322 | Philip Pettit on Language, Agency, Politics, and Freedom

0:00:00.2 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We human beings like to flatter ourselves perhaps by thinking of ourselves as rational creatures. We all know that we're not always rational. There's a whole little subculture of rationalists trying to convince us to become more rational. There are debates in economics about how rational actors really are, and whether or not we can take irrationality into account, or whether or not we should just generalize our notion of rationality, et cetera. But it's an old conceit that what distinguishes human beings from other kinds of animals or even other living beings, is our rationality. There's a motto that man is a rational animal that is supposed to reflect an Aristotelian way of thinking. Aristotle himself didn't say quite those words, but he basically said things like that, and it became kind of a catchphrase. Other animals, there's a little bit of thinking involved, some puzzle solving here and there. But we, human beings, we're really the rational ones.

0:01:05.0 SC: One thing that follows from this perspective, even if you understand all the caveats and all the irrationalities, et cetera, it kind of puts the spotlight on our brains or at least our inner thoughts. We human beings think whether it's rationally or not, but we cogitate, et cetera, and then we go out into the world. We interact with our environment, we interact with other people and social situations, et cetera, and that's a hidden assumption that is worth interrogating. Today's guest, Philip Pettit, is a distinguished philosopher, one of our most distinguished living philosophers at Princeton University and also Australian National University. So he splits his time. And one of his themes throughout his work is sort of inverting that hidden assumption to say, let's first think about the social world. Let's first think about how human beings interact with each other, and then ask how our thinking, how our reasoning, how our conation, our rationality arises out of that. He has a new book on exactly this theme called "When Minds Converse: A social Genealogy of the Human Soul" where he goes through what human beings have the capacity to do using language and thinking, and how all of that relates to our social lives. And it's a little bit more than what an anthropologist would do. And we love the anthropologists here, nothing against them, but as a philosopher, Philip relates it to things like agency and responsibility and free will, and even all the way up to morality and ethics and politics. Indeed, it's as a political philosopher that I think that Philip Pettit has made his biggest impact over the years, although he's very wide ranging doing a lot of things.  

0:02:57.8 SC: So we do take the opportunity here in the podcast to make that connection very, very explicit, going from this idea of imagining human beings as social animals who developed rational capacities to be better social animals, to use language for that purpose, and then extend it to what that means for political organization, what freedom means, how we should construe the notion of liberty, and even some quite practical implications for how to order our society. So, to me, it's what philosophy should we do. Philip does say at the beginning, and I'm very sympathetic to it, that it's a shame that more philosophers these days pick a lane and stick to it, and do their little disciplinary thing. It doesn't need to just be philosophers. People in physics or biology, all kinds of academics are often most comfortable doing a certain kind of research over and over again. But philosophy in particular invites you to be a bit more generalist than that, to cross over from logic to ethics to aesthetics. And that's exactly what Philip has done in a very admirable way over the years. So I think this is a good conversation with a great philosopher. I hope you enjoy it. Let's go.  

0:04:31.8 SC: Philip Pettit, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

0:04:33.5 Philip Pettit: Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

0:04:35.7 SC: I'd like to ask for, you know, someone who's been a philosopher for, let's say, a long career, if that's okay. Some philosophers have projects. Their life's work sort of coheres into a set of themes. Would you think of yourself that way? Like, do you have an overarching project you've been engaged in all this time?

0:05:00.0 PP: Well, I think of myself that way, though it may be a false of image. We all know that we tell narratives about ourselves. I began in philosophy as a seminarian in a Catholic training to be a priest. And I discovered philosophy in my second year, and I fell in love with the idea. And in particular, I started reading Jean-Paul Sartre. And the great thing about Sartre, as I felt at the time, was here was an overall view of human life and human experience, and also branching into novels and these plays and so on, and with a core claim at the center of his view. And I found that almost intoxicating, just the unity of it. I suppose, in a way, it was answering to a religious urge to want an overall view. And I found it so exciting that in philosophy you could ask your own questions. You could interact with the history of the subject. You could interact with a whole range of disciplines and the contemporary world, and really do your very best to come up with your own answers. And having come out of a more doctrinaire background, that, to me, was heavy stuff.

0:06:23.6 PP: It was like discovering your first alcohol or whatever. And I'm afraid I drank the alcohol and got sucked into it. And over the years, I suppose, I have been a bit untypical, well, maybe typical of my generation, which is now aging out, so to speak, in the sense of thinking of philosophy as essentially a generalist project. When I was younger, for example, the best people in philosophy wrote about everything, mainly because they had to teach everything within a certain range. I mean, from ethics to philosophy of mind to metaphysics to history of philosophy. Whereas nowadays, philosophy departments tend to be more compartmentalized. And it seems to me that's a bit of a pity. I mean, one of the lights of philosophy for me is precisely that you get a carte blanche, as it were, to wander across a whole range of areas. And what I found over the years myself, I mean, I've made struthers, but that as you move from area to area, you discover that there are keys, there are intellectual sorts of motifs that are important and profitable in different areas. And you can use the same tools, or as much tools as building blocks, you know, fit in building different sorts of edifices, as it were. And so I've really enjoyed being a generalist. And if you get bored with any one area, you can always move elsewhere. Now, I suspect this may appeal to you, given a look at the range of your interest, which is certainly untypical for a scientist.

0:08:16.8 SC: Well, it certainly explains why I'm doing a podcast where I talk to people who are not just physicists. It's a great way to interact live in a way that just couldn't have been done back in the day with great thinkers in all sorts of fields.

0:08:31.9 PP: Absolutely, yes.

0:08:33.5 SC: Okay. But despite the generalist, I mean, there are themes that come up over and over again. I mean, it seems to me, I'm going to make myself look foolish by trying to put your career into my words, but you're trying to understand how human beings function as sort of both rational and social creatures in a world full of complexity and organizations and nations and laws. Is that okay? How do I do?

0:09:02.1 PP: Yes, I would emphasize the social. I mean, I think that if there's any theme that bulks large in my own thinking, it's that we are essentially such social creatures. Now, in a way, that's a platitude, it's been there since Aristotle, the political animal, the social animal, that's what we are. I think that that can be taken deeper than it normally is in ordinary thinking. And a recent book that I've just done called When Minds Confessed is an argument that essentially what we think of as mental activity is the internalization of an activity we learn in the first place as a social practice, as a social activity. I think of our minds, which we think of as primary and then social life as secondary with our minds being expressed in social life. I think we're inducted into social life. We gain competence in the practices of conversation, exchange, making sense of ourselves, making promises, keeping our promises, holding another responsible, and that our mental life is really the internalization of that. So, in that particular book, I take six human capacities and I provide an argument for why we might think of these in each case as the internalization of a social skill, the skill in the exercise of a social capacity. I mean, that's all very abstract, so maybe I should give you some examples.

0:10:47.7 SC: We'll get into some examples, yeah. But I guess, I did want to get on the table, it does remind me, let me put it this way, this whole point of view that you just articulated of the social sort of shaping our interior mental lives is not one that I would have given much credence to years ago, but I'm coming around to this point of view, in part because of a conversation I had on the podcast with Hugo Mercier, who's working on this though.

0:11:17.1 PP: Oh, indeed, yes, yes. Whose work with Dan Sperber I know quite about, yes.

0:11:21.4 SC: Exactly, thinking of reason...

0:11:21.8 PP: And connected with actually in this book.

0:11:24.1 SC: Yeah. Reasons as primarily serving a social function, and your books seem to be sort of building on that theme in multiple directions. It's not just reasons, but lots of aspects of humanity and what we think of as reasoning, rationality, or whatever, as coming out of these social forces, social impulses.

0:11:48.6 PP: Yes. That's a fair comment, I think. Although what I do is done in more philosophical key than Hugo's work or Dan's.

0:11:58.3 SC: Well, that was the other thing I wanted to start with. This book that we're talking about, which will be coming out pretty soon, I take it. When will it be coming out? I don't actually know.

0:12:09.5 PP: It's already come out. It's just appeared, actually,

0:12:12.3 SC: Okay. Good. We'll hope to get a bump in your sales from the podcast episode then. I mean, you're tackling a famous question of what makes human beings special, different from other species here on Earth. That's a fraught question to ask. It's an important one, but it's also easy to make mistakes. And you're coming at it from a primarily philosophical point of view. So how do you guard against sort of telling stories that would be overturned by future discoveries in the study of animals and so forth?

0:12:48.6 PP: Oh, well, none of us minds are being overturned. The main thing is to make some sort of input to the conversation that may help things along. And I'd be much happier with the thought that what I've got to say might be paid some attention and then overturned than with the possibility that no one pays any attention whatsoever, which is decidedly a possibility here. I mean, in a way, the book is... It's a very unusual book for a philosopher to write these days, where philosophy tends to be more specialized in any case. And I sort of feel sometimes I can only have the courage or the boldness, the recklessness to write it because of being on the outer edge, so to speak, age-wise of the profession. I mean, I sort of feel that life is short, and I wanted to give this a go. And it may be found objectionable or faulty in all sorts of ways by other people, but it's at least, it's giving a shot at making sense of our social nature and connecting with our mental capacity and as you say, with our difference from other species.

0:14:11.3 SC: And you certainly put a finger on our capacity for language as something that gives rise to everything else. So, how do you perceive this role of language as being super important?

0:14:24.8 PP: Well, I don't say anything, at least anything interesting, on the origin of language, which is, of course, a much-debated question. Other than arguing in the first chapter of the book that we don't have to think of the emergence of language as entirely mysterious, because language as we use it combines, I think, two different aspects, so to speak, of communication systems. On the one hand, we know that other great apes, for example, chimpanzees, can actually communicate in a sense that Paul Grice, a well-known philosopher, explicated better than anybody else, I think, going back to the '50s. What he argued was that in communication, the distinctive thing is that you seek a certain effect, a certain response in particular in other people, in other conspecifics, and you seek them to provide that response simply by making clear to them what response it is that you're seeking. You don't engineer them into giving the response. You just let them see what you want, and you rely on them to provide in response to their recognizing what you want to actually deliver the goods. So, for example, in targeted help scenarios with chimpanzees, what's been found is, roughly speaking, the following, that you've got two chimps, let's suppose, in cages side by side, separated by a relatively high barrier, and one chimp, let's call him chimp one, wants to reach some fruit but needs a long stick, and the sticks in his or her, in its cage are too short, but it sees a stick in the nearby chimp's cage that is long enough, and it can't reach that. It's too far away, but what it does is draw the attention of the other chimp to what it's doing and then reaches for the stick, obviously with no help of success, but thereby clearly making clear to the other chimp that what it wants is to get the stick, and the other chimp, in most cases, I think it goes up to 90% actually, and recognizing what the first chimp is seeking, recognize the response it wants, it delivers that response by giving the stick to the first chimp.

0:17:17.2 PP: Now, I think that's an extraordinary sort of achievement, and that is Gricean-style communication. The first chimp is seeking an end to get the stick by just revealing to the other chimp what end it is that he's seeking, and the other chimp then delivers the goods. That's the core of communicative capacity. Now, chimps, so far as we can see, use gestures for this purpose, like the reaching for, but they don't have available to them, as it were, discrete information-bearing signs. But we know that other animals, for example, do have a use of information-bearing signs, though they don't use them with the intention of communicating. So, a standard example that I use in the book is from the study of vervet monkeys in Kenya by two well-known evolutionary biologists, Cheney and Seyfarth, and what they discovered was that the chimps in that area, there are three main dangers that they face from snakes in the grass, from lions, it is in Kenya, and from eagles in the sky. And it seems to come to them by nature, it's not a land, although that's debated, they make a noise in response to whether it's a snake or an eagle or a lion. And the thing is that other chimps who hear that noise, it gives them information that there's a lion around or a snake or an eagle, and it does that in the sense that they respond to the sound as if they'd seen the eagle or heard the lion or whatever. So, basically, they don't just respond with a routine piece of behavior, as in always do X, whatever that might be, they respond as is appropriate to avoid the lion or the snake.

0:19:24.0 PP: So, if they're in the grass and they hear a snake call, they go straight for the tree. If they're in the tree and they hear an eagle call, they make sure they go lower in the tree rather than higher in the tree. So, basically, what they're doing is they're giving one another information, but the evidence is they're not intending to give one another information. The sign, the sound they make comes more or less spontaneously. And it does give the information. Now, I say what I think of as a very simple language would involve the use of signs of the vervet kind to a communicative purpose like that of the chimpanzees. Now, I think that we all know language evolved at some point in hominin history. And all I say about it in the book is that we needn't treat it as, so to speak, a divine mystery that language appeared amongst our kind, because there's nothing entirely mysterious about the fact that a species might unite these two different capacities, and that's what having a simple language would be. And then what I argue in the way the book, sorry to go on at length, but roughly speaking, the plan of the book then is to characterize a set of creatures, I call them humanoids, who are pretty well like human beings on the basis of what we know about human beings in language-independent ways. And then to imagine what the effect would be, it's a thought experiment, to speculate about, to explore what the effect would be on these creatures of being able to use suddenly language, of having a simple language that involves the use of information-bearing signs to a communicative purpose.

0:21:23.8 SC: Good. And that does sound like a quintessentially philosophical exercise. You're not doing an experiment out there in the wild, you're not in Africa, you're asking yourself the thought experiment, what would the humanoids do if they were given these new capacities? So tell me, what would they do? How would they start behaving?

0:21:43.3 PP: Well, can I just say first, Sean, I mean, the idea of a Gedanken experiment, a thought experiment, is not the invention of philosophers. After all, just to go to your area, think of Einstein on the equivalence principle between acceleration and gravity. And you were invited to that thought experiment of being on the lift, and would you be able to detect the fact that you're actually going down, sorry, the fact that you're going up or the fact that you're actually static but subject to gravity?

0:22:16.3 SC: Einstein was kind of a philosopher though, right?

0:22:18.7 PP: Oh, well, okay. But think about Galileo, and the thought experiment that made sense of the fact that things light and heavy will fall at the same rate. You imagine two bricks and then you imagine they're connected with a thread and then you imagine the thread becoming solid, connected with the two bricks, and you ask the person, well, now, do you think they'd fall more quickly than the individual bricks or than the bricks connected by the thread? And, of course, everyone says, no, they wouldn't. That's a thought experiment. Okay. So, the thought experiment is to ask, how would the humanoids respond to this new technology, as you might say, this new way of... Now, in characterizing the first chapter, the nature of humanoids, I make them out to be very like human beings in all sorts of ways, and I draw to an extent on psychology and evolutionary biology and so on in characterizing the nature of these humanoids, but one thing is they're a deeply self-reliant species. They're a species such that they die alone or they survive together. They've just got to hang together. Now, the first argument is that with the technology of language available, it would make possible for them the communication of information about their environment to one another, and they will thereby benefit one another by increasing the pool of information.

0:23:56.5 PP: And not only that, but they'd each have very good reason to be, well, let's say, truthful and competent, careful in making a report, in using a sign. Let's say there's a sign for lion, there's a sign for zebra. In using their lion sign, when there really is a lion there, not only when there's a lion there, because if they're not reliable with other people, they can hardly expect other people to be reliable with them. There's a tit-for-tat mechanism well-known in evolutionary biology that would explain why not only would they use these signs to communicate information, but they would use them reliably to communicate information. And they benefit one another in that way. Think of that as a social practice of information giving as between different creatures. And you can imagine that evolving as a purely external sort of practice that they benefit one another in, a bit like the vervet monkeys who are giving information to one another, except they're giving information intentionally in the sense of the chimps' communication. And then what I argue, just to give you this first sort of rung on the ladder that I characterize in the book, is that what they'd quickly discover... Of course, this is just speculation. What I say is this would be very likely, robustly likely, as in it wouldn't take a miracle for them to discover, regardless of how things were, they'd be likely to discover, that actually they themselves benefit from giving information to others as well as benefiting from the information they get. Because you ask me, let's suppose I'm on a higher level than you, what's that animal in the difference? You use an information-bearing sign, lion, zebra, whatever, just animal, in an interrogative mode, which I argued perfectly intelligible that they should do that, and that prompts me now to want to give you an answer. And if I can see, I can lift my head and look in the distance about the part where you asked, the place you asked about, and I can see at my height and with my vision that it's a lion, I'm going to say lion in response. And I've given you information. You didn't know what the animal was. You now know it's a lion. You better take cover or whatever.

0:26:36.9 PP: But I've also given myself information because by means of this intentional action I've taken, maybe raising my head, turning and looking, sharpening my eyes, I have given you information, but I've also given myself information because I may not have noticed the animal before, and I now know it indeed is a lion. So I benefit from giving as well as receiving information. But now, so I argue it would be robustly likely amongst these humanoids, they know how to ask questions of others. They know how to answer the questions of others, I mean, when the evidence is available. And they know that they benefit from answering questions. Well, why shouldn't they ask questions of themselves? And why shouldn't they treat themselves as an interlocutor and make intentional efforts to answer that question and thereby increase their own information? So they are at once the instructor and the informant and the informed, so to speak. And so I wonder, there's an animal. What is it? And I make an effort. Oh, it's a zebra. And so I relax, let's suppose. Well, what have I done? I've been talking to myself, as it were. I may have done it out loud. But of course, I could do it without actually speaking the words if I'm in the habit of using the words. And what I say is, now look, at this point, wouldn't the humanoids have developed a capacity very like what we tend to think of as thinking, as in making an intentional effort, in this case, screwing up your eyes or going to a higher level, et cetera.

0:28:25.2 PP: An intentional effort that is designed to provide you with information to increase your domain of beliefs. And that actually is very close to what we think of as trying to make up your mind, as thinking in that sense, as in a very, so to speak, simple mode, the sort of thing that le penseur does, as you see him with his hand on his elbows meditating on something. Well, of course, we do that ourselves. So, I stop and I think, who was that I saw yesterday? I recognize the face. And then, that's all sort of making intentional effort. Now, it's purely mental activity here and remembering in order to increase my information, my body of information in order to form a belief. I say that's really what thinking is. And my own hunch, it's really more than a hunch, is that animals don't do that sort of thing. Like in Gary Larson cartoons, dogs may put their head on their paws, so to speak, and be seen as wondering about this or that. But actually, of course, there are very simple animals comparatively with the great apes, but they don't show any signs of doing that.

0:29:52.8 PP: Of course, their beliefs update all the time. As the dog runs around, it sees the rabbit or whatever, it forms a belief. But it doesn't make an intentional effort to do something with a view to forming a belief. And that's what I call thinking. And that's what the humanoids would do as a result of coming to even a very simple language. So, if I can just now comment on the general theme we began with, Sean, I said that I tend to think of mental activity as the internalization of social activity. Well, here you've had amongst the humanoids the development of a social practice of making intentional effort to answer the questions of others, presumably the development of a skill in this practice, for example, learning that you better tell the truth, learning that you better be careful or to be ignored as an informant in the future. That's the tit-for-tat mechanism. And then, so to speak, treating themselves as an interlocutor in asking themselves questions and then seeking by making intentional efforts to answer those questions. So that is actually internalizing the social practice of raising questions for others and answering the questions. You do it simply with yourself. And there's every reason why you should do it, because you're going to benefit from it. You've got the means of doing it. The technology is language, and now you've got the motive to do it as well, which is you increase your body of information. So I say that at least goes some way to making sense of a way in which thinking might have evolved in our kind. I don't say it evolved as it were a thought experiment fashion, which is simplified in all sorts of ways, but that may tell us something about what thinking is.

0:31:47.4 SC: And I'm not super educated about this, but it sounds like, I mean, there's been plenty of work done on the relationship, or plenty of speculation anyway, on the relationship between language and thought. Language shapes thought, the development of language, and probably feedback on evolutionary biology, and the shape of the brain, and things like that. But it seems that it's mostly on that technology side. Once we have symbolic manipulation of ideas, that shapes our thinking. And you're shedding light more, putting the spotlight more on the incentive side, the motivation side. It's not just that we have the ability to symbolically manipulate some symbols, it's that in this social context, we are incentivized to start doing something we recognize as thinking.

0:32:42.5 PP: The standard view, and it's got a strong presence in the history of philosophy, Descartes being the sort of supreme figurehead or exemplar of this view, is that it's what I think of as an inside-out view of language, that we have thinking as a capacity that comes to us by nature, by first nature, as it were, and then we discover speech as a way of externalizing our thought and communicating our thoughts to one another. So to speak, the inside comes first, it's inside-out, and then the outside comes second. What I want to argue for is an outside-in view of the mind, that the outside comes first, the language comes first, and that thinking is really the internalization of a practice and a skill that in the first place is social. So it's a very different view. It's a view that language isn't just useful instrumentally or expressively, whatever, of course it is all of that, but that it's also constitutively important. It's what constitutes the capacity we think of as thinking. Now, of course, someone's going to say, but animals think. Well, of course, there's a sense of the word think, which animals certainly do think.

0:34:13.9 PP: But as I say, animals, I mean, the animals I know of anywhere, I'm not an ethologist, but I am very interested, I must say, in the ethology, especially of the great apes. They certainly update their beliefs all the time, but I think the evidence is that that is done more or less autonomically or subpersonally, as is often put. They don't make an effort to update their beliefs. The beliefs just update in response to the environment, the new stimuli and so on. They're coming their way. Whereas thinking in the sense in which I'm using the word now is where it really involves an intentional effort to do something, like the effort of le penseur or the effort of just trying to remember who was that person I saw yesterday, or screwing up your eyes and saying, what is that animal in the distance? It's the effort of that kind intentionally conducted, which has the payoff if the evidence is available to you of actually yielding an increased body of information, which is what we all need, of course, in order to act in the world.

0:35:29.0 SC: There's obviously so many things to say and think about this, but time is finite, and I want to leap forward to some of the bigger ideas that follow up. I mean, you do talk in the book about not just thinking for ourselves and the relationship to language, but then connecting it to agency and morality and what it means to be a responsible person. And that's probably the payoff for you of being a well-traveled philosopher in many different areas over many different years.

0:36:06.9 PP: Well, maybe well-traveled. The trouble being well-traveled is you can end up being a tourist in every area and a native in none. I try to use my friends to assure me that I'm not merely a tourist in the areas where I venture in, as I have to do in this book, for example. Well, how to get there? There's a chapter on reasoning and perception, but let's leave those apart for the moment and just go to a development I trace in Chapter four, which is the development of what I call the capacity or the practice of commitment. So, even game theorists will tell you, here's a good definition of committing to a thought as distinct from reporting that something is the case, reporting a thought. If I tell you that is a zebra there, and you say, is it really? You're not so sure. Somebody else told me it was a lion or whatever. You're just doubtful about my capacities. And I want to communicate to you that I really am quite certain about this. Then one way of doing that, of course, would be to make it costly for me to be wrong.

0:37:31.7 PP: So for example, if I say, if I put money on the table, I'll say, Sean, this money is yours. If it turns out I'm wrong about this. Well, you've got no reason to trust what I say, but now there's a natural way in which the humanoids, and I think human beings too, can make their reports, so to speak, their information bearing, acts of communication, more costly. And that is by closing down excuses that might otherwise be available for getting things wrong. So for example, if you ask me what do I, this is true in particular when we're communicating about the state of our own minds. And of course, to have reports about state of our minds already means we're further along that ladder. I've skipped the sections on reasoning and what I call recipients. But if I'm communicating about my mind, you might ask me, what do I believe about such and such? Do I believe that Trump will go up for election another time? And I may say to you, I may report that belief by saying, well, look, I think I believe that, I sort of come and go, but actually I sort of, I think I believe that.

0:39:02.4 PP: Now, in that case, I'm giving you a report, but I'm qualifying the report. But if I want to make it absolutely sure in your mind that I really do believe this, I can say something like, not I think I believe that Trump is, but I can say Trump is going to have a go at being elected again. Well, I can't now, in the case of the report, I could have excused my failure by saying to you, well, I must have got myself wrong. I really felt, if, for example, you discover I act as if I believe Trump was going to stand in the next election, but I said I thought I didn't believe that. I feel I must have got myself wrong. But if I say he will, I avow the belief, as I put it, rather than reporting the belief. Well, in that case, I can't say I must have got myself wrong, because clearly when you asked me the question, I wasn't thinking about my mind and what I believed. I was thinking about the state of affairs and I was standing with the belief I formed that indeed Trump is going to stand for the next election.

0:40:10.1 PP: But let me make it stronger. I can make a commitment much more strongly than that. So, for example, if I'm communicating an intention, you say, am I going to go to that game tonight? And I say, yeah, I'll be there. And I don't turn up and you complain. I say, well, look, I did avow and I did indeed have the attention. I didn't say I think I have the intention. I said I will be there. It's true. I avowed it. I can't give the excuse that I must have got myself wrong. But I can still say I changed my mind. I can give that excuse. But there's a way of shutting down that excuse too. I can say, depend on me, I'll be there. Or I could say, using our own language, I pledge to be there or I promise to be there. Now, that's a very heavy commitment. Why? Because now the expense of being wrong is really much heavier than it would be had I given a report or even a mirror vowel of the intention. You're going to say, I'm not going to be trustworthy if I made a promise and I then let you down. And I realize there's a big loss in store if I am wrong about being there. And so you can trust me when I say I will be there now in this pledging mode. Okay. That's background. I'm sorry for talking so long about that, Sean.

0:41:37.7 SC: Very helpful. No. Great.

0:41:39.6 PP: Okay.. I argue that we are the humanoids, for example, would have strong motives to make vowels and pledges as well as just reports on themselves to one another in order to elicit credibility and to build relations with others who will trust them now that they can see they're putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak. Okay. But that means in turn that if I'm now... I'm a little bit doubtful about whether you're going to live up to your pledge, for example. Maybe you pledged me to tell the truth about some incident involving us both and it's important to me you do tell the truth, say, to a third party. And you really pledged and there will be a loss for you. But I'm beginning to worry about you, as in I think you'll be subject to temptation, because it's an embarrassing incident, you're going to... Well, I can say to you in advance, I can say, now listen, Sean, you can tell the truth, you're up to it, come on, brace yourself, man, you can do it. I exhort you to tell the truth.

0:42:51.1 PP: Now, I think that the humanoids would learn that by reminding one another of commitments they made or the costs that are in store if they fail the commitment, and they can, in that sense, make it more likely that the person will actually keep the commitment. So I make it more likely, as I believe, that you will tell the truth if I actually say, you can tell the truth if I exhort you in advance. Okay. So that's very important, it seems to me. But now, if I do exhort you in advance like that, what am I going to do if actually nonetheless you let me down? So you come out of, say, the meeting with the third party and you say to me, and I say, okay, you told him, did you? And you say, oh, God, I'm sorry, I didn't. I just simply, I couldn't in the end, I was too embarrassed, I didn't tell the truth. Well, what do I say? I think I'm going to say to you, well, I could give up on you. I could say, Sean Carroll, you just can't deal with him. He's an inveterate liar. I could shun you or put you at a distance forever. But that would be really cutting off my nose to spite my face because we're going to have other relationships and so on.

0:44:09.8 PP: And so I think what I'm quite likely to do with you is remind you of the exhortation and say to you not, you could do this because that was in the past, but I say, Sean, you could have told the truth. It was within your capacity. And now I think that it's going to be very natural amongst the humanoids that they adopt reactively the proactive stance of exhortation and reactively adopting that stance, treating you still as exhortable, saying you could have done it, Sean, I'm not giving up on you. That that actually amounts to holding you responsible. So now this is moving us very much into the normative domain. So I want to argue that once commitment as a practice comes on stream, you're going to get related practices of exhortation and then of holding responsible. But I also say, if I can just go back to the social to mental move, I also argue that the humanoids would quickly discover that they actually can, as it were, bind themselves to the mast by saying, I will do this. Making a commitment to themselves, making a resolution, let's suppose, to vote at the next election, as you're saying from just predicting they probably will vote, as if they make a promise to themselves.

0:45:42.8 PP: And that is really an internal resolution. And then if they fail to do that, they don't just sort of say to themselves, oh, well, I changed my mind. No, they berate themselves like they might berate another person. And that's developing a conscience, isn't it, after all? And here you're moving right into the heart of moral concepts, the concept of holding responsible other people and mutually holding others responsible, expecting to be held responsible by others, developing a capacity, a fitness to be held responsible, as in generally living up to the commitments you have to by others. But then you could do all of that with yourself. And I think this is a major sort of, you become, at this point, I think you're close to becoming what we call a person, as you can encourage yourself and berate yourself. You can hold yourself to an image of yourself, the image that, so to speak, is embedded in these commitments you make to yourself. And that, I think, has become something like a person. So that's at least to make one connection with the normative domain.

0:46:59.1 SC: Well, yeah. And not only that. I mean, I hate to give a short drift to the book. I know the book is a big undertaking, but you have all of these other wonderful works in philosophy, especially political philosophy, and I can kind of see how they're connected now. I mean, once you start having human beings making promises, one might almost say contracts and exhorting, maybe even punishing others, at some point, one is gonna wanna formalize this and ask, okay, how should we order our society in the right way?

0:47:35.4 PP: Absolutely. I mean, and for me, they are connected. Of course, there's always the possibility that I'm telling myself a narrative that is, so to speak, self-satisfying rather than a narrative that's really accurate. But what is certainly true is this, that the distinctive sort of themes in my own political thinking came to me initially in writing a book many years ago, which is in a way an antecedent of the When Minds Confess book, which is called "The common mind" that also argued about the importance of language in bringing people to mind, so to speak, in making them mindful, in minding them in that sense. And in developing that book, what I realized is that it really didn't make sense to think of human beings as creatures who could ever exist in isolation, in a solitary condition. I mean, you might have the Robin's Cruthill, but that's a later period in his life, so to speak. But you begin to think that the idea of a baby being raised or raising itself or being raised by a wolf in the traditional example, without exposure to speech, without induction in the social practices that are the counterparts of the mental practices that are so important to us, I began to think such an individual would not actually develop a human soul, if I can put it that way, would not actually come to humanity, that humanity is something that requires that social evolution and the social contact with others.

0:49:18.4 PP: And this is a deeper version of the society first, outside in theory of mind that attracts me. Okay. But once you think in that way, and then you think about, well, what are going to be the ideal, so to speak, of relating between human beings, in particular between human beings taken at random, not just friends, not just family, et cetera. And of course, we all think freedom is surely going to be a major sort of feature, we all want to be free in relation to random others to do our own thing or whatever. But then you ask, if you, so to speak, thought the solitary condition was a conceivable condition of human beings, you might think, well, being free is just being as near as possible to existing in a world where there is no one else to thwart you, there is no one else to get in your way. But if you think that's just a totally inappropriate image, because we are essentially social, and then you ask what freedom is, well, you very quickly come to the idea that, well, to be free is basically to be related to other people, but in such a way that they give you a space of your own.

0:50:36.7 PP: They don't actually get in your way in certain sorts of choices at any rate, and nor do you depend on their will, so to speak, their goodwill in order to achieve this space. The ideal would be they don't even have a power, there's a block to their getting in your way. You're not at their mercy, you're not in their hands, so to speak. And I came to think of that as a notion of freedom as not just being let alone by others, but existing in a relationship with others, as well as don't have the power of getting in your way in certain choices. And then I became aware through the work of historians, Quentin Skinner was very important to me in this respect, that actually the long way of thinking about freedom in what's often called the Republican tradition, going back to Republican Rome, argues that you're not free if you've got a boss in your life, even if the boss, so to speak, leaves you alone, gives you carte blanche, gives you free rein. So, for example, the Romans made a point of arguing that the slave who had a kindly master, a gentle master, a master who was away all the time, who let them do as they wish, is still a slave.

0:52:08.5 PP: They're not free, even though they're not actually being interfered with, because they depend on the goodwill of their master in order to act according to their own will. So I came to think of freedom as being able to act as you will in relevant choices, regardless of what you yourself wish to do, and also regardless of what others wish you to do. It's to have that power, which means you have the power regardless of what you want. You can do it in a given choice. You can choose to vote or not vote, let's suppose, in a country like America, and you can do either, depending on what you want, but also you can do either regardless of what other people want you to do. Others may want you not to vote or may want you to vote, but actually you are free in so far as others don't have that power. Now, if you, for example, were in a workplace where the employer required you to vote, maybe required you to give evidence of voting his or her way, so to speak, then you'd lose the freedom, so to speak, to vote because you wouldn't be able to vote or not to vote regardless of the will of others, the will of the employer. If they wish you to vote, you gotta vote.

0:53:41.7 PP: I sometimes give the example in Henry Ibsen's 's play, "A Doll's House." Torvald is the husband, Nora is the wife, and under Norwegian law as it is at the time of the play is depicting, which is the 1860s, a man has all the power, so depending what Torvald wanted, he could dictate what she wore, what friends she had, where she went in the evening, whether she could attend plays or the opera or whatever, it was all under his power. But in that play, at least at the beginning of the play, Torvald is so totally in love with Nora that he gives her carte blanche. She can really act in effect just as she wishes. She can act according to her own will. And the question is, is Nora free? Well, I would say no, because she can act as she wishes only so long as Torvald wishes that she should be able to act as she wishes. So she's dependent on his will, even though she has freedom as non-interference, as I tend to call it, she does not have freedom as, well, I tend to say non-domination. She has a dominus in her life, the dominus is her husband in this case. Now, if you think of freedom as non-domination, and then you think it should be an ideal that we could all enjoy in our society, then that gives you the beginnings of a political philosophy of working out how things should be ordered in society. But you probably have questions for me, and I'm going on at too great length, but I'm quite happy to continue on this line if you want me to do so.

0:55:39.3 SC: I think that you anticipated my question. I guess I wanted to ask, given that conception of freedom, this Republican version of freedom as absence of domination, what does that suggest about organizing society to let that happen? Because it sounds maybe a little conceptual, like I can do whatever I want, but someone else has the power to stop me, but they're not using that power. What are the practical effects of that way of thinking?

0:56:08.6 PP: Well, the practical effects, I think, are this. If we assume, as I assume, and I think all of us would assume, that in a society, if freedom is an ideal, people ought to have access to that ideal equally. People ought to enjoy equal freedom as non-domination. And now you ask about how would that be possible? Well, one requirement would be that you identify the range of choices where they can be given security in choosing as they wish, regardless of how others wish. And traditionally, that set of choices that were supposed to be promised or assured in the society have been called the basic liberties. So, for example, they certainly include the liberty of speech, of association, of movement, of employment, of changing job, and so on. They include much more, I should say, but those are just examples. Then the first thing you'd want in your society is a system of law that gives everyone freedom of choice in those particular areas, and not only that, that enables them to practice those choices with impunity, there's no penalty for doing so, but equally that protects them in the exercise of those choices, secures them in the exercise of those choices.

0:57:41.9 PP: And that is a world in which, you think of the law is really important, that it actually establishes in an impartial way a space within which each person is secure. Of course, within that space, they may choose to form intimate relations with others, friendships, family connections, and so on, that do bind them, but they can exit those relations as well as entering them. So they are basically sovereign in this space that the law gives them. Now in this picture, the law is actually what creates freedom for us. It's the infrastructure on the basis of which we are free. So for example, freedom of speech, we enjoy only insofar as there is a constitution, a set of laws that actually ensures us against certain sorts of interference in the exercise of choice as to what we say or don't say. And very importantly though, we all agree that when the law gives each of us that sort of secure space to speak as we wish, it does so only under certain provisos, under the proviso, for example, that the use of the speech is not damaging in various ways. For example, if it disturbs public order, like calling a fire in a packed theater in the old example, then freedom of speech should not protect you in a case like that. There have to be provisos.

0:59:16.8 PP: This means there really have to be courts in order to interpret the law and to introduce new provisos if provisos are needed. But the idea is that the law should identify basic liberties which have the following characteristics, that everyone can enjoy each of those basic liberties, acting, exercising those liberties according to their own will and independently of what others would wish them to do. Each should have that, but equally we should carve out these basic liberties so that everyone's enjoying them doesn't make everyone worse off than they would be if they didn't have them. Now, a very pertinent example here, I mean, I divide my life as I think you know, between Australia and the United States. In the United States, there's a freedom to own a gun for personal protection with very light provisos, but still some provisos, of course. In Australia, there are very, very heavy provisos, so there really effectively is not a freedom to own a gun just for self-protection. Now, some people who think that freedom to own a gun for self-protection is essential, so to speak, to being a free person, think that everyone's a slave, so to speak, to that extent in Australia. I have to say it doesn't feel like that. When you're in Australia, most Australians will say this, you don't feel any the less secure for guns not being available to you to protect yourself, because of course you also know they're not available to others, at least very widely.

1:01:09.5 PP: So, that's a case of where we have to devise the basic liberties in different cultures, different legal systems, different countries will select different basic liberties to privilege and protect, so to speak. But what's really important is that in our lives, we should have a law that establishes the same body of liberties for all of us. I would say that, if I can just add one thing more to this, that it's not just important that the law stops other people interfering with us in the exercise of these liberties, it's also important, I would say, and I think it's part of the Republican heritage, the classical Republican heritage, it's a civic Republican heritage, as you might say, that the law and the society should equally make it possible for people to be able to enjoy those basic liberties, should make it possible by, for example, guarding them against destitution, by ensuring their education, because you've got to be educated to basically hold up in relations with others, to provide help for them in the case of medical emergencies rather than depending on the goodwill of others.

1:02:27.2 PP: It's got to empower people to enjoy the basic liberties as well as protecting people against others in the enjoyment of those basic liberties. So, that's one strand. I call it the social justice strand in a Republican way of thinking. And now maybe the connection may seem a bit slim to you, but I do think it goes back to thinking about human beings. We're essentially social creatures who depend on one another, who have to find space and relationship with another to create our own individuality, internalizing the social practices in the development of our own thought processes and the development of our own commitments to others in the development of our own relationships. And law is at the center of that, and especially a law that is enforced and enacted on the basis of rule of law constraints in a way that is impartial between the citizens of a society. And a law that empowers as well as protects people. That's the social justice, so to speak, strand in this civic Republican way of thinking.

1:03:37.9 SC: I actually see the connection with the language and human exceptionalism and the social aspects pretty clearly all the way up to the political philosophy. The question I was going to ask, and you sort of hinted at it, but let's make it a little bit more clear. When one has a political philosophy centered on a conception of freedom or liberty, one does have countervailing values that other people are going to care about, whether it's security or equality or whatever. And I think you're admitting, yes, those are also values, and so therefore we put in provisos there. It seems like a little bit less than perfectly systematic to me how we figure out where to protect the freedom, where to bound it in favor of other values.

1:04:25.6 PP: Of course. I think that Aristotle says somewhere, we shouldn't look for more exactitude in any discipline than reality makes available, so to speak. There isn't a mathematical theory, basically, of how best the polity ought to be ordered. It's always a matter of judgment, and there will be disagreements, and there have to be compromises, negotiated, discursively negotiated compromises. And I think the great thing is that in the evolution, at least so far, of our post-Enlightenment Western democracies, I think we have evolved a system of law, and an understanding of law and of the place it gives us in relation to one another that is really deeply important and that we dare not lose, or if we do, we descend, I think, into a very much inferior sort of level of life. But there is one, I said that's the social justice strand of this Republican philosophy. Of course, law isn't issued, so to speak, by an algorithm or isn't issued by an impartial presence in the sky. Law is itself created by human beings. It takes people to establish a constitution and maintain it, to establish a legislature and maintain it, to establish courts and to maintain it.

1:05:54.2 PP: And of course, what's always a danger is that the law might protect us from one another, from, so to speak, the arbitrary power of others, the power of others to interfere depending on what they wish in our space. It may protect us against arbitrary power by others, but there still could be an arbitrary power of the source of the law. So the lawmakers, might be an elite or a despot, a single individual who, so to speak, makes laws just as he or she wishes or they wish, that make laws arbitrarily in that way, and to that extent we would be subject to a dominus, so to speak, of a vertical kind, even if that dominus protects us against the masters, the domini in our private lives. And so you have to have a vertical dimension of justice as well as a horizontal, a democratic justice, you might call it, justice in relation to the lawmakers and the law imposers and the law adjudicators. And we have evolved a system of doing that, which is very imperfect, but I think perfectible. And that is, broadly speaking, a democratic system, which involves more than election. I mean, the election of some officials, and of course we don't elect all of those who play a part in government.

1:07:16.4 PP: We generally don't elect judges, for example. Probably, I think, a good thing, because judges have a specific job to do, which is to interpret the law according to the books and to apply it according to the books. If you elect them, you give them a contrary motive, which is a motive to be re-elected, which may actually bend their commitment to fidelity to the law. So we do have authorities, so to speak, who have power over us. That's very important. And what has to be the case is that the decisions they make in making laws, in changing laws, in imposing laws, interpreting laws, applying laws, those decisions have to be constrained on terms that we, the people, generally support. Government has to be on the people's terms. And this is ensured in various ways, I would say. By election is certainly part of it, but even more important, I would say, is the contestatory possibilities democracy gives us. We can take those in government to the court, a different part of the government system, but independent and importantly independent in our way of thinking, the system of checks and balances. We can criticize them in the media, assuming we have a free media, a public broadcaster, private broadcasters that are at least in competition with one another to the point that they keep one another relatively honest. And of course, we have the possibility of contesting in the streets as well as in the media and in the courts, and that contestatory aspect of democracy is just as important as the electoral.

1:09:09.4 PP: We also, of course, have the appointments that are made in government that are not by election, say of judges and so on, are made under constraints that the law and the constitution lays down, that ultimately are the constraints laid down by we the people on how those should be made, on the transparency that should be available, on the conditions under which the judges should act and what they should be faithful to. And these constraints ideally should build up a system of control such that those in power, those in power in the state, do not make decisions just as they wish, regardless of what we wish. They don't make the decisions arbitrarily in that sense. They have to make decisions under constraints that we the people impose. The constraint of not being elected next time. The constraint of being shamed in the media. The constraint of facing huge opposition from the people at large, whether in the courts, in the media, or indeed on the streets. These are all constraints that are really important aspects of the system of control that would mean that there is no vertical dominance in our lives as the law ideally should prevent us from having to suffer the private dominance in our lives. It's a political dimension.

1:10:42.2 SC: Right. It's a wonderful philosophical underpinning for the rule of law, the checks and balances, the not concentrating power.

1:10:52.4 PP: Exactly. These are all means, these are all facilitators of popular control over what government does, and they're crucial. And if you give it up, if you move to a form of government where those in power do not feel bound by rule of law constraints, do not feel bound by checks and balances that the system has in place, do not feel bound by the court ruling against them, for example, can be high-handed in their attitudes, then you're moving to a free-for-all, which is to say chaos or sort of anarchy, or indeed despotism. You're moving away from the sort of civilization that is within our grasp but is only imperfectly realized.

1:11:41.8 SC: Connections to current events are left for the audience to work out for themselves. But I will, one final question before we let you go. If your Wikipedia page is to be believed, your political philosophy has actually had real-world implications, especially in the country of Spain. Is that true? Could you say a few words about that?

1:12:09.2 PP: Yeah, that is true. I published a book called Republicanism, which sets out this view of Republican thought and its implications for politics in a book I published in the late '90s. It was translated into Spanish, and the leader of the opposition, Zapatero, decided that he wanted a political philosophy to guide him in government if he won government. And I know from his advisors he read widely in political philosophy, and he was taken apparently by this Republicanism book and decided that the civic Republicanism was the sort of political philosophy ought to guide him. And he did come to power in 2004, and he invited me to give a lecture to a very large audience in Madrid because he'd been using the thoughts of the strands of thought in the tradition. And I do say it's not my invention, civic Republicanism, I'm just giving voice to a tradition that I think was there right down to the American founding and including the thought of the American founders, which was lost in the 19th and 20th centuries by my own perceptions. But he adopted this, and he used phrases from my book, for example, that no dominación, you know, no domination became the great catch cry. Even on electoral bills, I was sort of amazed at this. And people sort of came to understand it, what he was talking about. And I sometimes use what I call the eyeball test in determining how far a society really is one, which you're enjoying freedom as non-domination, which is to say it's a society where people can look one another in the eye without reason for fear or deference based on the power of the other.

1:14:13.6 PP: That at least in the realm of the basic liberties, they can stand tall, they can look one another in the eye. And I think that is only possible in virtue of law. It's not possible on the prairie, so to speak, in the wilderness, on your own or in an anarchic society. It requires the shaping of law, the cultural law in our societies. And he was very taken by that. And so, for example, one of the first acts of his parliament was to introduce gay marriage in a very Catholic country. His legislature was the third legislature in the world to introduce gay marriage, which is extraordinary. And to use the eyeball test in persuading people to do this, there is a book which I published with a Spanish lawyer and political theorist called José Martí called Political Philosophy in Public Life, where he writes about Zapatero parliamentary presence on this theme, where he in Parliament said to Parliament, and indeed said it at large, which of you can leave this Parliament and meet a gay friend, assuming you're heterosexual, and expect them to be able to look you in the eye without reason for fear or deference if you have just voted to deny their intimate relationships the protection that you as heterosexual enjoy in your intimate relationships. And apparently it was very powerful.

1:15:55.5 SC: It does sound good.

1:15:56.8 PP: And I think in other ways he used the Republican themes very effectively in the first Parliament when he was Prime Minister, President they say in Spain, that was until 2008. The great financial crisis rather changed the focus a bit, but most of the laws that he introduced, and I was saying I gave this lecture in Madrid, at the end of this lecture I joked to him about, for example, he had already passed a law in which the public broadcaster in Spain, a sort of BBC of Spain, was really made independent of the government of the day, that law. And he claimed to be following my book in going that direction. Now, I think very important that if there is a public broadcaster it should be an independent public broadcaster, even if it is funded from government sources. And he had done this and I said in my talk, jokingly as I thought, look, you've made this law and I think that's terrific, I fully support it, but you're going to find it very difficult to live up to this law because I predict that a year from now the public broadcaster will be a critic of your policies and you're going to be sorely tempted to ring up the director and to remind him of who he got this power from, so to speak, or she got this power from.

1:17:31.7 PP: And it meant as a joke, but in response to my speech, rather than giving his prepared remarks, he said he would live up to these themes on a whole range of issues and in token of his confidence in this, he invited me, he had only met me for the first time half an hour previously, to review his government for his performance six months before the next election. It's not the sort of thing I generally do or even would ever wish to do, but I... And someone stood up in the audience and said my foundation will support Philip Pettit in doing this if he accepts and of course I had to accept the invitation. So I did do a review in 2007 prior to the following election. The press in Spain all pressed me very strongly to give him a mark. I was happy enough to say nine out of ten or something like that.

1:18:30.3 SC: Okay. Good.

1:18:30.9 PP: But it was very interesting in that period. I met with him in a number of occasions where he was anxious to persuade me, he was being faithful to the principles of Republican thought in the policies he was introducing and indeed they were very, in some cases, very remarkable policies and I think he was broadly faithful, but it gave me a sense of how he was thinking. He was this man I came to admire greatly, deep believer in democracy, but in democratic leadership. So for example, he would not have pushed with that gay marriage law except insofar as he brought people along with him. When apparently prior to his introducing it there was a majority even his own party against. When it passed there was a 65% majority in favor in the Spanish people. The opposition immediately said we will revoke the law as soon as we get to power. Of course they didn't.

1:19:26.7 SC: They didn't because it was popular. Yeah.

1:19:29.1 PP: Most people had gone to a gay marriage, to a gay wedding, you know, and it just seemed so mean-spirited to withdraw this license, this legitimation that you've given to a large section of our population. Anyhow, that's the connection with practical life. I've had a few others, but that's certainly the only technical one, so to speak.

1:19:52.8 SC: Well, and it sounds like his gestures at your talk and your responses both fit in perfectly with where we started with human beings offering assurances of their speech acts representing true beliefs and commitments at the time.

1:20:10.3 PP: Well, it's very nice for you to say so. I'd like to believe that's the case, but as I say, I may be deceiving myself.

1:20:16.7 SC: You've given us a lot to think about. Philip Pettit, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:20:20.6 PP: It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Sean.

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