Transcript: Philosophy with a Touch of Huemer

 

Date of recording: June 23, 2024, The Savvy Street Show

Hosts: Roger Bissell and Marco den Ouden. Guest: Michael Huemer

 

For those who prefer to watch the video, it is here.

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. Explanatory references are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

 

Roger Bissell

Hello, and welcome to The Savvy Street Show. My name is Roger Bissell, and I’m standing in for our regular host, Vinay Kolhatkar. Today on The Savvy Street Show we have a distinguished guest from the field of philosophy, and also here again is my co-host, Marco den Ouden. Marco is a well-known libertarian and publisher of the blog The Jolly Libertarian, and he is going to introduce our special guest. Welcome to the show, Marco.

 

Marco den Ouden

Thank you, Roger. Our special guest on the show today is Michael Huemer. Michael is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and his fields of expertise include epistemology, ethics, meta-ethics, and political philosophy. He is the author or co-author of a dozen books, one of them which is not yet published, and his books include Ethical Intuitionism, The Problem of Political Authority, and his most recent book, Understanding Knowledge. He’s also the author of over 80 academic articles. Welcome to the show, Michael.

 

Michael Huemer

Thanks, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

 

Marco den Ouden

Okay, I have a couple questions to lead off with about your method of doing philosophy. First, Michael, you call yourself an intuitionist. Now, I haven’t read your book on intuitionism yet, but I have read Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind, in which he also explains intuitionism and why he is an intuitionist. Now, Jonathan Haidt suggests that David Hume was right, that our emotions set the course for our thinking, and our conscious reasoning is often just a rationalization for justifying our emotions. We’re merely a slave to our passions. Haidt refines Hume using intuition as a substitute for emotions, arguing that there are two different kinds of cognition: intuition and reasoning. Do you agree with Haidt’s assessment of Hume and of how he defines the concept of intuition?

 

Michael Huemer

Jonathan Haidt’s use of intuitionism is different from the use in philosophy.

Well, Jonathan Haidt’s use of intuitionism is different from the use in philosophy. It’s not completely unrelated, but it’s not really the same thing. First, he’s talking about a psychological issue, and the philosophers are usually not talking about the psychological issue. In the philosophical uses, the intuitionists are saying, first of all, there are objective values. Second, the way that we know about them or the way that you’re justified in believing an evaluative proposition depends ultimately on a mental state called an intuition. That’s different from what the psychologists are saying because the psychologists are never addressing a normative issue. They’re just making a claim about how people in fact form beliefs. Jonathan Haidt is not making a claim that there are objective values, and he’s also not making a claim about justification; he’s not saying you’re justified in believing something.

The other thing is that we’re not exactly using intuition in the same way. It’s not totally unrelated, because we both agree that you need to have some input that’s non-inferential. So, some of your value judgments have to be starting points that you didn’t arrive at by reasoning. But these starting points in the usual philosophical usage and in my usage are not emotions. They’re things that when you think about them, you can see to be true obviously, like the shortest path between any two points is a straight line. I would call that an intuition, and that’s widely used terminology in epistemology. You would say that’s intuitive, meaning when you think about it, it’s just obvious, you don’t have to give an argument for that. The claim of the intuitionists in ethics is that there are some ethical propositions that are intuitive in that sense.

David Hume wasn’t a realist. He didn’t think that there are objective evaluative truths.

Now, David Hume is wrong. It appears that David Hume, first of all, wasn’t a realist. So, he didn’t think that there are objective evaluative truths. Saying exactly what his view is in modern terms is a little hard because he’s a little bit ambiguous. But he didn’t think there were objective values. So, if there are objective values and then we have cognitive states that represent them, then that goes against Hume’s view about human motivation. He thought that you could only be motivated by your desires, but I think we could be motivated by our value judgments, so you could want to do one thing, but you could have the judgment that you should do something else, and then you could be motivated to follow the judgment.

 

Marco den Ouden

Well, I’m definitely going to have to read your book to find out more about that because that sounds like quite a different take than Haidt’s take, and I like the philosophical approach.

In your book, The Problem of Political Authority, you derive an anarcho-capitalist position not by relying on “tentative or controversial intuitions, but on clear mainstream intuitions.” Now, this sounds like you would avoid the controversial hard cases such as abortion, capital punishment, intellectual property rights, or the state of Israel. But wouldn’t these be the very issues that would likely result in a clash between the private defense agencies that you propose? And so, wouldn’t it be advisable to dig into these difficult questions rather than avoid them?

 

Michael Huemer

The idea is to try to start from a case that people don’t disagree about.

Well, when I said that I’m relying on common sense intuitions, that doesn’t mean that I’m not addressing any controversial issues. I’m defending a highly controversial position. Anarchism in the first place is highly controversial. But the idea is to try to address a controversial issue by starting from intuitions or, just in general, starting from premises that are less controversial. Can this be done? Well, read the book and see if I succeed. But the idea is to try to start from a case that people don’t disagree about, or there’s minimal disagreement about, and then see whether you can somehow use that to resolve more controversial cases. Having said that, in the book I in fact did not address the specific things that you mentioned. I didn’t address abortion because in fact I don’t know the answer to that. I didn’t address Israel, also because I don’t know how to solve that. By the way, anarchism wouldn’t work for Israel in the current situation. Basically, you have to solve that conflict first before they could have anarchism, because right now they have to be protected from the surrounding states.

There was a third thing that you mentioned, intellectual property, and I don’t really know the answer to that either. But I could tell you what I think would happen in the anarchist society, which is, they would not protect intellectual property. Roughly speaking, you have to get a lot of agreement. In order for something to be reliably protected, there has to be pretty good agreement about it, which there isn’t about intellectual property. So, you could have some communities that think it’s legitimate and a bunch of other communities that think it isn’t. And the nature of this particular issue is that if half of the people are not recognizing it, then it’s pointless. So, if half of the people can take your patents, and the other half of the people can’t, then you might as well not have patents.

 

Roger Bissell

Well, that’s a very good point, and I love this particular subject, which unfortunately we’re not focusing on today. But I wanted to follow up on starting from a widely agreed point and then basing arguments on that. I was going to tie my next question to what Marco asked you. I was going to ask you if you see an advantage in using intuition rather than formal argument to promote individual liberty, and I guess your answer would be: No, that’s not what I do. You would say that you would start with your groundwork intuitions and then you would build on that using arguments and facts and so on. I was going to ask you about sophists who are going to pluck something out of what you said, like, “I have an intuition that a certain government intervention program of control over the economy or private individual behavior. . . . My intuition says those are justified.” So, how do you deal with people who claim to be intuitionists, but they come up with some conclusion that’s wildly different from yours?

 

Michael Huemer

First, I want to clarify. I’m not using some weird new methodology that nobody ever tried before. As a matter of fact, I’m doing the same thing that everyone else is doing, because there aren’t any people who present infinitely long arguments. In the history of the subject, there has never been anyone who presented an infinite argument. Everyone has starting points. So, most objections to intuitionism are apparently objections to having any starting point which, if you think about it, is an incoherent idea. The difference is just that I recognize that fact. I recognize I have starting points. I recognize what they are, and I defend what I’m doing explicitly. Everyone else just does it, and they don’t say that that’s what they’re doing.

But your main question is: Suppose somebody says that they have very different intuitions from me. What would I do? Well, there’s two possibilities, because it wasn’t clear. Are they just lying about what their intuitions are? So, if the question is: How do I stop people from lying about their intuitions? I cannot. I can’t stop them. But what if they actually do have very different intuitions? Well, this is why I said we try to take very widely shared intuitions. My intuitions that I would start with would not be things like libertarianism is true, like welfare programs are unjust. It would not be that. It would be something that Democrats would agree with. So, it’d be something like it wouldn’t okay for me in reality right now to go over to my neighbor next door and demand that he gives me a bunch of money and point a gun at him and tell him, give me the money because I need to send money to Oxfam to help the poor. And you agree I can’t do that. So, that would be the normal starting point. If somebody disagrees with that, then I don’t know what to do, but almost everyone agrees with that. Then I can start asking them things like Why would it be okay for the State? What’s special about those guys? Why do they get to do that? And my experience is, in fact, people do not have a good answer to that. And I’ve read the literature, so they’re probably not going to come up with an answer that I don’t know about. Philosophers have thought about this, and there are answers to it, but they just are not very good.

 

Roger Bissell

So, you’re basically saying that most people go in pretty much the same fashion that you do, but they might call them premises or assumptions or axioms instead, just whatever it seems, upon reflection, to be obvious. “How could you question that?” So, you find some bedrock place to start, and then you can build a bridge to people who might have a different policy idea, and then you show them how, if we agree on this, then doesn’t it make sense that you can’t do this? When I ran for the school board one time here locally, I was talking to a very liberal neighborhood group who wanted a lot more money for the educational system. I was trying to reason from the idea that we all want the best education for our children. So, it’s that kind of thing. “Sure, who doesn’t? That’s obvious.” You start with something obvious, and then you try to show them another way of thinking about it. I do see that that’s very much how even for somebody who thinks with reason and syllogisms, that would seem to be a good way to go.

As you may know, I cut my teeth on Ayn Rand’s philosophy many, many years ago, and a lot of our viewers did, too. You wrote a piece called “Why I am not an Objectivist,” and soon after I got online back in the nineties, I saw it and loved it. It’s a long piece, but if you could, please briefly tell us what you think are the key shortcomings, even at this point today, the key shortcomings in Rand’s philosophy?

 

Michael Huemer

I think there are mistakes all over the place. [In The Objectivist Ethics.]

It’s really hard. I don’t think that you can actually summarize that because there’s like dozens of objections or something. I’ll say the most distinctive thing about Ayn Rand as a philosopher is her theory of the nature of ethics, which appears in that essay, “The Objectivist Ethics.” That’s the most distinctive of her. It’s not the only thing and might not even be the most important thing, but it’s the thing that she contributes to philosophy that’s most different from what other people were saying. But also, it’s just a terrible argument. I can’t really summarize everything that’s wrong with it, because I think there are mistakes all over the place. There’s supposed to be an argument for ethical egoism, but it’s hard to figure out what the argument is. Basically, I think when you figure out what’s going on, ethical egoism actually turns out to be a premise of the argument, or something really close to that, but she uses language in such a way that most people don’t notice that that’s what’s going on.

 

Roger Bissell

You mean it’s circular?

 

Michael Huemer

Yes, begging the question. Here’s an analogy. You meet this Christian, and the Christian says, “Human beings are the only beings who are capable of properly worshiping God, and so that’s why we need ethics, to tell us how to please God, and so now I’ve given you a theory of ethics, and now I’ve shown you that you have to worship God.” No, you just assumed that. Now, that is analogous to saying, “Living things are the only things that have an alternative of existing or not existing, and so we need ethics to tell us how to preserve our lives.” No, you didn’t give any argument for that. You just assumed that life was the ultimate value. You didn’t show that. Just saying it could either happen or not happen, and it depends upon your action, doesn’t show you what you should do. Anything that you could take as a value, you could say that we have the alternative of having that thing or not having it, so we need ethics in order to make sure that we have that value. But that doesn’t show that that’s the value.

 

Roger Bissell

Well, yes, it seems that there are ambiguities that need to be teased out and analyzed to see if it all fits together or it doesn’t. That’s one of the chief challenges that I’ve had over the years in figuring out. Is it tight? Does it hold together? Is it coherent or not?

Now, that’s ethics. I was just wondering, have you studied Rand’s concept theory in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Do you think there’s anything original or helpful in what she says there that one might not run into otherwise?

 

Michael Huemer

That is a very interesting book, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I read that a long time ago when I was in college, and I think it’s a good thing to read just because it stretches your mind and makes you think about the issues. Now, is it a great contribution to philosophy? I thought it was quite similar to Locke’s theory about concepts, that you start from experiences, and when you’re forming an abstract concept, you’re omitting something from it. That is Locke’s view. That’s also her view, although she says something a little more specific. She says you’re omitting measurements. But I think that might be overly specific, unless you’re using the word “measurement” in such a broad way that it just means you’re omitting some details.

I thought it [measurement omission] was quite similar to Locke’s theory about concepts.

Now, is that a correct theory? I don’t know if that’s exactly correct. This is what people like Berkeley and the other empiricists would say: What are you talking about? They thought that sensory experiences are images in the mind. So, imagine taking an image, a picture of a horse or something (it’s an example of Berkeley), and somebody says, take that thing, omit the color from it. What?! There’s a picture of a horse. You take away its color. What do you have left? Well, you just took away the whole image. You can’t take away the specific color and have anything left. So, if you really just started from the image, it doesn’t actually make sense that you omit the details, because there’s nothing left. It might be that actually you’re assuming that you already had something abstract there in the first place, and you can’t really explain where you got the abstract idea from. It had to already be there.

 

Roger Bissell

Well, there’s one other tidbit here. I was wondering if you’ve read any of the materials Rand has written about art and aesthetics. My question is, do you think that aesthetics really properly belongs in philosophy any more than say philosophy of law or philosophy of education?

 

Michael Huemer

Well, maybe those things also belong to philosophy. Maybe in order to think about the law, you should first think about philosophy. You should think philosophically about: Why do we have law? And why does it matter if you’re following the law? Actually, that does seem right to me.

But what about aesthetics? It’s not the case that in order to make good art, you have to think about aesthetics. That’s not true. But it might help. I don’t know. Actually, I’m not even sure if it does help. I don’t know. I have to talk to some artists. But yes, she was very interesting on that subject. Although, you know, ultimately, I guess I do not agree with her definition of art, because I think it only covers representational art: “a selective re-creation of reality according to the author’s metaphysical value judgments.” Okay, “re-creation of reality” sounds like it has to be representational art.

 

Roger Bissell

It does sound like that, yes. Thank you.

 

Marco den Ouden

Michael, in your essay on Ayn Rand, you argue that ethics is a priori. Does this commit you to holding that there’s only one universal true ethics? And if so, what do you see as being that ethics?

 

Michael Huemer

I think the answer is: It doesn’t commit me to that, but that thing is just a trivial truth. That there’s one true ethics, as far as I understand what that means, is just a necessary truth. And you can put anything in for ethics. Is there one true mathematics? Is there one true physics? In just any subject. Yes, there’s one true “that,” because every truth is part of that. If you find an ethical truth that’s part of the true ethics, and then there’s an alternative ethical proposition, and it’s incompatible with the true one, then it’s false, because that’s what incompatible means. Incompatible means that they can’t both be true. So, there can’t be two incompatible ethical truths; there could be at most one, and so, if there are any ethical truths at all, then there’s one true ethics.

 

Marco den Ouden

Well, that’s interesting because, for quite a few years now, I’ve been interested in the philosophy of Isaiah Berlin, who of course is well known for his value pluralism, as well as for phrasing the problem of political authority very much like you do, that it’s a question of obedience and duty to obey. Regarding value pluralism, he says that genuine values can often be in conflict; and in any given situation, we have to make a choice. For example, are we going to be brave and risk death to save a stranger? Or are we going to be prudent and avoid such a risk to preserve our own life? So, that’s a case of two conflicting value judgments there. So, how do you view Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism?

 

Michael Huemer

Well, I do have a pluralistic value system. So, when you asked the previous question about the one true ethics, I was thinking: Can there be conflicting ethical systems? The answer is no. But maybe it just meant, is there more than one thing that’s good that isn’t reducible to other things? As far as I can tell, there is. There’s happiness and there’s loyalty and there’s honesty and justice. It looks like there’s more than one value. I don’t see how to reduce them all. There are people who give unitary theories where there’s only one value, but they just wind up having to say very counterintuitive things, like the utilitarians. That’s the most common unitary theory of ethics, where everything is just maximizing enjoyment and minimizing suffering. But then it winds up that they have to say, you have a healthy patient who’s got organs that could be transplanted into five other patients. You can kill the healthy patient and save five other people by harvesting his organs because that’s going to prevent more pain. That’s obviously wrong. Nobody’s been able to come up with a theory that has only one value, that also gets the right results.

 

Marco den Ouden

That example of the patient who has five organs that could save five lives if you kill him sounds a bit like the famous trolley problem.

 

Michael Huemer

Except that most people think that you should turn the trolley, but almost everyone agrees that you should not kill the healthy patient.

 

Roger Bissell

Well, it’s interesting that you said that you don’t know if there are any unitary theories, because I immediately thought about Aristotle among other people who said that your flourishing or living well, your good life—there are subsidiary values that feed into that, and you can have a different way of slicing up the pie of health and friendship and so on. But all of these are necessary constituents of a good life, and if you’re missing some of them, it’s like missing nutrients from your food intake. If you don’t have enough vitamin C, you’ll get scurvy. So, in a way, Aristotle saw these things as kind of in a hierarchy, like you have lower-level concepts and higher-level ones, and they ultimately fall under the great categories of attribute or action or so on, and it all comes up from your ground-level observations. I think Aristotle might’ve said something similar is true for your values. Like you value a good wine or you value…I don’t know what they ate then, olives or whatever…

 

Michael Huemer

Yeah, you must have had olives then.

 

Roger Bissell

So, altogether it’d be good food, good drink, good nourishment. It all just groups together under what you put in your body, the ideas that you learn, and so on. So, I was wondering, when you say a unitary theory, would you be ruling out something like Aristotle’s view? Or would you say that’s not really unitary because it’s so complex.

 

Michael Huemer

The latter. You can have a single value if you’re allowed to characterize it in vague evaluative terms—like you say, my value could be the good, that’s all that matters to me. But then when I started telling you what the good is, there’s like 10 different things. You described it as living well. That’s evaluative and it’s super vague. And then when you start telling me what constitutes living well, there’s multiple different things, right?

 

Roger Bissell

I do have a super-vague standard of value, yes, that’s true.

All right. I don’t want to mischaracterize what your position would be, but I understand you to have said that when Ayn Rand made statements about the choice to live rather later in her writings, this implied that what goals we should have and ends we should pursue are not dictated by facts, but instead we just value certain things; we want them and so whatever is conducive to getting those things we want, that’s what we need to do. [Editor’s Note: This refers to “Causality vs. Duty,” in which Rand said that a person is bound by a moral imperative only if and when they first choose to live, and that it’s only true that you must do something if it is required in order to support your choice to live.] It’s kind of utilitarian or instrumental—this will help me get that so I should do this. Someone I’ve known for a long time, a friend, Douglas Rasmussen, has pointed out that this might imply not a rational, reason-directed theory, but instead what is called “voluntarism,” where the will is superior to the reason, and morality doesn’t hinge on your reason, but on your will. Whatever you want, that’s what you should do. [Editor’s Note: This refers to voluntarism, the philosophical view that the human will has primacy over reason—not to volunteerism or voluntaryism or voluntarism, the political view that freedom of choice/will should govern all human action and interaction.] Now, do you think that this suggestion by Rasmussen about Rand’s later writing is correct? Do you think that she really didn’t realize that implication and that it conflicted with what she had previously said about rational self-interest, and maybe she was painting herself into a corner? To me, that is a big pivotal issue, and I don’t know if it’s been successfully resolved. So, what do you think about that?

 

Michael Huemer

Rand probably had different strands of thought, which she didn’t realize are just conflicting strands of thought or didn’t completely separate and decide what her view was.

When you talk about famous philosophers of the past, and then you try to fit their views into the taxonomy of views that we have frequently, they’re ambiguous. I think that Rand probably had different strands of thought, which she didn’t realize are just conflicting strands of thought or didn’t completely separate and decide what her view was. She wants it to be that there are objective values and truths, but if you wind up saying that such and such is only good conditional on your choosing to value life and you didn’t have a reason for that, well, that’s a subjectivist theory. That is what everyone else calls subjectivism. Maybe the better view was that life is objectively good. The other way of interpreting the whole thing is a naturalist theory, that the good just is that which promotes life, and then if you don’t choose to live, then you’re just choosing the bad. I like that a lot better than the theory that it’s only good if you choose it.

 

Roger Bissell

Right. Plato’s Euthyphro: Is it good because I desire it, or do I desire it because it’s good? That whole conundrum. I agree with you.

One of Rand’s catch-phrases [a variant on Aristotle] was “nature will take its course.” If you didn’t like the law of contradiction, well, try to get along without it and see what happens, buddy. If you don’t believe that you should do what promotes your life and your well-being, then nature will take its course. That’s when you throw up your hands because you can’t get anywhere in a discussion with someone like that. You say, okay, let’s agree to disagree, and God bless you. I hope it turns out better for you than I think it will.

 

Michael Huemer

Well, that’s departing from the intellectual issue, right? If you found somebody who doesn’t value life, then they’ll probably die soon. But that doesn’t answer the issue of how we in fact know.

 

Roger Bissell

No, it’s just giving up.

 

Marco den Ouden

Some philosophers have argued that libertarianism encompasses more than just the non-aggression principle. For example, Roderick Long and others promote what they call left-wing market anarchism, which embraces many of the concerns of the Left as well as concern for the poor and the downtrodden. And this is sometimes called thick libertarianism. On the other hand, people like Ayn Rand, say, as she said in a letter from 1947 on the subject, that the only shared moral premise that is needed for the foundation for the legal system of a free society is that people of diverse moralities all agree that all humans are ends in themselves. Many advocates of thin libertarianism prefer this minimalist foundation to the more expansive moral base for liberty. Do you see anarcho-capitalism that you argue for as compatible with either of these two views? And if not, what do you think is the necessary set of principles that we need as a basis for a free society?

 

Michael Huemer

No, I don’t agree with either of those. Take the second thing first: The only thing we need is a principle that all individuals are ends in themselves. No, that’s not enough. I agree that that’s a good principle, but that’s not enough. Is there intellectual property? People are ends in themselves, so should there be patent law, and [if so] what should be the term for the patents? Obviously, you cannot answer that [patent terms] from that [the principle of patents]. It’s just not going to answer every question, although it’s a good idea.

Then, what’s wrong with the left libertarian view? I gave the example earlier where I decided that I’m going to go over to my neighbor and demand some money for charity, because there are poor people in the world, and I want to donate some money, and I don’t have enough money for the poor. So, I just demand that he give me money, otherwise I’m going to kidnap him and lock him in a cage. Okay, that seems wrong. And so, if it’s okay for the state to do that, there better be some reason why that’s okay. I don’t think there is a good answer to why it would be different for them.

This is why the book is called The Problem of Political Authority, because you have to claim that the government has some kind of special authority that other people don’t have, which overrides the rights that we normally recognize between individuals. So, then you have to give an account of why they have authority, and basically, there just isn’t a good account of why the neighbor would have a right not to be robbed by me, but they wouldn’t have any right not to be robbed by the state.

 

Marco den Ouden

Now, in defense of Roderick Long and the left libertarian market anarchist view, I don’t think that they actually advocate using coercion or compulsion to achieve their ends. But they do believe that if you get rid of the state, then you get rid of crony capitalism or corporations and other businesses and individuals getting an advantage from the coercion of the government to their own position. So, I think their belief to some extent is that if you get rid of the state, all these problems, including poverty and everything else, will just disappear on their own.

 

Michael Huemer

I was maybe addressing a different view, where you’re a libertarian except that it’s okay to have a welfare state or something. What went wrong with the left anarchist view? Well, it’s wishful thinking. I think it is true that the state is doing some bullshit that promotes big businesses at the expense of small businesses. That’s all true. So, if we get rid of them, small businesses will prosper more, and then maybe there could be private charity to help the poor. But I don’t think it’s going to fix everything. There are still going to be poor people. And, by the way, there’s going to be inequality, because people differ from each other in ways that are relevant. Some people are going to be more productive, and then they’re just going to get more money. And in a modern society, as technology advances and so on, the inequality will probably get greater because the state of technology acts like an amplifier. It can amplify the differences in people’s productivity. Somebody who’s productive, the technology can help them be super productive. Also, there’s the interconnectedness of the world. Somebody like Jeff Bezos starts up this Amazon thing, and then he can extend it across the entire world to 8 billion people. That’s how he can become a guy with $200 billion, which couldn’t have happened in earlier times, and that’s not all just because the government is helping Amazon, right?

 

Roger Bissell

Right. I haven’t figured out how to do that with my trombone yet. [Michael: probably not going to work. Roger: probably not going to.]

 

Michael Huemer

If you care about inequality, then capitalism is a problem. Now, I myself think inequality is okay, so I’m okay with that. There’s going to be inequality.

 

Roger Bissell

There was a discussion on Cato Unbound maybe 14, 15 years ago, and you were part of the discussion. At that time, you said you thought things were probably getting better in the world. Do you still think this is so, and if you do, then why, and if you don’t, then why not? And just give us a little hope, or just tell us how hopeless things are—however you see it.

 

Michael Huemer

Things have gotten better, over time, dramatically.

I’m really not sure what’s going to happen in the future. Predictions are difficult, especially with the future. But just looking over the past history of civilization, things have gotten better, over time, dramatically. On almost everything, almost every dimension that’s relevant to human welfare that you can measure, it turns out that it’s been getting a lot better. Throughout the history of the human species, the average life expectancy is thought to be something like 24 years. This is not because people were dropping dead at 24. It’s because a lot of children were dying. A lot of people would lose their children in the first five years, which is kind of crappy. There’s a quotation from David Schmidtz, the libertarian political philosopher, in a recent book, where he’s saying we need to think about how we got to the point where today being poor means wondering if you can afford a second car, from the point where a few centuries ago, being poor meant wondering whether you can afford to bury your first child in his own shirt, or whether you have to save that shirt for his younger brother. You have to appreciate how life used to be. When you get upset about things that are happening today, just understand what things were like in the Middle Ages, and then maybe be a little bit more appreciative. But having said that, by the way, I don’t know that we’re not going to all kill ourselves. That remains a possibility to me. It’s not a far-fetched possibility.

 

Roger Bissell

Okay, that’s a good balanced answer, and I appreciate that. This is the end of our show, and Michael, I want to thank you for your engaging answers, and Marco den Ouden, my co-host, for helping out. To those who’ve been listening or watching, thank you for tuning into The Savvy Street Show, and we encourage you to keep tuning in. We assure you that if you do so, you’ll become more and more savvy. So, goodbye for now.