You're listening to the reversing climate change, podcast by the team at Nori. The carbon removal Marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello and welcome to the reversing climate change
podcast. I'm Ross Kenyan I am the creative editor at Nori. The carbon removal Marketplace today, I have with me dr. Kevin Valley, a associate professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University and author of Of the new book trust in a polarize age. Hey, Kevin, I Ross has a gun is going well, I'm glad to have you here. It's a very well good timing, because I think if we had spoken a week earlier, you might have
had different thoughts. But the inauguration was yesterday, you write about trust. Why politics feels like war must? It be War. As one of your previous books is called? Why is it like this, does it have to be like this? Why, why is everyone so angry all the time as it may be layperson way of asking it? Yeah. So um I'll talk about the particular circumstances and then the kind of broader
picture. So I work on the different topics of trust and political polarization and I work on two kinds of trusts one is, what's called social trust? Your trust in most people in your Society usually trust in strangers as a whole and political trust which is trust in institutions particular institutions, like different parts of government like Congress or the president or particular people who occupy those Al's political polarization is a term that is a lot more familiar to most people
than social and political trust. And it's typically thought to be the idea that people are moving further apart from one another, in terms of their political views but that actually isn't the only thing we're talking about when we talk about polarization, we sometimes talk about a thick base polarization where people are coming to dislike people in the other party or other group more. So polarization involves both changes in issues and More negative affect.
We've got more effective polarization than we have issue-based polarization. There's also the phenomenon of sorting and sorting is you're not changing your views or attitudes, but you're associating with like-minded and dissociated from the on like-minded. So, really what I talk about is those those four different phenomenon that are different things, me my polarization. Okay, so hopefully we've given your listeners these Concepts. I think their cost. Only connected.
So the idea is that the more polarized, we get the less trusting, we get of other people in our society that are on the other team and the leaders of those people and then when they run the institutions, we trust those less as well as so
polarizations driving distrust. And I think distrust is driving polarization because I think they'll last, you trust people, the more you're inclined to see their disagreements with you as cause for disliking them because you're more likely to attribute their Differences with you to some sort of fault in them. I call this the illusion of culpable dissent in the book. So we think that their descent is their fault.
Because their Dom or evil, or both only a moron or a bad person could think X, Y and Z. So, we're in a doom Loop between falling trust and polarization. Now, I thought until the last two weeks that we were seeing a slow linear decline in trust and a slow linear increase in polarization.
Ation. But the thing about the last two weeks that my friend Ryan Muldoon points out is that sometimes social indicators and social norms don't change in a linear fashion, sometimes they change in an exponential fashion and I think that what has happened is that trust in institutions particularly the Democratic process collapsed, very, very fast on one side of the aisle and it led to revolt and that Revolt has In some ways exacerbated, political
polarization. Although I think it's also highlighted, the cost of it, which is good at least. So, going from the general bits of trust and polarization. That's how I would analyze the current situation as a decline in trust in the Democratic process leading to a Revolt that continues to crystallize and further deepen divisions. In fact now that Biden and the inaugural talked about fighting domestic terrorism, I'm a little worried that we're going to have
a politicized. Sized new institution a bit like the way we handled foreign terrorism which was, you know, extremely poor, and oppressive and terrible. So you know, that's where I kind of think we are. We have a lot of lower and lower trust in institutions in each other more and more polarization of all these varieties and it creates a flammable environment and indeed, Trump is better at
lighting that flame. That anyone does so deliberately and repeatedly and ingeniously in order to benefit. Shelf. And it finally blew up in his face and hopefully his permanently disgraced him. I'm sorry. I've been very black pulled on Trump over the last couple of weeks. Usually, I kind of try to be more even-handed, but I'm like not in the mood for that which is kind of weird for me like kind of pride, myself on it, but, but trying to be even-handed, but I'm not there right now.
I think this is just hideous Behavior, so I feel similarly, if there's one criticism, someone listening could make of this show and I would be like touche, it's that there's more generosity to ideas that do not deserve them sometimes. Yeah, being to charitable too much steel. Manning is happening, and it's hard hard. But necessary questions do not get asked and it might look like politeness but it could be cowardice as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it actually worse than it has
been historically? I don't know what the data show about this, but are we actually more polarized and suspicious of each other? The Divide also splits between Progressive and conservative, broadly, maybe you would frame it differently but have these factions always been so strong? No, I mean, what's interesting is we've really only been measuring trust levels via surveys for the past, say about 60 years. The political distrust measures are actually a bit older. Go back into the 50s.
So the survey data only goes back about 50, 60 years. So, we don't really, Ali know if there were periods of lower trust, my suspicion, is that growing up in a world where two or we work together to defeat, an obviously evil Foe and didn't see any real damage drone country or division over. This was a big trust increasing event for us. However, there's also been trust declines in a lot of European countries, but not very much. We were weird.
We're the only established democracy that seen this big big, big decline in Social, trust for instance, but have things been worse. So trust is hard to say. It's the worst things have been since polling began but there's been a Slowdown in the collapse over the last decade or two political polarization however is something that we can measure a little bit better particular but primarily at the elite
level. So there's the nominate index created by Nolan McCarty at Princeton that looks at Congressional votes and measures polarization based on that and roll call votes. So we were this politically polarized during the Civil War. Or and just before it. But we haven't been this polarized since then. So on the polarization index at the elite level, we haven't been this polarized. But then the question is, what about most people? And it turns out that issue
based polarization decreases. I think as your education level decreases, but the Highly Educated, highly connected are very politically partisan and very politically engaged. And from what I can tell the more that people get into politics in the More educated. They are the more this phenomenon, the more this phenomenon hits them. So you know probably the maximally polarized people in high political office with the decrease in moderates.
I mean it's I think McConnell May cooperate with the Democrats simply because dealing with Trump for four years was psychologically traumatic and various respects for our politician who'd been used to so many such differences and he's
done buying a very long time. I think that helps but Generally I think at the elite level people in DC, politicians peoples, and politicians offices, very wealthy people, very and highly, you know, people in the academy people and Hollywood, you know, the high cultural Elites, those are the
most polarized. So what I would say is to the extent that your Elite and high-level your polarized and highly educated but that there isn't that much issue-based polarization in the average American but Can be polarized very easily. So I have thoughts as a lay person on why polarization has increased and I want to say them and I want you to tell me why they're wrong or incomplete.
Will you do that for me? Yes I think I've said this before on the show but tend to be pretty favorable towards
markets. I think they're important and worth preserving in many in many ways but I think the way that media is monetized breaks this dynamic in a really dangerous way where the best way to keep us engaged is oftentimes to get us angry and you can look back to the origins of right-wing talk radio and Rush Limbaugh and I feel like that trend has gone through Fox News and social media.
I look at something like a vise article and they're almost scientifically designed to make everyone mad and the whole comments are mobile meta comments about how mad everyone is and watching this disaster. I think it's the only way to get attention is to piss everyone off and I think that is just been bad. Capitalist feedback loop. I think that's part of it. Am I onto something or no?
Well, I think you are. I mean the biggest regret I have in the book is that I couldn't get very much into media distrust. I talk about it in the empirics but I wanted to talk about ways of restoring Trust in Media with liberal institutions. And I don't know how to do it without violating the First Amendment. So I didn't have a chapter on it.
I talked about the liberal institutions that I thought could be employed or What reformed or extended to increase trust and reduce polarization those include associations, freedom of Association, markets, some aspects of the welfare state elections and parliamentary democracy, and the rule of law. I had to cut the federalism chapter. I think it would help but there
wasn't enough data. But with media, it's just so difficult to think about what you would need to solve the problem because they do feed outrage, but the bigger issue isn't so much that people are Outrage. Now it's that they have manifestly false beliefs and I think this is a much worse problem on the right than the left. I've become very convinced of this recently. I read this nice book Network propaganda and it made the case that the right-wing media
circuit is a lot simpler. Like, there are far fewer outlets and it's easier for them to be a closed system. So then it's much easier to propagate lies and false beliefs like that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or well. They did find a few radioactive holes out. Out there but nonetheless believing just falsehoods like that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11.
So that was, that's when a lot of the really faults believe started to take hold in the media, but trumpets, just on a whole nother level promoting all kinds of conspiracy theories and then punishing media that don't propagate it. So if Fox News got critical of him, he started attacking Fox News in their writings have gone down quite a bit. Actually since he started doing that I went to like Our American Network and YouTube and like yeah I want America.
And yeah, I mean, they're going to be who knows where they're dispersing towards it's very disturbing. This one of the reasons I hope that Trump is barred from future office by the Senate. Yeah. No punches pulled. Sorry, I should pull some, maybe I should pull. So now I just speak, right? It's fine. I well, I mean, I just think that he's just such a master manipulator that he's able to
take advantage of Of the media. He's a because I don't think anyone would dispute it. No no, no. And it's his ability and willingness to punish reporters in such a public way. I mean he destroyed Megyn Kelly for instance and I suspect he'll start to set his sights on people like Chris Wallace here, not too long so who knows what's
going to happen? You know, we took I don't think I think he's too lazy to start his own party but he's been talking about it. But yeah, so he's been a lot of the problem now a lot of people say oh well the problems predate him. Yes. Yes, they do. But he, he has made things per personally has made things. Worse deliberately to benefit
himself. I just want to say that because I think it's manifest, but it is more important in general, to pay more attention to institutions than two individuals, because institutions Place enormous limits on what individuals may do. But so do social norms and if you have someone who I think never feels guilt or shame, they'll flout norms. And so, when people We'll try to punish them, they don't feel
remorse and so they don't stop. But that makes Trump a bit of a unicorn because the vast majority of humans feel guilt and shame and so they can be reined in. Wow well maybe we should talk about institutions then if yes please Focus Less on an individual's we're even start to talk about institutions. Yeah so I mean there's two kinds of Institutions, I think matter formal and informal and formal or things like laws constitutions.
Administrative rules and regulations stuff that you know there's usually some kind of like written code that's enforced by courts and police informal Norms or things more like social social norms, where there are expectations that people follow the norms. And there's some kind of usually social sanction or punishment when people don't follow them. You know, we all think we ought to go along with them.
So you know there's a lot of well-known destructive social norms, you know things like Chinese foot binding.
Or this is the most neutral way to use the term, but female genital cutting, where a lot of people do it, but they don't want to do it because they're worried about being punished if they do it. We keep a lot of order with good social norms, even though we often have bad ones, we have developed some new Norms. Like, punishing people who use racial epithets that reinforce certain kinds of racial statements, but they usually involve Society responding with
punishment. Now, I think social media has made it easier to over punish which is why a lot of people do. The punishing don't understand canceled culture because they're like, I'm just like chastising people who deserve it, but because it gets Amplified and coordinated it. The person being attacked is just it's disproportionate but it's a spontaneous, it's disproportionate by a spontaneous order. He doesn't just want actor.
So formal and informal Norms that I think of them both as kinds of Institutions, there's a number of different things going on but a lot of the polarization I think has to do with the way that Congressional rules and the way our voting and for officials and official voting. Like, when legislators vote is structured, such that polarization creates a lot of problems with with things like gridlock and a lot of really
basic stuff can be addressed. But then there's also just the institutions that the media and their attempts to monetize things and to violate social norms like against lying which is decreased trusting media a lot, but they're still doing just fine in terms of numbers, people think, once I can't be trusted so they start trusting the other side which is Felicia. But nonetheless, it's what happens. And then you have just a lot of informal Democratic Norms, that
are being violated. That Trump has been violating about, you know, not trying to get another country to dig up dirt on your political opponent or lying about the Integrity of the election process and so on. And those aren't you know necessarily illegal but they're in their violations of informal Norms. There are things that we all think no one should do and that no one actually does do until
trunk does them. Them. So anyway, I'm just trying to give examples of, I don't want to get back to cold close towards Trump. But yeah, there are informal Norms, informal norms and I think we're seeing decay in in both. And I think the media outrage is people are willing to violate social norms to make money and then those Norms degrade. And so, everyone feels like they can be mean to each other, because all the high status, people are being mean to each
other. And then, particularly Twitter acts as a wild, amplifiers social punishment. Such that it just builds and builds and builds and it can ruin lives. Like I would rather go to jail for a couple days. Then be the subject of a Twitter mob. Maybe longer brief tangent here, have you read Jon Ronson's? So, you've been publicly shamed?
No, I haven't tell me about it. I think you would very much like it and it gives examples of both the left and the right and the sort of gallows culture of the public execution, and ways in which it's been used inappropriately. He also has some examples where maybe it was just defied to, but just sort of like the gleeful destruction of someone's life, that people may be read like a single tweet. I like cool. Well, we should cast this person
into outer Darkness then. Yeah, you're like wow your way your way too eager to do that. But he's a he's a journalist actually that he's covered. A lot of like weird conspiracy cultures Fringe subcultures. It's good book. I think you'd like it but oh great. Okay. Yeah, that's very interesting. Yeah. Okay. Actually, real question now though, I think now that our listeners have an understanding of what you mean by institutions
formal and informal. I think we should back up even further and explain how you view liberalism because a big part of this book is you sort of offering a vision of what liberalism is / could be and why it's important why we maybe take it for granted and how our institutional thoughts that you just laid out might fit inside of that container. So, what exactly is liberalism? Well, so all I'll start with the a very general account and then get more specific in stages.
So the very very most broad account of liberalism is that it is a political philosophy which says that persons are naturally free and equal and should be treated as such by government. And what that means is there's no natural hierarchies of authority, meaning that everyone's in a sense, Born Free and not under the authority of anyone but say their parents, so they can make up their own minds about how to live and To be treated equally, right? So that people don't aren't
naturally ahead of each other. And so, those Notions of Liberty, and equality don't actually conflict. Because originally in liberalism, there wasn't a liberty, equality conflict. So, they're very, very much basic form is Natural Freedom and equality. If persons. Now, it's a quality in the moral sense that everyone ought to be treated as equals or everyone has equal dignity. Not that people are equal in capacities or talents or anything like that.
So a lot of you know, Libertarians will Say, well, people aren't equal but, you know, that's not what the people saying we're equals typically, the more like me, like, a Christian equality before God, something like that. Yeah, cuz he starts off that way because liberalism, you know, evolves out of out of Christianity, but it doesn't have to be so you can be an atheist Global or Christian
liberal. But in terms of Origins, yeah I think Christianity contributes greatly to the idea of equal moral worth So that's the very broadest notion. Now, there's a divide among liberals historically between those who think that certain liberal values like freedom and autonomy ought to be actively promoted by the state's.
You know, you find this, you know, the European continent would like a lot of liberals want to suppress the Catholic church or or suppress organized religion because they think it undermines freedom. And this is more of what we might call liberal perfectionism. So on this view, people are free and equal but the state Shouldn't be neutral. The state should promote liberal
values sometimes by force. But then there's another kind of liberalism that I call at the very most General way liberal neutralism and liberal neutralism says, look if people are actually free and equal, we're going to be fair to them. We can't just decide that one view is correct and impose it on
the rest. So this started off with religion, where the thought was or released with variants of protestantism where the thought was roughly that, you know, look you know, we can't agree on religion and And we seem to have different views that aren't going to go away. And over time, they kind of start to look like different but reasonable views. And so the thought is that, you know, look the state shouldn't take a side on religious
matters. And then, you know, became a question about whether the state should take the side of religion at all or probably be secular and then liberalism's and liberals disagree about whether neutrality. Implies robust forms of secularism like getting religion out of the Public Square like friendship.
France and lie CTA or a much more kind of open Public Square where the state doesn't coercively establish religion, but in allows all kinds of other religious expressions, like, in the United States. So, there's little neutralism and perfectionist, liberalism, I'm a little neutralist, and then you can get even more specific with kinds of liberal
neutralism. So that would be like a natural, right space liberalism that says these natural rights and you establishment violates those rights or you can go in In for the Contemporary variants of social contract, liberalism try to justify the state, based on the free, and equal agreement between persons may be an actual and maybe a hypothetical one, but we're actually kind of beyond the consent analogy.
Now we're basically the thought is that you because people are naturally free and equal, you can't coerce them if the coercion isn't justifiable to them from their own perspective. So the thought is that all coercion State, coercion or power needs to be publicly justify that. It's a To be justified to each person by their own lights. And so this is what's called public reason liberalism.
It's a variant of neutrals liberalism because it says, the state shouldn't coerce a matters of reasonable dispute. Instead there has to be justifiability to multiple perspectives. Rawls is an example of someone
who has this view my advisor. Jerry Gauss was had a version of this view is very different than Rawls is, so we've got liberalism neutralism and the perfectionism distinction, and then we've got the more contemporary Version of liberal neutrals and it's called public reason the Burleson. And I'm a public reason liberals. So there's your taxonomy. Hopefully that's helpful to people to some degree. At least, I know what the Google infer that we have detailed show notes.
Yeah, we actually know each other because I spent a year at Arizona which is your alma mater for your PhD. Yeah. And I decided against continuing but was still very influenced by the public reason thinkers there and post rawlsian is mm. I'm curious how Much I want to give listeners but I imagine from the good place. They at least know, some basic side this point but public reason. Actually I want you to explain in Greater detail what exactly is and the original position.
And so like the, you know, the 101 of Rawls, and then I can explain what hurt my brain about it. And one of the reasons why I left and then ways, your book answers, some of my concerns. Would you be willing to do that for us? Yeah, yeah. Let me see how fast I can do it. So, this is a gigantic. A question, Kevin I'm saying it is, but but I think I can do a
sequence of explanations. So the sort of standard sort of social contract, liberalism's of like lat Rousseau and Kant fell out of favor in the 19th century and favor of, you know, more like communitarian and nationalist views and England to utilitarian views, and to Marxism and socialism is of various varieties, and this was even true to some degree.
Until the second world war, you did have kind of liberalism socialism liberal Democratic, socialism that gained in power, where it's libertarianism, Classical liberalism, contracted greatly. But one of the things that happen in philosophy is that people had kind of moved away
from making moral claims at all. Thinking that they were say, just expressions of emotion, that any sensible philosophical disputes were based on things that needed to be able to be, you know, empirically verifiable. So, political philosophy had fallen on Hard Times. Even when did people did political philosophy, it was done in a kind of British utilitarian vain.
So Along Comes John, Rawls starting and the 50s, he's finishing up, his education, late 40s, and he wants to create a systematic alternative to utilitarianism for a variety of reasons. But one of which is just the thinks that very simply that utilitarianism does not respect what he called the separateness of persons. So, he wants to develop a kind of, he wants to develop a more General theory of social contract theory, but getting it what he thinks is really important about the idea.
And what's really important about the idea is that Justice is a kind of fairness. And it's not just a fairness to people of different races or nationalities. It's also a matter of fairness to people who have different faiths and what he called conceptions of the good in general. And so, how would you figure out how to treat different perspectives, and different people fairly? Well, one thing you could do is you can ask what principles of Justice.
They would choose. If they didn't know those divisive or potentially divisive features of themselves. And so Rawls construct, assists idea of the original position and the veil of ignorance and the original position, you have a whole bunch of abstract people that are in some sense taken to represent real people but in a much more complicated way than
people typically know. If they know anything about roles and he says okay look we're going to make people Only and more than that rational, and choosing not just means, but also to some degree choosing ends, but to make sure that their choice is fair and reasonable, we're going to deny them factors. That would bias them that are, as he said irrelevant from a moral point of view and he thought not just our race or nationality or whatever was irrelevant from a moral point of view.
But so is our conception of the good. And so we shouldn't know those factors or the parties to the original position. Shouldn't know those factors when they're trying to figure out what Justice.
Is the result would be a theory of justice that comported with our ordinary moral intuitions about Justice, it would be non-utilitarian and character that ultimately would Justify both extensive protection for basic Liberties, but also equal opportunities and lots of respects and that all social and economic inequality should be organized to maximize, additional least Advantage. So it's a very very left-leaning liberalism that says that? Very hard to justify inequality.
You has to benefit everyone and the least advantage to the maximum extent. Can I jump in here? Kevin yep. Yep. So that's that's rolls up to 1971. Oh yeah. That's the that's the bits that we can start sort of start with. Yeah I think that's a great place to start to in my understanding of Rawls and surely you know much much more than I do is that he was pretty conservative with how he thought people would choose within the
original position. He thought if you didn't know which person you it'd be in society, you would choose egalitarian distribution. You wouldn't want there to be a lot of rich people, out of poor people because you could be one of the poor ones. But a lot of what came out of Arizona and sort of what is deemed post rawlsian. Was that actually rational people in the original position could choose less equal outcomes?
People can disagree about the like what the outcome should be coming out of the original position. And that idea really mess with my head because it meant that there is multiple, right? Answers or maybe even no, right, answer to the original position in which case where do you go from? There, is that as I understand scrapped, yeah, actually, that's a very nice way of putting it. So, one of the points that Jerri gasps made, it was my advisor.
And you took a course with. And I think you did take a course with them. Right? I did him and David Schmitz thought it together. Yeah. And one of the themes that he was stressing been and it's still, it's still a theme of his work. Has his last book will come out in July, they were getting through. Ooh. And one of the things that he says, is that social contract reasoning and itself is
inherently indeterminate. And the same thing is true of all contracts, here in theories of Justice, including roles has and that Rawls actually understood this early on in his papers in the 50s. But he tried to resist it. In a theory of Justice, by building in a whole bunch of controversial assumptions than, of the choice scenario.
Stuff that, you know, many of his critics not only disagree with, but Mock and sometimes he would say stuff like, Now if we get the wrong answer, that's counterintuitive out of the original position, we should just change the original position. So it's like he was trying to arrive at his own particular answer by rigging the system, such as being for critics. It's such a chastity.
It is bait. Yes. And so one of the things Yuri said was well actually look there's going to be reasonable disagreement, not just about like you know, what's good? And so there's going to be reasonable disagreement about Justice. And so people are going to be able to Have different conceptions of Justice rank conceptions of Justice
differently. And so the original position, reasoning will be what Jerry called indeterminate and determined Now Jerry still kind of like social contract theory and so a big thing of his work was how do we resolve indeterminacy after we realized that impartial moral reasoning, you know isn't going to tell us what Justice requires and in his own work? What he does is he keeps this
idea conti and malls and idea. Of morality and Justice being about some kind of impartial moral reasoning, reciprocal, moral reasoning, but trying to find ways that real social processes and social interactions could lead us to coordinate on one of those options that would be acceptable. So you try to delineate the set of potential agreement points and then you say okay well how do social institutions and social Evolution lead us to arrive to actually practicing one of those agreements.
Eight points. And that's how I started to introduce Hayek and Hume into the thought of Kant. And Rawls by saying look, you know, a big part of justice is how we conquer ties, the thing, how we bring it to Earth how we institutionalize it, because the original position will help us something like it will help us to reason impartially, but it doesn't get us to a real actual morality that can is Ross's resolve are competing claims. So, yeah, that was one.
Way that in the later project of political liberalism broke Noun. So, one of the things that rolls realize is in the interim between a theory of justice and then his other big book, political liberalism is that he had assumed. So one of the things we always wanted to argue is not just that you come up with Justice but that Justice should structure a well or it's what he calls, a relative society.
And the reason he cared about this is because it wasn't enough for justice to just be Justice to be Justice, it had to also be able to organize Society in a way that would be compatible with people. Good, good, their own personal good. And, and he also wanted to show that Justice would be self-stabilizing like that. If you you established it, it would it would keep itself in effect. Do you mean something like in contradistinction to something like let Justice rain though?
The heavens fall, that's not a viable option for right? No, so his con thien ism is consequence sensitive. So Rawls developed this idea of a well-ordered society and the last third of theory of Justice which people don't look at but in it, he assumed that people would agree. Really about a great deal of what was good. And he later comes to be dissatisfied with that assumption that he thinks that, even in that model, people are going to come to disagree about what's good.
And so the whole Theory had to be recast because people would have to agree to his theory of Justice. What he called, Justice is fairness from different perspectives, about the good and so he said, okay, well look, I mean, people are going to disagree about the good but maybe they can still agree on on Justice. This creates this problem which is that if we agree on Justice from different perspectives, it's not going to be obvious to each other, whether we've all endorsed it.
And we're going to need some public way to communicate that to each other. And so, in order to stabilize a diverse Society with different perspectives, on the good different religions and to coordinate people around Justice in the way roles wanted, you had to be able and be willing and prepared to exchange what he called public reasons.
And these are reasons that are Some sense accessible or shared and that would exclude and ultimately a quite subtle way, not a ham-fisted way, religious reasons, or private reasons, or reasons, for what he called, comprehensive doctrines. So from this, he developed this idea of public reason, which their doctrines of public reason earlier and political philosophy, but he gave the term sort of currency.
And so, the thought was that the justifications for state power and state action had to appeal to different perspectives and that would only work. If you appeal to reasons that were shared by those perspectives, in some sense.
So this is the way that public reason starts to impact the role of religion in the Public Square because it says that we should tend to keep religion out of it in various respects and that created a gigantic controversy in the nadi's in this one tonight and the 2000s and that's what I ended up. Writing my dissertation on. Yeah, keeps philosophers
employed, it's great. Yeah, well, you know, it not only that but it keeps people in religious studies political Theory and constitutional law employed. So it's a really big Kind of interdisciplinary. Debates, pretty interesting. So the doctor of public reason in Rawls kind of starts off that way but what really matters I think for roles in the end is that principles of justice and principles for organizing Society or Justified, to
multiple Regional perspectives. Now, another thing that took off after you left, that really took off after you left what was still going on when you were there. When I was there was the idea of what we might call pluralism of that Justice. Where, you know? Yeah, people can I just disagree about the good, they can disagree about Justice and so they can reasonably reject Rawls has conception of justice. So if you want a society that stable and will ordered you can no longer maintain that.
Rawls is theory of justice. Is the best way to do that. Rawls admits this towards the end of his life and essentially, here he's picking up on that theme where look reasonable people can disagree about justice. So, you know, we can't just insist on a procedure for determining. What that is? And Rawls kind of basically admits this.
In fact, in his letter to his editor, before the last edition of political liberalism, he said that his theory of justice, justice fairness now planes at best a small role and is his broader. Thoughts on these topics, which is a remarkable admission. So we get to a liberalism that says, look, people aren't actually free and equals. So we have to justify things to their diverse points of view, and then there's and that it event says in a kind of
neutrality requirement. Cause you're not going to be able to Fi I resume that takes a course of sidon something controversial to the people who don't accept it, right? So you end up with something kind of neutral, but one of the interesting questions is, what is the status of capitalism in under a, an order in an order of public reason. So one place that Jerry Allison John Rawls disagreed about is how large the state should be and how much should interfere
with markets? Where's Ross thought it should interfere an enormous amount just a staggering amount and watch more than the You know, people will make this obnoxious remark that Rawls was trying to justify the Democratic party platform of 1968. That's false. He was much more left-wing than that.
Much more left wing. You know, but then Jerry's got a kind of classical liberal View. And so that's another interesting dispute among public reason, liberals, which is, you know, how to regard markets, but Jerry thought they were essential to any any free equal and mutually justifiable order. Okay, I think you've given us super helpful Baseline for understanding the rest of your book trust very might have difficult conversations about climate change and Beyond.
But yeah, how exactly does liberalism work where we it takes for, granted that it is legitimate for reasonable people to disagree about things that are important to them? How are we supposed to live together? If we don't actually agree on a lot, I'm sure people feel that a lot listening right now and the in America, the way the books,
the two books, trust books. I've done got Started was kind of reflecting on the public reason project and particularly Jerry's version of it, because one of the things that Jerry says that Rawls does not make so clear, is that what one of the things we really, really, really care about and Society? Broadly isn't just social cooperation bear, social cooperation, but it being able to have what Jerry called moral relations between persons. Those included things like love
and friendship and trust. And so the thought was that you No, in a free Society on. That's governed by the Norms of Javed justification. It is easier to form and sustain those moral relations. It's easier to have relations of love and friendship across differences. A liberal Society, you can make it connect. You know, make an Interfaith marriage work, right?
You can be friends with people who have wildly different views than you do. I mean, Jerry, and I disagreed in terms of metaphysics about everything, but we still work very well together and we're friends. So the thought is that Liberal Society, affords people, the opportunity to form more relations in a stable way, with a very wide range of people. And that one of the things that just about anyone says really matters in life is close successful personal relationships.
So I got to thinking, well, you know, love and friendship or like incredibly important, but they're not going to be the basis for an entire social order because we can't sort of have intimate relations of love and friendship with everybody. Hey, have a Civic friendship but Jerry, I kind of developed theories of love and friendship and some His very early work,
but you have a theory of trust. And so, my kind of thought was, well, you know, maybe if we disagree about Justice, when we disagree about the good, the most intimate social relation, we can expect to have with one. Another is just to be able to trust each other to generally do what we think to be the right thing. So there's there's a core of goodness and Justice that we can agree to but almost everything else is going to be controversial.
And so the question is, can we land on a system of norms that allows a diverse people to? See each other when we follow them. So my thought was well, look Norms that can be justified to each person's perspective, informal and formal institutions. Are those that will all have reason from our own perspective to follow. And so, when we see one another does, knowing our differences following the same rules, we think. Okay, now we can count on them,
we can trust them. And they're doing this out of some, kind of concern or respect for our well-being or something like that. So I develop in the book must politics be War. The purely philosophical predecessor to this very empirical I'll book an account or trust for the right reasons arguing that a liberal societies unique and being able to provide a rational basis. For trust, for people with diverse perspectives.
Any society, our state that takes sides was going to engender reasonable distrust between those and control. And those who are controlled between a hegemon in the suppressed group because they don't accept each other's values. So, the suppress group will disagree, you know, would disagree with the hegemon. Will be quote untrustworthy, with respect to those values when they can get away with it. And the subverted group won't
trust the hegemon. Because again, there's just you're not following the kind of common Norms, freely from their own perspective, they're imposing alien values. So then I thought, okay, well It's really needs to be two books because there's two questions. One is can a liberal Society in general sustained trust in principle so that you could even have a stable level order,
right? But then there's like the imminently practical question which is that can liberal institutions create real trust in a reasonably. Clearly just way from where we are and the aim of this book was to synthesize the empirical Just literature's in political science and economics with the public reason tradition. So that we can actually bring social science to bear on trying to figure out when our institutions are Justified.
So a very kind of gaussian theme of very kind of theme within the new movement, of philosophy, politics, economics, what I'm trying to contribute as the integration of the study of trust, into liberal, political thought. And so what this book does, is it tries to argue that liberal institutions can create real trust in the real world and in
fact, do and happen. So I run through a lot of the trust literature and I look at the institutions that I think can help to establish trust even under highly polarized conditions. So in essence, what I'm saying, is the liberal order. If we rely on liberal institutions in the policy tools within liberal Democratic capitalism that we can restore trust and we can reduce polymerization. There are a lot of complications though when this comes to policy making and I was just talking
with someone. Last night about whether a public reason, how public reason view would approach carbon tax or carbon emission restrictions its complex. I think you can publicly justify them but it's sort of it's sort of complicated because there's so much we don't know about. I mean I can run through it for you because I know you'll be interested obviously with the name of the podcast but different people model the world differently economically and socially. And they so they develop
different models. And they have different predictions for outcomes. And this makes it difficult to publicly justify. Because people think the same policy will have really different effects and they have models of complex systems that are decent. But that usually don't have a lot of predictive power because we're dealing with macro-level complexity and it's just extremely hard to model and predict such systems.
Sometimes it's impossible and in climate change and you might just say, well, you know, people disagree about how bad, you know, the warming is, and what the consequences will be. But I think there's a pretty compelling argument that all perspectives, should be worried about it, particularly
libertarian. Perspectives because a lot of climate change is going to violate a lot of property rights or lead to a lot of property rights violations, like Wars and conflicts now, the reasonable libertarian position is, I think the kind of Matt Ridley, I think Libertarians should basically be with a natural scientists are, but if you wanted to get on the outer bounds, you'd be a mooc warmer like, Matt Ridley and think that the we are causing some climate change through
human activity, but it's going to remain in a 2 degree Celsius. Here's the problem with that argument suppose there's an 80% chance that it's true suppose there's a 10% chance. We go over four degrees Celsius and warming. That's going to be a catastrophe. We have no idea how bad it's going to be.
Even if we see the clouds, we're going to have massive ocean acidification thinning of permafrost methane, you know, explosions, massive extinctions of animals, people still put a b. So the thought is that it's, there's a massive risk aversion argument. For restricting carbon plus Libertarians tend to be very optimistic about Innovations on the market. So they're anticipated costs for carbon taxes.
And carbon emissions, take that into account, it might be the case that we're able to innovate around it. Not unlike we did with CFCs, right? So, you know, we were able to bring that problem under a lot of control. Now reducing carbon emissions is going to be tough but you know, suppose we tell Exxon hey we're going to replace, you know your corporate tax rate with a carbon tax. Acts and the less carbon you omit the last actual pay and get all your scientists on it.
Because, you know, if you figure out how to get to zero carbon, you'll never pay taxes again or something you won't pay taxes for a generation or something like that. Just give them the dang incentive to figure out how to do it and I think that can clearly be publicly Justified because carbon emissions are a negative externality. Their threats to property rights, a Libertarian
perspective. Every other perspective is open to carbon emission controls in principle, there may be some cost of growth but the If we go over 4 degrees Celsius, they're going to be big cost to growth because, you know, we could even have really, massive death, heat waves more natural disasters. The destruction of a lot of, you know, being able to have viable sea life that can survive in areas where people were too
reliant upon. So basically, you know, kind of where I am is arguing that you can publicly justify restrictions on carbon emissions, you can justify to multiple perspectives on the ground of avoiding man. Sieve risk. So even if it's low probability so maybe the libertarian can say well 10% chance we go over 4 °C nightmarishly bad if we do that, right? So I think that's going to be sufficient reason to be able to justify it even to libertarian perspective.
So there's my public reason argument for carbon emissions restrictions. Well you back let a little bit but I'm glad you did because I wasn't sure we were going to make it to climate change and sometimes this No runs the risk of not, sometimes I abused the name of the show a little bit. But okay, I do want to talk about this climate stuff before it gets too far away. I still want to ask foundational questions about liberalism. Yeah. Is it actually neutral for instance?
I think of like marxian Scholars, making the claim that liberalism presupposes neutrality but it's smuggles in things like property rights that are not actually neutral. This is a way of protecting the bourgeoisie. It's a society dominated by moneyed interests. Isn't neutral. This Is A Lie. This is sort of an anyone who doesn't believe it is a victim of false consciousness. That's maybe a classical Mark, seen interpretation of liberalism. What do you say to something like that?
Well, I mean, the difficulty that marks have is the status of moral theory and their view. So if you're really classical Marxist, you're going to have to be a kind of moral relativist, animal, constructivist and even maybe in the mall nihilist. So when you push marxists to actually give more foundations of their view, they Oftentimes, we'll go perfectionist. So the effectively say, well, socialism is about promoting human well-being, but then you can just ask the question.
Well, Marxist, you're all about equality. So what do you do when people disagree about well-being? And then, they could say one or two things if they say, well, we're going to go ahead, then you can say, well, that's some dominating others, even by your own lights, but if they say no, then we got the liberal hook in them and can bring them over.
And so, then the question is, well, what about, you know, if you decide that you're not just Going to take a sectarian stand for one Doctrine. Can you be completely neutral between views? No. No. Liberals ever said, we can be completely neutral. In fact, it's not even clearly coherent and I know a lot of critics of liberalism says yeah you came actually neutral so it's an incoherent ideal. That is wrong Critics on the right, like to make this claim
to, it's not, that's correct. And it is an exaggeration of a Liberal site. When I say that I'm a neutralist, I see that. I'm a contextual neutralist. So, what you do is you look at the series of view, Is that you think a respectable exercises of practical, theoretical, rationality, right? People would kind of part of a tradition of thought. They're thinking the spoon and honest way, they're living by the norms and values of their
communities or groups. And the idea is you try to find institutions that are neutral between those groups. Not that are neutral in every sense of the term, but they can be justified to each perspective but that's going to vary based on the society. So you know what public justification is going to look like in a society, where everyone's a socialist is one thing more. Everyone's the Libertarians going to be the other.
However, people are not going to agree about whether libertarianism or socialism is true. I'm sorry, Libertarians, listening. I'm sorry, socialist listening, you're never going to convince everybody. You will probably never convince a majority Marxist came to power through a North Korean revolt and Rule and for an oppression and Libertarians have never come to power at all in any significant way but in the modern era, maybe Gladstone was like kind of libertarian or
something. So, So if we're never going to agree about the good and we're about, you know, the Divinity of Christ, whom we're never going to disagree, about agree about natural property rights. We're never going to agree about, you know, this class based analysis is a society, whether history is a history of class struggle or something like that. How do we resolve our differences? Well, why do I to resolve? Our differences is to have Democratic choice, we just get
together and we vote. But the problem here is that it's pretty clear that sometimes the votes go wrong and we do have Some kind of standard for saying, when we got the vote wrong, and the mother problem is just incredibly difficult for Democratic deliberation, to lead to agreement. And so, to find a way to kind of govern our Collective lives so that we are respecting, our freedom and equality, and the concerns of public justification.
So, one of the arguments Jerry makes is that the way that we actually resolve a lot of insuperable collective disputes is to devolve disputes to the individual. And group level to have way called jurisdictional rights. So instead of, you know, collectively deciding on how we're all going to live in our houses, you know, just having one big government on housing complex right fighting over what the rules are whether we can smoke or not or what kind of
carpet we can have right? We decentralize those choices, right? And the key to decentralization and to people being able to reconcile with their different uses of their partition of social space, is the Private
property and exchange. So the rationale for democracy and the rationale for private property are basically the same, which is that there are ways of reconciling people with different perspectives, sometimes we have to make Collective decisions, sometimes we can make our own decisions and so Democratic capitalism is actually kind of neutral because it's the way of resolving disputes between those who disagree about the good, and who disagree about Justice, it's on
maximally neutral, nothing is, but that's fine because that wasn't the point. Aunt, what do we do when we do disagree, though? I imagined idea that we should decentralize and allow a group like white nationalist to have their own private Idaho, just like the Gus Van Sant movie. I guess that works. Is that allowed? Should we allow something like that? Or how should we disagree in a productive way?
Another thing that's important is that even if certain abstract rights are publicly Justified, like say freedom of speech, the details of how those apply are going to be controversial.
And so that's why many We have to use democracy, you know, or the Judiciary to resolve disputes about rights and that's how those institutions get publicly publicly Justified is that we have reasonable conflicting interpretations of our basic rights and so those have to be resolved through some kind of collective decision procedure.
There's also the option of using federalism just to allow people polities to very, although Federalism is very very very under discussed in the public reason, literature. Hell Even I had to cut that chapter out of my book, boy, that I'm going to talk about it. I know you have a lot in there about how like, I wish I could, but there's just not enough data. It's something like this, right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right.
So that's kind of the story. I mean I know there's a number of different steps but I think they connect, we can publicly justify abstract rights when we're aware that we disagree about Justice in the good because we want to be able to trust each other anyway because the benefits of social trust are staggering and the result is That some institutions that people don't think our ideal even ideally just but ones that they can live with ones that they can live with.
That's what's key. I think. So you're thinking of that the type of federalism I described would not be publicly Justified and we shouldn't accept it. Yeah. I mean if we think that these centralization is going to lead to a majority violating the human rights, the basic human rights of the minority, then that's a reason against Ization. So, like one of my views is this? Like we should have way more states rights, but racial policy should be Federal.
So the big worry in decentralisation is it a lot of the Southern States in particular? We'll just go back to racist Moore's very quickly. But that doesn't mean we can't decentralized drug policy, doesn't mean we can't be centralized health. Insurance policy doesn't mean we can't decentralize education which we already do to a large extent. It just means that when it comes to racial Equity, maybe the feds have to step in. And, you know, securing voting rights and those kinds of things.
So, you know, that's what I would say in the United States, you know, we do have a systemic racism problem. It is hard to know exactly how much it is because these are very difficult questions measures or controversial. But, you know, if we're worried about bigotry and a small part and we think that the big part can correct the bigotry in the small part. Then, you know, you can keep
those things centralized. And I think in the way that the United Knighted states works is that the federal government tends to be less bigoted than the state governments? It might be the reverse, right? I mean, it potentially and then which case, then we would want a decentralized to protect racial minorities, but the circumstances in the United States, who decides to wear that just hasn't historically been
the case. So, and indeed black Americans trust the federal government more than they trust. Most people 17 percent of black Americans say, most people can be trusted as opposed to 46 percent of whites. Wow, that's that's quite a statistic. It's very, very sad and it's something I'm going to we're going to be studying empirically because it's both to some extent Justified. But it's also very very harmful because when you were low trust, there's a lot of opportunities
you miss. So, there's is a kind of what in philosophy. We call epistemic Injustice, against the black community, because there are grounds for distrust, but the distrust harms them in a way that's unjust. So, it's a double blind. Yeah. So for listeners, we've been pretty high falutin here. Talking, you know, graduate-level philosophy, Rawls. And in some degree of detail. If they care about rebuilding trust, what are some avenues that you think might be productive?
Besides the generic stuff of trying to allow for more freedom of Association to have stable protections for markets and lots of areas of making sure that the welfare state is efficient and as addressing very deep set. Need trying to preserve the Integrity of the election process, reducing corruption, the legal system particular in the police. So that's added, you know, a fairly High restricting kind of rent seeking and stuff at the federal level.
But those are very high level. So maybe we could talk about. I'll talk about some more specific stuff. One of the things I'm banging on about a lot is housing reform of making housing cheaper to build primarily through markets, but there are some ways, maybe housing doctors could be used for that. Well, but really ending a lot of the not in my backyard zoning. That makes them possible people
to live in cities. Here's why a lot of trust in government is based on two different assessments, how much economic inequality there is because a lot of people on the left, think that's just an itself, a sign of unfairness. So do some on the right but also economic growth, people think it's one of the functions of government to make sure that they're economically prosperous and increasingly. So so you want more broad-based growth. But housing restrictions are really, really bad.
For growth in inequality one they for growth, they hold back the division of labor because workers can't move into cities and further extend the division of labor and cities, you know, a lesson we've known since Adam Smith at least but it's also the case, that it hurts economic equality because rich people, essentially redistribute upward by controlling land and who can build, we're probably, you know, Matt broglie estimated in response the Pekingese top that about two-thirds of the
increase, inequality in the United States which due to real estate, not due to income. So if If we lower the price of housing, we had zoning reform, real estate zoning reform. We can increase growth and increasing economic equality at the same time. That's very hard to do, but it's something that I think would it. Strengthen trust in institutions from multiple perspectives, do people feel like they can't get a foot on the ladder because of this.
And then there's, that's right support that their government is not being responsible. And I even think that kids often times at can't prove this yet that kids feel like their parents. Raishin hasn't done their job by leaving them with huge amounts of debts and expenses. So I think one source of distrust is I think that Millennials distrust Boomers. Yeah, there's a lot of that going around. Yeah. Oh so many Express attacks in the culture.
I mean it is from a place of resentment and mistrust in the sense that the Boomers lived it up and ate the seed corn. Yeah. Do you think the more basic quotidian, join the Elks Lodge, go to your neighborhood church, know your neighbors names and their kids names stuff like that helps to yeah, I do particularly passing on your children.
So, you know, I like to think of this analogy, you know, the image of someone, you know, coming to talk to a parent and the kids kind of hiding behind them because they're shy and not sure how to react that happens in my think that sometimes. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, It happens to my three kids, you know, they, someone new comes in the house and they hide and, you know, until they see how we interact and they gradually come out and warm up.
So kids learn to trust from how their parents interact with strangers. Is it going Theory? And if you're interacting with strangers, a lot and you're interacting with people, they don't necessarily know a lot like in an association like a church or a lodge or something like that, and you're particularly doing say service work through a church or you're interacting with the poor and things like that, that can be trust-building. Kids and that can over time race trust.
So the practice of freedom of Association, not just the bare having of it, but the exercise of that, right, particularly with institutions that are integrated and networked in the community can build social cost. I think it also builds trust in government, does people learn to interact with it and learn to affect it for the good? So, you know, I think that is very, very important. I think that probably has a
pretty big effect on kids. It doesn't look like it has an effect on the adults, but Social trust, doesn't seem to be that affected by anything among adults because social trust attitudes tend to be things that seem to be fixed in early adulthood and childhood. I know you have to run here pretty soon. I'm wondering if you could take the temperature of the country. Do you think there's good reasons to hope for increase trust or you still pretty Grim?
I'm grim and hopeful so I'm Graham in the sense that I think trust is going to remain pretty low. I'm hopeful and then I think Biden is going to slow its decline. Bye. Or maybe pause it restoring. It's going to take a long time. Millennials are extremely distrusting.
So we're going to have to build circumstances where the Next Generation can become more trusting because falling trust is like a cohort effect, like the you know the silent generation, you know, it's more trusting the Boomers she's more trusting than genetics, who's more trusting than Millennials and those attitudes from the lock-in and adulthood. So we have to create a more trusting younger generation and I'm not quite sure how we're going to do that, so that's
difficult. Her, if there's less manifest corruption and people who are powerful getting away with a lot of garbage that will help trust in the system. So, one of the things I'm hoping will happen, is it? I think that even though people who were fans of trump, we need to punish powerful officials for basic more violations. They have to punish your leads for violations. So that the sense is that everyone's following the basic Norms because I believe stop following the Norms.
They rode the norms, and that makes trust harder, because then it's well, People aren't following the Norms that exist. So why should I can't count on? So, one thing I think that's going to be important. In the immediate term is simply punishing. Those who violate basic Norms to reinforce those Norms. So, those Norms are the basis for people learning to trust. Each other is the powerful can
just do whatever they want. I think it's a problem for trust because it arose, the basis of trust, which is norm compliance. Okay. Tentative nuanced answer. But it really Justified if you wanted to steer someone to your work and to follow up. I think this this new book is where you would want them to go. Yes, yes, that's right. That's right, I've written it so that it can be read by non philosophers so the more philosophical stuff there's an
asterisk next to those sections. So I think a lot of people you know any I think anyone with a college degree can get through it pretty easily. If you're you know graduate I'm at it's not hard at all. So I think anyone can benefit from it. I would say everyone could benefit. I think a lot from I worked really hard on the second chapter, which is an overview of thousands of papers in the trust literature. Not all of which I've read, but I've read meta-analyses, and
different areas. I'm very proud of that chapter. I think people would like to be able to just see that chapters just pretty big, but it's a great reference. The beginning of the book, I talk a lot about trust and polarization in the epilogue, I talk. About how to restore trust. There's discussions of trust in institutions throughout, so it's not just a work of philosophy. It's also a work of political science and economics. So I think a lot of different perspectives could be
interested. I think so too. It's amazing literature review. There's a, the bibliography here, the works cited, massive useful. If you care about this topic, if you made it this far, you probably do it would help you, it would sit well in your library and thanks for being here. Kevin. Well, thanks so much for having me. It was, it was a lot of fun. We got a little bit of climate change and I'm really happy. You just went for it. And maybe we should talk more
about it in the future. There's a lot more to do and if we don't have trust I don't think action on climate. Change is really going to work very well. That's right, that's right. But thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in apple podcast and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this. Content to a wider audience. If you think what we're doing is
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