, which is something we need to do this can push us away from oil towards the green fuels, the future. Now, what about China, China will get cheaper oil. But it might also get the resource curse. If we stop buying authoritarian oil, say from the Persian Gulf, then China will become dependent for its primary energy imports, on a region into which it cannot project power. Right? This is a very troubled region of the world. What’s going to happen when the next Middle Eastern crisis comes up? China has no military there at all. Does China really want to deal with ISIS? 2.0 is like what is it going to do that? Is it really in China’s national interest to be so dependent on these countries who have proved so unstable? In the past? Having said all that, I’m sorry, my just let me finish with one more of the primary power of these proposals isn’t hard power, right, hard power has been very difficult for us when it comes to oil for all these decades, so many invasions and sanctions and failed alliances. The main power of these policies is soft power, the idea that a country belongs to its people. And that idea really is affirmed by a majority of citizens in countries in every region of the world, including the Middle East. If we take a principled and somewhat costly stance for that idea that every country belongs to its own people, the soft power of the idea will empower people in other country who are fighting for reforms within their country for more accountability to the people. And people who are fighting for reforms exist in every country, outside the palaces and also inside the palaces. If we stand up for the principle, it’ll help others to stand up for it, too.
Michael Livermore 28:14
Yeah, so so. So this actually, I think, is an interesting kind of segue into maybe some, some of those kind of, because obviously, you’re you’re a philosopher, and by training and, and by disposition, presumably. And, and so you’re, you’re engaged in this important work in the in the policy domain, but obviously, you have lots of kind of philosophical interests and commitments. And so one of the one that kind of comes to mind in this context is, you know, we can imagine, you know, the, this world where that, you know, it’s not a good equilibrium, but it’s something that might occur where, you know, some countries get off authoritarian oil, and they kind of form not a trade bloc, but a kind of a natural resource trade bloc, with slightly higher prices, five to 10%, which isn’t nothing, but it’s not going to tank anybody’s economy, then you’ve got the authoritarian resource block, that enjoys, I guess, is the word slightly lower prices for fossil fuels. Now, one possibility is that all of the negatives associated with authoritarianism basically, and authoritarian regimes kind of are problematic for the authoritarian bloc, and, you know, the benefits that flow from Democratic or accountable governance, kind of are enjoyed by the the non authoritarian block, and that ultimately leads the authoritarian bloc, either to shrink or to decline over time. And and you know, that can be kind of a happy story there. You can imagine an alternative whether it just forms it just an equilibrium for us. We just we don’t know, right? It’s just kind of speculative about what is going to happen and so, so I guess the question that And as how much of your own views about the the value or the importance or the wisdom of D linking from, from authoritarian Natural Resources flows from these consequences flows from a belief about, say the soft power or what would what would be what happened visa vie China foreign policy, if it’s, you know, if its energy was so closely associated with authoritarian regimes. And so, you know, because that one argument I could imagine, it’s just fine. If it turns out that, you know, a authoritarian block formed that is kind of resilient and exists and is able to perpetuate over time. That’s not ideal, but there’s nothing we could do about it. And, you know, at least we know that we’re living by our principles, and that’s kind of sufficient, even if it actually doesn’t undermine the authoritarian regimes in practice. And there’s just as many authoritarian regimes as that would be, you know, without even if we didn’t change our behavior, so it doesn’t actually affect governance. But it what it does mean is that we’re not participating in it. And is that kind of a sufficient argument for you? Or does that is that kind of enough to drive the argument? Or do we have to kind of take the further step to think, actually, you know, part of what isn’t, you know, well, it’s not really worth doing. And this is going to actually reduce the amount of authoritarianism in the world.
Leif Wenar 31:33
The consequences are extremely serious. Remember this statistics about the resource curse. We started out with? authoritarianism, corruption, civil conflict, refugees, poverty, hunger, the resource curse really does make the whole world worse than it could be. And let me add another dimension to that consequentialist argument. It’s not just people over there who are badly affected, there is a resource curse on the west. This is the national security angle to the project. Think about the threats and crises that the West is faced during your lifetime. Right now, it’s Putin invading Ukraine. That’s a huge crisis. Before that, it was ISIS. Remember taking over the oil wells in Iraq and Assad of Syria, barrel bombing his own people. Before that, it was Gadhafi with his years of supporting terrorists, all over the world before Gaddafi was Saddam Hussein, invading Kuwait in 1990, the Iranian regime for all these years since the revolution, supporting militant groups from Hezbollah, to Islamic Jihad, Saudi Arabia, using vast oil wealth to spread an archaic version of Islam around the world for all those decades. Even if you look back to the United States is greatest existential threat of all time, the Soviet Union, in the 80s surging ahead of the West, and the nuclear arms race. All of those threats and crises were paid for with our money, right, we paid for all of those bombs and bullets and missiles with with our money to buy oil from those regimes and from those armed groups, the people who were buying the weapons, we’re buying it with our money. That’s the national security problem. The status quo is really bad. And the transition is hard. But we’ve got to do it, because the alternative is potentially disastrous.
Michael Livermore 33:51
It’s already been terrible, right? There’s no, there’s no question about that the status quo is bad. Yeah.
Leif Wenar 33:59
Yeah, let me add a more personal angle to it. It’s it’s not just that all these world events are calamitous. And every time you look at the newspaper, we see some oil stayed in trouble. It’s that we’re personally involved to all sorts of things that we buy every day contain these natural resources that have been coercively extracted. You probably have heard about conflict minerals. It could be that in your cell phone is a little piece of the Democratic Republic of Congo that was harvested at gunpoint by one of the terrible militias in the Congo, who have made the place so disastrous for decades, millions of deaths from the conflicts in the Congo, millions of refugees, all trying to get possession of these metals that go into our smartphones and our laptops and our cars. When we buy ordinary goods, we are tainted with the violence and the coercion that occurred at the source of extraction. And that’s a business we really shouldn’t want to be in. We shouldn’t be buying conflict minerals, we shouldn’t be buying blood boil.
Michael Livermore 35:20
So So So okay, so then just to clarify the the kind of the, the position is that, even if so, so, of course, we want to do what we can to, you know, to undermine authoritarian regimes. And this, this could be one good way to do that. And I guess the question is, even if we’re not convinced about the consequentialist case, and so it kind of it goes to the second point, which is, imagine we’re not convinced about the consequentialist case. But, you know, it sounds as though you would find the, the case about this tent, to be to be persuasive on its own, and just trying to separate out the kind of acting for consequences in the world kind of argument from the, you know, like almost like a personal responsibility that even if we personally can’t do anything about it, or even collectively, the government can’t do anything about it’s still worth costly effort on our part to D link our ourselves from it.
Leif Wenar 36:21
That’s right. And in fact, there’s a third stream of argument, which you already touched on. So the consequences of going by my mic, right, is are terrible. We also don’t want to be buying tainted goods all the time. And third, the real question, Do we really believe in this principle that a country belongs to its people? I mean, imagine that we found out tomorrow that Joe Biden had sold off an oil deposit off the coast of Florida, and pocketed the money to buy some stuff for himself spent some of the rest of the money to buy off some senators and toothpaste and FBI agents to, to quash any dissent from American citizens who found out about it. I mean, it would be outrageous, right? America’s oil does not belong to Joe Biden, he can’t just do what he wants with it, it belongs to the American people. If if we want to have that oil sold off, well, we’ll get Congress to approve it. If we want that oil to be privatized, we’ll get Congress to approve it. oil resources belong to the people. That’s the principle, that’s the principle that Putin is violating. And let me just say, that is the principle which is already enshrined in primary documents of international law. If you look at Article One, both of the major human rights treaties, it just says that the resources of a country belong to the people. And in fact, for, for legal scholars out there, this is actually the only human rights that’s declared twice, in both of the human rights treaties, all of the resources of the country start off in the hands of the people, and if anyone wants to sell them off, they really do have to be accountable to the owners, do we believe that countries belong to their people instead of the powerful, if we believe that then we should switch to this better rule for buying Natural Resources abroad?
Michael Livermore 38:12
So So an idea that you return to a bunch in the book and it’s kind of comes out in the in, you know, that your latest comments, is this idea of division, and kind of and unity. So it’s obviously a kind of making a transition to some some of your value theory and some of the more philosophical work? So, so in the blood oil context, or in the natural resource context, you know, you could say that we’re not we’re not acting, you know, consistently with our principles, right? If if we believe in popular sovereignty, we’re not acting consistently by supporting authoritarian regimes that are not minimally accountable. You argue in the book and point to the various ways that support for authoritarian regimes in this way, leads us to support divisions amongst other people or, you know, helps us or leads us to divide people from their government by supporting governments that are, you know, don’t have the best interest of their people at heart. And in some of the, your recent philosophical work, which, you know, I think we might talk about a little bit now, you know, you talk to the notion of, of unity, and the relationship between various kinds of unity and the theory of value. So, I mean, one thing I’m just curious about the relationship in between your philosophical work and your, your kind of more broad kind of public policy oriented work, let’s say is whether this notion of unity and division is kind of part of what drew you to the issue of natural resources and the natural and the resource curse in the in the first place.
Leif Wenar 39:50
It’s interesting, as a philosopher looking at the resource curse, the big problem really is divisions at the deepest level. So, when we use this rule of might makes right. Of course it divides countries against themselves civil conflict. We see it in Libya and Sudan and BMR. Of course, it divides countries against their neighbors, you know, Ukraine and Russia are at war Saudi Arabia and Yemen was the war. Of course, it divides our countries against their countries, right, the US and Russia, US and Iran, Iraq, so on. And it also divides us against ourselves. Think about the arguments we’ve had over the years with these lose, lose political situations that the resource curse is forced on us. You should we invade Iraq, should we use military action in Libya? Should we invade Syria? Should we tighten our security against terrorist attacks at the cost of our personal freedom? Think of all the bad blood that Americans have had against each other, even people of goodwill, trying to sort out these impossible foreign policy problems. The resource curse is just deficient. You and if division is the problem, then then unity must be the solution. And this is really philosophical, philosophical claim. Unity is what’s good unity within ourselves, unity with the world, and especially unity with each other. That’s the philosophical position that’s driving the policy pronouncements. And that’s the theory that I’ve been working on most recently.
Michael Livermore 41:43
Yeah, great. And so really, it’s a fascinating papers as relatively, relatively recent, and so yeah, maybe we could kind of get into the details. I’ve, you know, deep interest in questions around welfarism. And so it’s a really, it’s a fascinating set of arguments that you make, and so. So the paper is the value of unity, I think, is a really beautiful encapsulation at the end of the paper, you note that the word good kind of derives from the proto Indian European language, the word that means to unite, and you say also a quote, the thesis of this article has been that goodness comes from unity, unity with the world, unity with each other, and unity within ourselves. So maybe we could just start with unpacking that a little bit. So what is unity? With the world or elsewhere your talk of unity between will and world? What is what is what does that mean? What when is there unity? And when is there this unity between will and world?
Leif Wenar 42:40
Good, thanks so much for asking you about this. And this really is foundational philosophy. So we’re shifting gears a bit. To talk about the deepest question. Let me just say what the question is, this is a question that Plato knew millennia ago, the question is the deep philosophical question. What is it that’s good in itself? And what is it that’s bad in itself? So, for example, love can lead to ruin but in itself, love is good. Right? And for agony can bring you clarity, but in itself, agony is bad. And the question is, what is the theory of what’s good in itself, and bad in itself, independently of what it leads to? So just to take some more obvious examples, money might be good, but it’s not good in itself, right? Money is just good for what it can get you. Philosophers have been debating for all these centuries. What is it? That’s good and itself? On unity theory, as you say, what’s good is unity with the world. Unity with each other, and unity with ourselves. So unity with the world is easy. Imagine that there’s no other people in the world and ask yourself, what do you want? What do you want right now, maybe you want a delicious meal that only you really appreciate the taste of, or maybe you want to go for? A Walk in deep forests and think about life’s challenges. Maybe you want to swim in the ocean. Maybe you want the barrier reef to survive another century, when it comes to your relations with the world. When you get what you want. That’s good. And let me just say, when you get what you want, don’t want that’s bad. So there’s a lot of things you don’t want. You don’t want certain kinds of sensations, experiences, tastes, you don’t want to be tortured. If those things happen, then you’re in disunity with the world. And that is bad in itself. So Unity theory says when it comes to your relationship with your world, with the world, whatever you want, it’s good if you get it
Michael Livermore 45:00
All right, good. And so one of the things that you’re kind of, you’re obviously working as to a vast existing literature that is, you know, it goes at least back to Plato. And so there are some other competing theories of of the good or a value here, that you’re that you’re in conversation with, you know, some of the of those that are currently in currency, like the view of hedonic welfare, pleasure, and pain is the kind of underlying goods and Bad’s or alternatively, preference satisfaction or desire based theories, the things that we want are the things that are good when they are, you know, it’s good when our desires are satisfied, our preferences are satisfied. And so the account that of unity that you were just describing, right, it is what is good is when we get the things that we want, when our will maps on to the world when we get this into the desert, or the walk in the woods. And that’s, that’s going to fit pretty well, I would say, there’s gonna be a lot of overlap at least there with hedonic pleasure based or preference satisfaction theory. So, so where is it where unity departs? And of course, this also gets us likely into the notion of unity with each other. So, so so so? So what is what are we talking about there? And, and where, where is the is the fissure points between a unity based theory of value and some of these more, you know, these other views that had been articulated?
Leif Wenar 46:29
You’re absolutely right, that this is a question we’ve wrestled with forever. Let me take someone who advocated a competing theory. And this is one you mentioned hedonism. So Germany, Jeremy Bentham, at the end of the 18th century, said, Look, I’ve solved it, I solve the question of intrinsic value. The only thing that’s good is pleasure. And the only thing that’s bad is pain. That’s it pleasures intrinsically good pains intrinsically that that actually at the time was a big advance. And it did lead to a lot of really worthwhile reforms. But it can’t be right. Right. It just can’t be right, that pleasure is the only thing that’s good. And pain is the only thing. That’s bad. Now, what about kindness? What about love? What about altruism, even if you never know that the person you were kind to or benevolent to received your care, even if you never find out and you never get pleasure from it, it’s still good. And even more clearly, pain, your own pain can’t be the only thing that’s bad. There’s all sorts of things that are bad. So take sadistic torture, one of the worst things you can imagine. Of course, the pain of the victim is bad, even Bentham would admit that, but what about the cruelty itself the cruelty of a torture, even if the torture gets pleasure from what the torture is doing? What the torture is doing is terrible, awful, repulsive. So when you look at what’s really good and bad, certainly pleasure and pain, make it on the list. Pletcher really is good. Anything really is bad, but they’re not the only things. Think about the wide range of things we think are good and bad in themselves. So start at the negative end. Cruelty is bad spite malevolence, domination, antagonism, subjugation, and manipulation. These are all ways we express variations of disunity, harassment, and bullying, molestation, rivalry, these are all states of disunity, and they’re all bad. On the other hand, when you look at the things we think are good in themselves, it’s so much more than just pleasure, like I said, kindness, compassion, beneficence, healing, nurturing alliances, solidarity community. And of course, at the top of the spectrum, is love. All of these things are variations of unity in different circumstances. Those are the things that we think are intrinsically good.
Michael Livermore 49:24
Okay, good. So, so, this is so just to encapsulate to tell me if this is a fair characterization is, you know, the, in the traditional hedonic or desire based accounts, you know, at least on your view, they’re not accounting for a lot of what is good and bad in the world, rest of the kind of incomplete and then and so what you’re offering is this account of unity, where what is good, like love is when we have unity of our of our wills, let’s say or our desires or preferences. I want what’s good for you. You want what’s good for me. I get pleasure when you get pleasure you get pleasure, when I get pleasure. That’s a kind of unity. And then we take the opposite, which would be, you know, like sadism where I derive pleasure from someone else’s pain. That’s disunity. And that’s bad. And the the argument is that this unity based account captures more of our judgments about what is good and bad in the world. So just one, is that a fair summary?
Leif Wenar 50:18
That’s absolutely right. This is the way I do philosophy. And I think it’s often valuable to do start with the phenomena, start with the data, start with the world, what is it that you really think are good in themselves and bad in themselves? And it takes some work to isolate it, right. But if you think about it long enough, and philosophically you, you just come up with a list of things that are bad and good. And it’s so much more than pain and pleasure, as I said, and then the question is, what is the account that gives an explanation for all of those data points, if you want to put it that way? And as it turns out, the answer is unity, unity with the world, unity with each other, and unity with ourselves. And then you just can go back and do a sanity check. I mean, is that really plausible? Well, look at how we teach our children. Don’t we want our children to be unified with the world with each other and with themselves? Right? We teach them to have skills to relate to the world, we tell them, it’s, it’s better if you become a person of integrity and commitment and prudence, right, and to be generous and cooperative and good hearted, and act in solidarity with other people? Are we teaching our children to be unity driven? Along these different dimensions? If you do that sanity check, it looks like the theory is capturing our deepest convictions.
Michael Livermore 51:51
Yeah, it’s really interesting. And and, you know, there’s certain there’s a lot to unpack. And there’s the interesting methodological questions of how to do moral philosophy, of course. But maybe just to press a little bit on this to see if I’m understanding and also, just curious how you respond. These are just thoughts that came to mind when when reading the piece. So So what is the hypo? Okay, I, you know, it’s one way to proceed with these with these kinds of conversations. And so, so one of the, you know, you’ve got a couple of examples that you offer in the paper. And, you know, the very evocative, the one five recall correctly has to do with movies, Gladiators, or some other, you know, spectacle in Rome, and, and you’ve got someone who’s being mauled by lions, but then like, you know, the audience wants the person to be locked out by lions. And so there’s the original suffering, right, which is the person and there’s the disunity between the spectators and the person who’s suffering the kind of the primary harm and, and because of that disunity, the pleasure that the spectators get, counts kind of against value, it’s kind of a negative thing. It’s, it’s pretty classic, this is an objection that people have to utilitarianism or, you know, in various forms is, you know, what are we supposed to do if everyone in the stadium is getting so much pleasure off, you know, from watching this person suffer, you know, does that commit us to the view that there’s like that this is good that we ought to support, you know, feeding people to lions in front of large crowds. Okay, so that’s, so that’s one hypo. And that’s, that’s when there’s been used as an objection to standard utilitarianism for a long time. Let me offer a question. I’m just curious what your thoughts are. So it’s kind of like the, it’s not exactly the opposite, but it’s a slightly different one. So let’s imagine I thought of Oscar the Grouch, the Sesame Street character is the kind of the person that is what I’m gonna use as an example. So Oscar, the Grouch takes pleasure in bad things happening to other people. And if that’s a fair characterization of Oscar, the guest character, but let’s just say that that’s the case. It takes pleasure and bad things happening to others, but doesn’t do anything to bring that about his passive. In fact, he thinks he has moral obligation to not do anything that will harm other people. He just thinks he just likes it. He just he gets a little jolt of pleasure whenever he sees something bad occur, and he’s indifferent when something good occurs. So of course, his life is very satisfying, because there’s a lot of bad things happening in the world. And whenever he’s satisfying to himself, from his his own perspective would would would evaluate it to be satisfying that he has a lot of pleasure he he claims to enjoy his life. He would say it’s worth living and all those other things good. He doesn’t do anything bad in the world to bring about harm. He just has this set of very dis unified preferences basically. Okay, so we have two worlds. A is the world that we currently live in, and B is the current world plus Oscar, Oscar the Grouch this kind of character that just derives pleasure from other people’s pain but doesn’t do anything to bring it about. So I would think in a standard welfarist framework, we would clearly say that world B, the world with Oscar the Grouch is better than the world without Oscar the Grouch, taking into account the internal perspective of the folks in that world, Oscar The graduates happier, everyone else’s is happy according to his own lights, and everyone else is the same. But I think on Unity theory we would evaluate the world a to be better than B. Right? Because I think so that’s kind of question one is, is that the case that you know, you the theory that you’re offering would commit us to the view that world a without Oscar the Grouch is worse than will be with Oscar the Grouch. And then does that sit okay with you, it’s strikes me as odd as an odd conclusion to, to derive but, but maybe it strikes you as exactly the this thing exactly the result you would want to get?
Leif Wenar 55:39
Thanks, it’s good to do philosophy, after all of the resources. And that’s a great blog post. So we’re gonna have to do a little bit more work to get the product firm and set up, but it’s a good one. Let’s distinguish Oscar getting what he wants from Oscars pleasure after he gets what he wants. So here we have Oscar who really has strong desires that other people suffer, right, but doesn’t do anything about it, he just contemplates the suffering. The claim of unity theory is that it is in fact worse, the world is a worse place when Oscar gets what he wants. It’s just bad to be cruel, or spiteful or vindictive, or rejoice in the suffering of others, whether or not you’re causing it or just contemplating it, you can think of Oscar looking out his window, and there’s a kid going by with the ice cream cone. And Oscar thinks, Oh, I really hope that I really want the ice cream drops off the cone, and it does, and he’s gratifies. So happy. The satisfaction of his cruel desire makes the world worse now is the claim. That’s the claim, as you say, he might get pleasure from that he might feel a little for salts of joy, that is a physical sensation, he might have some minor physical sensation of pleasure. When that happens. The pleasure is good in itself, pleasure is always good in itself. But it’s extremely unlikely to rule out the real badness of the satisfaction of his cruel, spiteful desire. What we say about someone like Oscar is they’re badly constituted, they’re a bad person, not only is the satisfaction of their desire, adding badness to the universe, but it’s bad for people to be that way. And this goes back to the Aristotelian position, tradition, the virtue theory, you should find pleasure in good things happen, and you shouldn’t have be painted bad things happening. Oscar is badly constituted, it would be better if people weren’t that way.
Michael Livermore 57:53
So I kind of agree with that. But okay, so there’s a couple of moves happening here. Right? So I totally by the separation of the physical pleasure from the pure preference, satisfaction that so that’s fair. And right, we have to figure out how those things cash out against each other. So when we’re evaluating the world, without Oscar versus the world with Oscar, we have to ask, like, the goodness of the pleasure versus the badness of his. But let’s imagine he doesn’t get very much he gets a little pleasure, right? And he’s really, he has a very strong preference, right? So so we could, we could calibrate those things so that the world would be worse on the on the unitary account, I think, with Oscar the Grouch in it, but just to, you know, the kind of some of the other moves, so there’s interesting the recourse to virtue ethics. So, so I was wondering, I mean, you know, we can maybe get into if we have time, the distinction between value and morality, because another very interesting part of the paper. But for me, it did seem as though there was some virtue ethics, or I even wrote down aesthetic ideas that are finding their way in here. So I don’t approve of or like mean preferences. I find them ugly and unattractive. I think I have reasons for that, too. And like, we could argue about them as someone who disagreed with me, I could try to convince them. But if they don’t have consequences, I feel odd. Let’s just say, being really worried about them. So I can I certainly think it’s unfortunate that disunity unities exist in part because if there was more unity, there would be more desire satisfaction, or there would be more pleasure. So Unity of desire would definitely be a good thing. But but it’s but it strikes me as like slightly different from value that I’m making some other kinds of judgments about folks preferences, that might be reasoned judgments, but that are that’s just don’t seem to me to not strike in a theory of value. So I’m just curious about your views on that like is value kind of an all in enterprise and so it’s okay to bring in virtue Do ethical or even aesthetic judgments into it? Or am I justified in some sense of trying to kind of police the boundaries around a value theory? And to want to resist aesthetic judgments or virtue ethics style judgments from affecting the my views on these value theory questions?
Leif Wenar 1:00:18
You’re absolutely right, the value theory is its own thing. And it really is distinct from morality, and even political theory. It’s not that it’s not important for these things. But it doesn’t exhaust at all what we want to say about what we should do, for example, now aesthetics, let me just make a note aesthetics is within value theory. So aesthetics is part of your unity with the world if you want to see the Grand Canyon. Or if you want to go to the frick gallery that’s getting what you want. And that, of course, can be very good beauty. As you see, it can be very good. But value theory does not in itself, tell us anything about morality, or what constitution we should have, and so on. Those things are built on value theory, but we haven’t got there yet. In a sense, in our conversation, we’ve done the extremes without the middle. So we started out with the resource curse, which is a terrible problem in the world today. And here we are in the very, very deepest foundations of philosophy, what’s good in itself, in between is morality and virtue and politics and all those things we need to work out. But let me just try to connect the dots here. Again, what we see in the world of natural resources is divisions. It’s them this Ben versus them, us versus them and us versus us. It’s not just the resource curses, cause divisions within countries, it also causes people to be divisive. I mean, think of the people themselves, like the cruel, desperate or the corrupt official or an executioner with his sword or some kid drugged up and playing war with a loaded gun. We’ve created a device of identities, and running our world with Mike makes right and that is just the real world. Just Unity’s that we see. And that we can counter with better policies. So we have, on one hand, very applied problems in the world, which can be captured in terms of unity, and disunity. And at the other side, we have a very foundational theory of value, which is telling us what we thought of already just didn’t realize, which is unity is good, and disunity is bad. The rest of the story comes in what’s in the middle? And I’m really excited to say, that’s what I’m working on right now.
Michael Livermore 1:02:50
Yeah, great. You know, I just have one final question for you. I appreciate your your indulgence, and I appreciate you taking the time with me today. So this is there’s had been prior podcast guests. This shows we do episodes, we mostly talk about environmental issues is obviously this is related. It’s not exactly the same thing. But one of the hard problems in environmental ethics these days is people trying to think about wild animals suffering. And you know, just kind of the problem of you know, there’s a lot of a lot of suffering in the natural world. And what, what, if anything, should we do about it, and some folks think we should intervene, lots of folks thinks that’s crazy. But But the question that this puts me in mind of visa vie unity theory is, you know, there’s a way in which the world is full of division. It’s just just the nature of the world. Certainly, the natural world is full of things fighting with each other all the time, there’s just opposition and conflict in the natural world. It’s just kind of our Darwinian heritage. It’s possible that we could separate out the human domain from, you know, the domain of reason and so on. But I wonder if there’s something kind of almost dis unified about trying to seek out unity that the world that there’s a disunity between the notion of unity, and the actual world that we live in, which is kind of foundationally, one of conflict? So since a meta question, but I’m just curious how that lands, like, if I have you know, that there’s, there’s almost like a kind of a unity of accepting that there’s a certain amount of disunity in the world. Again, I haven’t really fully thought that out, but, but I’m curious, curious how that lands lands with you.
Leif Wenar 1:04:34
Yeah, no one could deny. There’s a lot of disunity in the world. And we just have to do what we can to overcome the conflict as much as we can. As a philosopher. I take the longer view. If you’re interested in any of this, you can go to my website which is winnaar dot info. That’s w e n AR dot info. And I wrote something in the New York Times asking whether humanity is getting better. With all of our divisions and conflicts and strife, there are reasons to think that humanity is getting more unified. We can even go back to our dear friend, Plato. And Plato, at the end of his life thought that a human society can only be unified if it has a maximum of 5000 households. And it Aristotle after him thought that a city couldn’t be bigger than the call of a herald could reach all the way across. They had very pessimistic standards for what the possibilities for unity could be. But now look, think about what Plato or Aristotle would say if they looked at what the United Kingdom and 65 million people, United States 330 million people, India 1.4 billion people united in political formations that maintain degree of stability and civility and peace, we are unifying on a greater and greater scale. If we can get rid of our archaic rules like might makes right we really can look to a future in which humanity is more unified still.
Michael Livermore 1:06:33
Well, that’s a you know, a wonderful way to end the podcast, very optimistic note. And thanks for for taking the time to chat with me today. It really do appreciate it’s been a fascinating conversation very, as you know, very wide ranging between between very practical and very philosophical questions. And so thanks for all your great work in this area. And it was been a great talk.
Leif Wenar 1:06:54
Thanks so much, Mike. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you and congratulations on the podcast.
Michael Livermore 1:07:00
And listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, let us know. You can give us a like a rating subscribe to the podcast and follow us on social media. It’d be great to hear from you, till next time.
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