James Brusseau on Inequality & Philosophy

Other speakers: Radio presents Hopping Mad with Will McLeod and Arliss Bunny.

Other speakers: Welcome to Hopping Mad, I'm Will McLeod.

Other speakers: And I'm Arliss Bunny. Coming up on Hopping Mad, we have a fabulous interview with Dr. James Brusseau. He is talking to us about the philosophy and ethics of inequality and really bringing a very different voice to that subject here on Hopping Mad. Welcome back to Hopping Mad. We talk a lot about economic facts here, but today we have a unique opportunity to talk about the ethics, philosophy, and morality of economics. In order to have that conversation, we're here with Professor James Brusseau, who works for Pace University and helped create the Wealth Inequality Workshop. James, welcome to the show. Well, thanks for having me. Looking forward to being here. Tell us about the Wealth and Equality Workshop. What are you trying to accomplish with this documentary and website you've created? Sure, this is a project that we put together with

James Brusseau: Pace University and some contribution from one of the publishers of one of my books, Flat World Knowledge. And what we're trying to do is take a look at the issue of wealth and equality in a language and on a level which is a little bit different than is commonly approached. So instead of talking in economic terms, that is, in terms of how we can maximize wealth for individuals or in political terms, say, in terms of Democrats versus Republicans or something similar. Instead, we're trying to talk in philosophical and ethical terms with the idea that we can perhaps shake up the way people think about and approach this issue, lend people an opportunity to create a fresh perspective, and perhaps find ways of talking in common with others with whom they might find themselves opposed if they were speaking on the economic level or the political level. So the goal then overall is a kind of a public service documentary that we've put out there for anybody to look at and talk about. And the hope is, again, that in this sort of election season and in general, this is an issue that's going to be important in our society. The hope is that people will be able to find new ways to interact and talk about this issue. Finally, I'll just add quickly that our documentary is not – we do not attempt to advocate one side or the other. Instead, what we're trying to do is explore just different ways of talking about wealth and equality in, as I say, philosophical and ethical terms.

Other speakers: Okay. In the documentary, you balance equality versus freedom. It seems to be the main sorts of forces that are trading off in the way that you look at wealth and equality from that philosophical perspective. And what's really interesting is you set the framework with let's just imagine pure equality which is easy to imagine according to the documentary where everybody lives in similar kind of apartment and everybody gets a parcel of goods every week that has equal amounts of wine and chocolate and luxuries and food and all that other stuff and you talk about how that's inherently unequal it's not sustainable it falls apart would you explain that sure happy

James Brusseau: Happy to. I'll just say quickly as an introduction, I think that it's right that the two ways traditionally within a philosophical and ethical tradition that we've talked about wealth and equality are from the perspective of equality and from the perspective of freedom. And it's certainly also true that there is a back and forth there and there's a conflict there. But it's also true, and this is a point that we tried to draw out in the documentary, that most people when they talk about wealth and equality, talk about it either within one side or within the other. That is, they start out within the philosophy and ethics of equality or within the philosophy and ethics of freedom. And debates about wealth and equality, whether we should have it, how much we should have, and so on, go on within both of those distinct value systems. And then what happens sometimes is that when people try to engage publicly on this issue, because some people are coming from the perspective of freedom and other people are coming from the perspective of value of equality it becomes impossible for them to interact they don't connect and so that's why sometimes these debates on wealth inequality it sounds like people are just talking past each other or even shouting past each other and it's because frequently when you look carefully They're coming from one or the other perspective. So in any case, that's a broad statement about the relation between the value of equality and the value of freedom as a way of approaching this issue.

Other speakers: And if I could agree with you there, that's a basic definition problem that philosophers try to work out. If people are talking past each other, they haven't defined their terms. They haven't agreed to what they're talking about beforehand. And so they end up talking about two completely different things when it comes to the economy. And I just remembered one of the questions I wanted to ask first, actually, we can help define our terms is let's define wealth. What specifically do we mean when we talk about wealth? Do we mean income? Do we mean money or do we mean ownership of productive

James Brusseau: Property? An excellent question. I think that on this front, we were trying to use a definition of wealth, which is simply the most intuitive. And that would be the accumulation of money and personal property. That's typically when philosophers talk about these issues. We typically think of wealth in terms of simply money and personal property added up, as opposed to, of course, you can have a distinct debate about income inequality versus wealth inequality. But we tend to wrap those two together as simply the accumulation of property and money that one has and how they have that and to what extent they're justified in having it and so on. So

Other speakers: Sorry, the intuitive definition of wealth is the one that—it's the one we always mean when we say wealth. We talk about wealthy people, we don't mean owning a corporation, we mean they have a big house. But do you think that might be a distraction at some point? Do you think that when we start dealing with this issue, at some point we might need to start talking about, say, the ownership of something that produces something? Like owning a company or owning, well, even stock that pays dividends or owning something that is productive, what Marxists might call the means of production, right? I think, and I think that's a very good point.

James Brusseau: And I think that those kinds of issues, excuse me, they tend to erupt more on the freedom side. And let me explain very, very quickly how. When people talk about wealth inequality starting from the ideal of freedom, they tend to—well, they don't tend to, they do want to say that the highest value, what we want to do above all, is not coerce others. So if that's the first step, then we can take a second step and we could talk perhaps, if we have time, we could come back later and talk about a famous thought experiment called the Wilt Chamberlain experiment. But let's skip that now and say that freedom is going to allow people to accumulate as much money as they like, right? That's a basic definition of freedom. First, and then second, attempts to redistribute that accumulated wealth would be seen as instances of coercion, that is to be subtractions from freedom. So an ethics that begins from the value of freedom tends to start from the idea that A, people can have as much wealth as they like, and B, it's wrong to try to redistribute that wealth.

So then you move to the next step, you say, okay, if this is our situation, is there any way within an ethics that values individual freedom? Is there any way that we can limit or that we can criticize wealth inequality. And in fact, coming back to your question, I think it runs just along those lines when you think not about the amount of wealth people have but to a certain extent the kind of wealth they have. There are very different kinds of wealth in the world as you understand perfectly and some of that wealth does in fact limit individual freedom.

You can see this for example, I lived in Mexico City for about 10 years. You see there that on the one hand, people have tremendous wealth. I can just tell you a little quick sort of anecdote story. And one of the things that's wonderful about Mexico, I was involved in a group when I was down there and we bought some buildings to redevelop them, right? And so we'd buy the old brick building and do what is this called? A gut renovation. And of course, when you're doing things like that, they're always building inspectors who come around and they're always going to find a problem. Now, where I live here in New York City, those building inspectors, they find problems and work stops for months and there's like a bureaucracy, etc. In Mexico, those problems are handled very simply. The building inspector gives you a piece of paper which tells you what is wrong with your building. You take a 500 peso note which is about 50 bucks, fold that into the paper and hand it back and the building inspector tells you that he is going to go for lunch and he never comes back. So, you are really free in Mexico as... I'm not an architect, but I was working with some people who were architects to build and do what you like. And that's one of the reasons why there's such so much of the great contemporary architecture is either produced by Mexicans or inspired by Mexicans. I'm thinking of Baragon, La Garota and others. It's because there's essentially no building codes. You can buy your way out of whatever rule there is. And if you go down to Mexico City, you see some of the most tremendous and wonderful buildings. So that's on the one hand, Mexico is a place where you have tremendous freedom and you see all of the advantages of that freedom.

But on the other hand, because wealth has become so concentrated in the hands of very few people, 95% of the population, there's no bridge, there's no way they can participate in this kind of reality. They don't have the money to pay these bribes and they don't have any way to get up into the economic level where they can do those things. So in this case, in the case of Mexico, what you see is the kind of wealth that people have accumulated through freedom and as an expression of freedom, which, again, you don't have to be for that. But if you start from freedom, you are for it as an expression of freedom. That same freedom turns back and destroys itself. And that's one of the that's the kind of debate and the kind of discussion you have if you approach wealth inequality from the side of freedom. The questions you ask are well how is it that freedom can be expressed and in what ways can freedom specifically can we trace the ways in which freedom turns back and destroys itself kind of like one of the examples we use in the documentary we talk about cigarette smoking it's one of those things where cigarette smoking destroys itself right you smoke two pet two cigarettes today for tomorrow and so on until finally you rot out to your own lungs and it's the desire to smoke cigarettes which has destroyed your ability to smoke cigarettes Well, freedom can be like that too. Freedom can overspin itself, can just turn back and destroy itself. And so then you could fit that into the wealth inequality discussion by saying where freedom is failing is where it is causing wealth inequality as opposed to allowing individuals to express in very concrete terms the kind of building an architect to build the kind of building he or she would like to build. So that's kind of a long-winded answer, but that would be the way you talk about the difference between wealth or kinds of wealth within this structure.

Other speakers: So what you're saying is that someone who is starting from a freedom perspective is not necessarily an opponent of equality. They simply are coming from a freedom perspective. In other words, they're seeing the world through that set of lenses.

James Brusseau: Right, good question. They are an opponent of inequality if and only if and only because it limits freedom. So if wealth inequality does not limit freedom, they are not against it, no matter how great the inequality is and then if you move that over to the economic side that would be that's the philosophical way of saying economically that well what you want is something like freedom of opportunity right maximized opportunity as opposed to maximize wealth and equality so that would be the philosophical answer to that question aspect

Other speakers: Aspect of all of this is the most surprising or most difficult for your students to take on board

James Brusseau: I think that where they tend to get caught up is in that notion that there really are two, well let's put it this way, there are actually three different levels of discussion. There is the discussion where you talk within the notion of equality itself and you say, well, does equality work? And in fact, it doesn't work, theoretically at least, as a value in its pure form. I don't think it can work. Maybe I can just quickly run through that. It refers back to the question Will asked just a second ago.

So, I can just quickly say that the way that works in the documentary is you can't imagine pure equality. A situation where everyone lives in the same apartment. He gets the same bundle of goods every week and so on. Now, what's going to happen is let's say you and I live next to each other in this apartment building. We have the same apartment and so on. There's only one difference between you and I. You are a big chocolate lover and I am a big wine drinker. And each week we get in our little basket of goods, we get a little bit of chocolate and a little bit of wine. Well, it's not going to be long before you and I decide, you know what? We're going to trade off, aren't we? I will give you my chocolate. You give me your wine. In that way, and here's sort of the curious point then, in that way, you and I are both better off than we were before, even though no one has gone backward, right? No one has lost. So this is called, this is kind of a curious economic reality that I'm sure you're familiar with. Pareto efficiency and so you have a situation in which even though no one has gone backwards in some sense equality has been preserved it's also true that equality is ruined because you and I are better off than everyone else we're happier than everyone else and so if that's right and we still want to enforce equality, then we need to do one of two things. We need to say either A, we can no longer allow people to be different. That is, everyone has to have not only the exact same goods and services, but they have to have the exact same tastes, the exact same desires. Or on the other hand, if we're going to let people be diverse or be different, then we're going to have to forbid or prohibit free exchange.

Either way, whether we decide we're not going to let people be diverse or we're not going to let people have free exchange, Either way, we're going to need enforcers. And as soon as you have enforcers, then equality is dead because you have people telling you what you can do. You have people who give orders and people who receive them. So if you think about the world as a place where you have diverse individuals, and you take that as the premise, in that kind of world, equality can't be sustained. It doesn't make sense. So you need to find different theories or different ways of expressing or trying to be true to the ideal of equality, which is not this direct way. Right, so from there you go in the workshop that we talk about. We talk about John Rawls' response to this problem as well as the utilitarian response, which are in essence two different ways of trying to work on equality even while we accept that inequality is necessary.

So in any case, and so then going back to your question, the question at the start was well what's most difficult for the students? What's most difficult for the students I find is understanding that that's one debate. That equality debate on one side. And then there's also the freedom debate on the other. And then there's this third debate which is are you a freedom person or an equality person? So it becomes very difficult to keep all these things straightened out in my head also, in fact from time to time. In the heads of students they said that you're talking about one subject and there are three completely different debates in languages to discuss it.

Other speakers: Well, and I think as you were giving the wine and chocolate example, I'm thinking yeah, but the wine, I'm from Sonoma County so I'm thinking yeah, but the wine is more valuable than the chocolate in terms of actual value on the market yet I would still make that trade if I was in your example because I prefer the chocolate to the wine. So I have given up some market value but I'm still happier I have still moved forward. So, I mean, it's even the complexity of these trade-offs is very, very much more layered than I think the political discourse provides.

James Brusseau: Right. And that gets right back to your earlier point about the difficulty of defining wealth and so on. So that too is a... We fall off the bus of our discussion when we get lost in the question of what actually has value in

Other speakers: The end of itself so yes and to add to complicate that pure equality model even further if you have that thing where everybody's getting the same bundle of goods there are people with specialized diets who if they don't get a certain diet they might die there are people with diabetes there are people with disabilities there are people who are allergic to certain foodstuffs so if one of those foodstuffs ends up in their bundle they're in trouble. There are people who can't tolerate certain preservatives or who are allergic to pesticides. There are all these issues that affect people. So at a pure equality model, there are people who are still losing because they don't have the capacity to make the choices that would put them not better than anyone else, but on the same level as everyone else. So the pure equality model just totally falls apart. And so what you say, which I think is interesting is so what ethics become is how do we manage inequality ethically right or how do

James Brusseau: We manage inequality within a framework of equality that's the trick is to say well how can we have not inequality as against equality but rather the idea is that inequality has to serve the idea of equality and so that's the issue it's less the catch how can inequality serve equality? And we need that, again, because we can't have straight up equality. And then one of those responses that I think this might be sort of the mainstream American philosophical response is offered by John Rawls. And here's what he calls his difference principle. And the difference principle is the following. He says, look, we will allow people to accumulate greater wealth or welfare or happiness, whatever you want to call it, than others on the following condition. If, let's say, my accumulation of an extra amount of wealth actually benefits those members of society who are poorest, or as he calls them, the least advantaged. That is, we're allowed to become wealthier than others as long as no one gets left behind.

And then kind of an example that I use here on this point in the documentary is I say, well, you can imagine, for example, this idea of no one being left behind. That's the essence of the idea. You can imagine that you are a military unit somewhere. One of your members has become injured and you're faced with a choice and you're forced to retreat, do you risk your own lives by carrying your wounded member out or do you leave the poor guy behind and run away and thus facilitate your own escape? For John Rawls, what he's going to say in that situation is you have to bring the least advantaged person with you even if it means risking your own lives. Now, that's kind of a dramatic example but that's exactly the way the theory spills out on the economic side. That is, we can't allow individuals to be successful unless that success doesn't trickle down but radiates over the most poor members of our society. And so that makes sense theoretically, right? I mean, almost all of us intuitively, I think, respond positively to that idea that, well, we're not going to leave the weakest behind. We're going to wait for that person, right? If it means waiting physically or if it means waiting economically, yes, we're going to do that.

The problem with this theory comes, though. The reality is that this can convert into kind of a dictatorship of the least advantaged or the poverty-stricken. And the example that I use in the documentary is a heroin addict. What do you do if you have someone who is the least advantaged and who, in a certain sense, is set upon being the least advantaged? Who is gobbling up the resources of society? Within Rawls' system, someone like Bill Gates is not allowed to create Microsoft Windows, which makes him extraordinarily wealthy, until he can show us how Microsoft Windows is going to make the life of the heroin junkie better. And I'm not sure it will. So the problem on this, the problem of serving equality in this sense with the difference principle is that we have this, as I call it in the documentary, kind of dictatorship of the least advantaged: the amount to which the rest of us are held back for that one person is significant so it's one of these kinds of situations where in the abstract we're all, everyone supports the difference principle in the abstract but in the concrete world it's not clear that it will be that it will work in a satisfactory way though it might work and it's something you

Other speakers: Could experiment with. I would love to have a very long response to that at this moment but unfortunately we are just about out of time I want to encourage everyone to tune in to the Extra Mad extended portion of this interview, which can be found on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play and on our website. I'm hopping mad dot com right now. K-Grow in the morning is coming up here on Netroots Radio. Stay with us. Welcome back to Hopping Mad. When we left off, we were talking about a concept called the dictatorship of the least advantage. And for the sake of this argument, imagine a world where we have a perfect social welfare system, where there's drug treatment facilities that anyone can go to regardless of wealth, where anyone who is in a situation of addiction can go and go to drug treatment and end up with a job and a much happier life and all of that. But society is held back under the difference principle by someone who refuses to cooperate with that process, someone who is the ideal or perfect heroin addict using philosophical language. Other speakers: And my question then, James, is shouldn't the freedom side then be brought into this debate and say, well, that's this guy's choice? Right

James Brusseau: Right. I think that's a perfect response. I think that many people are sympathetic with that. But what happens then is, if we're going to accept, if we're going to respect and recognize that this person has a right to bury him or herself in his or her own sorrows, then when we look on the other side, and we look at someone like, say, Bill Gates, who's accumulated so much money that it literally is not worth his time to bend over and pick up a $20 bill off the floor. Then we look on that side, it seems like in order to be consistent, we're going to have to say to Bill Gates, well, just like the heroin junkies made his or her choices, we're going to live with it. You, Bill Gates, you've made your choices and we're going to live with that too. And what that means in reality is that we're no longer able to go to Bill Gates and say, look, you have a lot more money than everybody else, so we're going to ask you to pay taxes or higher taxes than anybody else to balance things out. That's no more judgmental—justified, or that would be a form of coercion, right? It's no more justified to say that to Bill Gates because he's just expressing his own free choices in the world when he accumulates this money. It's no more justified to say that to Bill Gates than it is to say to the heroin junkie, you've got to stop using heroin. If we're going to let people do the kinds of things that they want to do and follow their own destiny and create an identity for themselves, whether it's a heroin junkie or a wealthy Microsoft producer, if we're going to allow that then it seems like to be consistent we need to allow it on both sides so as soon as we say to the heroin junkie you're good to go do what you like it becomes very difficult to limit wealth inequality generally because the same goes for Bill Gates and what he likes to do let's just say is make extraordinary amounts of money. It is to take this for a minute

Other speakers: To the real world and to sort of the current political discussion immigration is a hot topic both here in the States and in the British referendum. And I really think that an awful lot of what goes around in the immigration debate comes from an emotional sense that people have, either a sense of abundance or a sense of scarcity. And that is they have those emotions regardless of facts. In other words, economists for the most part will generally agree that immigration is good for an economy, that immigration not only grows an economy, but that it lifts everybody up along with it, that it drives activity into an economy. So it isn't the addition of people that makes the difference. It is this sense of scarcity. And I just wondered, Doesn't that fit right in with this freedom versus equality balance?

James Brusseau: I think it fits. I think there's something to be said on that front, and I think that also there might be even a better, more coherent fit within the dynamic of freedom ethics or freedom philosophy in the following sense. What we've sort of said at a few points or touched down at a few points now is this idea that one of the things that's interesting about the dynamic of freedom, the basic dynamic of freedom which Georges Bataille, a French philosopher from the middle 20th century called an excess economy. The basic dynamic there is that there can be a kind of overproduction of something which is so extreme that it ends up killing itself, wiping itself out. So we use the example of cigarettes. The desire for cigarettes grows and grows to the point where it's that desire for cigarettes itself that destroys your ability to smoke cigarettes and therefore destroys the desire to smoke cigarettes. Or we talked about in the case of Mexico, how the freedom which allows this wonderful architecture in individuals to create things that they could never create in New York City or elsewhere, perhaps. And that same freedom also, in certain ways, wipes out freedom for a very large percentage of the population. So if that is an excess economy or that dynamic is what we call an excess economy, whether we're talking about money or freedom or what have you, I think then in that case it might be kind of interesting to look at some of these immigration questions in that way and say, well, within a free society, to what extent is it true or to what degree could we say that it's the freedom, the values of the free society itself, the openness to the outside and the openness to new ideas, et cetera, which is choking itself off in some of these cases where those who are the indigenous people of the local culture, whether it's an American citizen or a British citizen or what have you, right whether it's that, in some sense, it's the strength of their fortitude or the strength of their belief in their own values of their own culture which forces them to not allow outsiders to enter. And whether or not this is a case where, one might want to analyze, might want to say, this is a case where it's the openness of the society itself which is turning back and choking itself in the same way that cigarettes lead to the choking of the smoker. I think that that might be a line that you could investigate if you wanted to use some of the ideas that we've developed in the documentary on that issue.

Other speakers: How do you go about getting people on the same page in this conversation? In other words, you're right, people do really talk past each other such a huge percentage of the time in this area. What do you do personally to try to get people speaking about things from the same plane so that they can have an actual discussion, an actual meeting of the minds? Whether they agree or not, at least they're having an actual discussion. How do you get there?

James Brusseau: Right well then that I think that goes back to kind of what we talked about at the start of have shown this notion that with respect to wealth and equality, what we're trying to do is we're going to say, well, let's talk about that in terms of freedom and equality. Why is that? Well, it's because almost nobody comes into the discussion with a doctrinaire position on freedom or equality. Almost all of us think equality, yeah, sounds pretty good. Freedom, yeah, that's a good thing too, right? So people don't start out against each other. So I think that in general, The answer to these kinds of questions is it's always to find a different way to approach a question. It doesn't matter what the question is. It's always to find an unexplored or undeveloped way, or a fresh way, let's say, of thinking about the issue, whether it's inequality or immigration or what have you. Why? Because that allows people to come at these conversations without those prejudgments or prejudice, without the kind of bias that sometimes makes these discussions so difficult. I think that's the response I would have there. It's not important to fix the ways we have of speaking about things, it's more important to find different ways of speaking about, fresh ways of thinking about the same thing.

Other speakers: Okay, that makes sense to me. To take us then back from the real world to the world of ideals and philosophies and stuff like that and look at my favorite philosophy, which you discuss in the documentary which is utility and I've loved utilitarianism ever since I picked up jeremy bentham's principles of morals and legislation as a kid and really struggled with it as a 14 year old trying to figure out what it meant and so utilitarianism just to set the stage for the discussion is the idea that we should strive to create the greatest good for the greatest number of people good happiness depending on who's doing the defining of that word. And so the utilitarian argument when it comes to economics would be you have people who have more houses than they can live in, more food than they can eat, more cars than they can drive, and you have people who lack those things. So those folks have so much stuff that they wouldn't notice if they owned a few less cars or had less food even though they still have more food than they could eat and that people who were starving would then be able to eat the idea of utility is these folks have way more than they know what to do with so we'll make sure that those folks are able to fund the people who literally are struggling to survive and you maximize happiness through the alleviation of suffering and then if someone is like our perfect heroin addict is choosing to go off and make decisions, that's his choice. And he has found his own peculiar kind of happiness there.

Other speakers: Right

James Brusseau: Right. And then I would just add one to that very nice summary of how a utilitarian would approach this. I would add one apparently technical point, but in fact, I think it's quite important. One of the significant aspects of the utilitarian ethical framework is that the proponent of utilitarianism stresses anonymity. That is, the utilitarian doesn't care who's happy as long as the maximum happiness for society overall is achieved. So, the reason people take up this position as a response to the problem we saw with roles is because the utilitarian is able to say coherently, justifiably, look, if there is this heroin junkie out there who wants to wallow in sadness and depression and this is the way that this person has decided to go and we can't do anything about it, the utilitarian is free to say, well, goodbye. You've made that choice, off you go. What I'm interested in as a utilitarian is maximizing happiness for everyone. So the utilitarian, in a sense, is freed from this dictatorship of the maximum impoverished, right? And free, therefore, to go, sort of as you admirably put it, to say, look, let's look at most of society, most of the time.

And in those cases, yes, it makes perfect sense to take away, redistribute, take away, that's a language you want to use, resources or wealth from some people and give it to those who have less. Why is that? Well, that's the doctrine of marginal utility is important here, right, that's the idea that if you have six bottles of water and six thirsty people will generate more happiness if every one of those six people drinks one bottle of water than you would if one person drank all six. And so what you want to do is maximize happiness, and that's all that matters. Then you will not hesitate to take away, even if I'm the owner of the six water bottles, you will not hesitate to take away five of them and give them to those other five people who are thirsty. So that's the positive step. That's what people like about utilitarianism and how it fits into this debate. What people don't like about utilitarianism is that just like you're free to take away from someone who is wealthy, so too you're free to take away from someone who is poverty-stricken or just a random person, again, underneath the same logic.

And there's a... This is a movie from kind of the distant past, but it happens to kind of fit right into this debate. The movie has Gene Hackman, and he's portrayed as a somewhat evil doctor. And what he is doing is he's kidnapping homeless individuals and unbalanced individuals, the poorest of the poor in society. He's kidnapping them and taking them to his secret workshop where he is doing medical investigations and research to try to cure some horrible disease. Now, the problem that the utilitarian faces is, you know, there might not be anything wrong with that. If he is confident that this work he's doing can lead to the solving, the curing of this disease, then by the utilitarian logic, the same logic that we used to say that we are going to take away from the wealthiest to create more happiness for society, that same logic can also work in this other case where we say we're going to take away even the lives of this group of people who happen to be quite poor. Why? Because these experiments will yield greater happiness overall for all of society if the disease is cured. And then again, to finalize this point, that of course it's not just the wealthy and the poorest of the poor that need to worry, it's you and I too, right? Because if the utilitarian can show that for whatever reason sacrificing, let's say, well, I'll take myself as the example here, For whatever reason, sacrificing the life of James Brusseau is going to create happiness for everyone else. That's a joke I could put in here, but we won't do that. For whatever reason, sacrificing my life would make everyone else's life better. And then by the same reasoning that led us to redistribute the water bottles, well, we're stuck doing that too. So there is this kind of peril and utilitarianism as well, which is a radical unfairness. That is, if the society can be bettered through the sacrifice of one or very few people, there's no hesitation on the part of the utilitarian.

Other speakers: Well, but I think utilitarians would argue and I see this argument, especially in sort of the crime and punishment section of Bentham is that injustice creates more unhappiness overall than then, you know, having justice. That's when we get into rule utilitarianism. You have a constitution where you're not allowed to take people's lives away. You have the Hippocratic Oath, which says do no harm in medicine. You have these rules that you have to follow, which provide the space in which you're allowed to operate under utility. So you can't take away someone's life without a legal process and they would have to have committed a crime. You can't have compulsory organ donation. And the main reason for that is, let's say, let's use this one thing that you kind of alluded to in the documentary, this idea that when people don't have the means, then they get killed by society and their organs are compulsorily donated to save other lives. The problem with that from a utility perspective is, okay, you get in a car accident, you wake up and the state tells you, hi, we're a utilitarian state that has just murdered someone to provide you with a liver that is replacing the one you lost in a car wreck. Other speakers: I hope you enjoy your murder organs. Good luck sleeping tonight. There's this creeping horror that would go through the rest of society and you know it's the sort of thing that would create more pain overall because I think one of things utilitarianism doesn't talk about as humans we're empathetic we're capable of feeling the pain of others so the pain that we cause one person can ripple throughout the whole of society In a way that is going to create much more pain than happiness. So while that is in some ways logically consistent, I always felt that attack on utilitarianism is an oversimplification and really undermines the way in which human beings feel empathy. Empathy exists, and that means that the unhappiness of a few becomes the unhappiness of many because we feel for those people.

James Brusseau: Right. But then the response is, the response that a hardcore, by the way, I'm not a hardcore utilitarian, but I will adopt that mask for the moment. And what the hardcore utilitarian is going to say, and this is, I want to come back also on your distinction between act and rule utilitarianism, which I will in a moment, but going straight to my hardest response if I'm a defender of utilitarianism is I say, well, I solve that problem about the organ sacrifices very simply. I lie. I don't tell the patient that's where the organs came from. In fact, I'm going to create a kind of star chamber government, which is going to be up there, and they're going to be in charge of creating lies which are beneficial for our society. Those lies would include not telling people that certain others are being sacrificed so that they can be happier. The utilitarian is going to go for that if you can show that that kind of societal structure, when based upon lies, does in fact create more happiness than a society based fully upon truth. In fact, this is one of the core ideas of utilitarianism and it stands against say the ethics of Kant. The ethics of Kant is, look, truth is important. Honesty is important. The utilitarian stance against this is precisely that truth and honesty are not important. What's important is happiness. And if that means that we are going to have to lie to the population, then that's what we will do. So now I'm not promoting that, but I'm noting that if you're going to stay true to the theory and the theory is that we'll do what's necessary, yes, justify the means, we'll do what's necessary to maximize social happiness, then that's the way we respond to that very good point you made. We don't respond by stopping the organ donations or the organ theft, we respond instead by lying about it. You can take that as you will

Other speakers: And go back and forth about that. I would argue that that's not possible but

James Brusseau: We could move on from that. Right. Then we get back to the problem that I have is what's possible and not possible rarely enters into my thought. Yeah. I just kind of imagine theoretically ideally things. But then I think it also works very quickly. You actually had two responses to the utilitarian position that we presented in the documentary. The one was that, well, people are going to be psychologically unhappy if they find out their organs are stolen. And then I said, well, my response to that is we're just going to lie to them.

The second response that you had was, well, there's two kinds of utilitarianism. The first is the one that is kind of the mainstream and that's the one I'm talking about now, which is act utilitarianism. And that means that whenever you're faced with a situation, you do that thing which creates the maximum happiness overall but there's also this other utilitarianism and a very good point you make rule utilitarianism where what we try and do is instead of taking things as in terms of circumstance every action we say let's set up one single set of rules which we think will in fact create the most happiness overall and then we will live by those rules now the response well we can go back and forth but that's a different kind of response I think that you're probably resisting the kind of the vision I have of people stealing organs, I think you're going to have more luck resisting that vision with your move to rule utilitarianism than you will with the empathy argument.

Other speakers: I think that's my suspicion, but I could be wrong about that. Who knows? I would say the empathy argument applies to most of the theoretical issues where we are creating pain in order to maximize pleasure. I don't think that pain, logically under the utilitarian model, does actually maximize pleasure. And then you say, lie about it, and that seems to be taking it to a rather absurd extreme in utilitarianism. And also, that's where we get into questions of... But I do think that... And I think that that was what Bentham was doing. I think Bentham is the original rule utilitarianism. He's talking about legislation. He's talking about crime and punishment. I think utility is best understood as a model for legislation and for social decisions in addition to being ethical. It's about how do we make legislation ethical?

James Brusseau: That's correct because his book was Principles of Morals and Legislation or Morals and Politics or something. So you're definitely right about that move, yes. But I think – but as I say, I think that that's a slightly separate debate. I think that the more interesting debate for wealth and equality in this particular case is that one, that great point you're making about how, well, there's this empathy problem, and then how you can respond to that and what that entails. It's an interesting, I think it's an interesting intellectual exercise.

Other speakers: Yeah, yeah. You had a thought experiment you talked about at the very beginning on the freedom side that you wanted to take us through. Sure, right.

James Brusseau: But for those people who want to start from equality, the way they do generally is with this thought about the perfect society. We see it doesn't work and then there's experimentation. We're kind of doing that in this discussion, experiment with different ways of thinking about how equality can work and how it might not work, etc. But then on the other side, the famous beginning point for the freedom ethics comes from a guy named Robert Nozick, and his example involves Wilt Chamberlain, and he wrote this thought experiment as a direct response to Rawls's Difference Principle. What Nozick said is, okay, let's imagine a society where everyone is perfectly equally wealthy.

Other speakers: Again, so we'll start from that perfect point, and I would just say that you're already throwing out the baby with the bathwater if you let someone argue from a point where we already have wealth equality. Yeah, that's the entire problem we're trying to address, but I'll leave that alone and let's continue the thought experiment. Right, right, and so we'll see where it...

James Brusseau: Goes. So we'll start out from that, but one thing that what Nozick says is, if we have perfect equality, at least one thing we can be sure of is that those people who promote perfect equality are not going to complain at this time. And then the next step is in this world there's a basketball player who I guess we would call him now Stephen Curry or LeBron James, but back then it was Wilt Chamberlain. And we imagine a situation where Wilt Chamberlain decides, you know what, I'm going to quit basketball unless every game that I play, the fans, besides buying a ticket, they also drop into a bucket a $5 bill and that money goes straight to me. Why? Wilt Chamberlain says. The reason I want that, Wilt Chamberlain says, is because I know that people are coming to really watch me play. I'm the best player here. And he was the best player at his time, right? He was the reason people went to watch him play. And so then he said, and that's just the way it's going to be. I'm not going to force anybody to come to my games. I'm not going to force anybody to play basketball who doesn't want to play basketball. If you don't want me to continue playing, I won't, et cetera. I'm just saying those are the conditions under which I will play. And then, well, what would happen? Well, in the thought experiment, what would happen, we assume, probably is what would happen in society. And that is that people would say, yeah, okay. Some season ticket holders would say, yeah, I don't like this Wilt Chamberlain character anymore. I'm going to quit it. But we know the reality is that people will pay more money to see the better athletes and teams and so on. And so probably people would drop a little extra money in the pot, and then he would end up very wealthy.

Now, what Nozick says there is he says, okay, if we have a situation where we started, where everyone was happy, there were no ethical complaints from the equality people. And now we have a situation where Wilt Chamberlain is extraordinarily wealthy. Is there any step in this move from the beginning to where Wilt Chamberlain is at now, where the equality advocates can reasonably make an ethical objection? And Nadzik says, no, there is not. Why? Because no one was coerced or forced to do anything. That's classic straight freedom ethics, right? If no one is coerced to do anything, then there's no objection to what was done. So, Nadzik says, there is no legitimate claim that can be made against wealth inequality in society. And then that's where the thought experiment sort of ends. And then where you go from there is you say, okay, well, that's where we're at. Then how is it, is there any way that we can resist wealth inequality in society if we want to buy that first argument, that is, we want to adhere to a freedom ethics? And then as we've talked a little bit about here and there, we've dotted on it, the way you do make the case against inequality is by saying that inequality is limiting or impeding freedom and that case is just really very different than the case the equality camp makes right the equality camp says what's wrong with inequality is inequality we want more equality the freedom camp says what's wrong with inequality is nothing however in this case because we have so much inequalities impeding freedom therefore

Other speakers: We're against it if I could jump in I always had an answer to that which was well that's totally fine, but he's using the U.S. dollar, which is collectively owned by all of us. So if he wants to continue to use the U.S. dollar, if he wants to choose to use dollars, then he'll agree to pay a higher tax bracket. He has a choice whether or not he wants to use U.S. dollars. But if he wants to collect – to choose to collect that many U.S. dollars, then he's free to also pay higher taxes on them as well because we own the dollar. And under the conditions which we will allow him to use the dollar we collectively own those conditions are taxes no coercion at all yeah everyone's happy I think you can do that I think you would probably respond well then

James Brusseau: You've got to drop little trinkets of gold into my pot or something. Yes, you could come back that way, though I do think that you could find some—I think that, as I say, yes, you could respond by saying, well, okay, then we need to drop trinkets of gold or very small diamonds into the pots to come watch me play. Right now, this happens from time to time. You do hear a thought like that, which I had not heard that thought before and I'm struggling a little bit to see how I want to respond to that. I'm not sure. It does seem right for me to say that, well, you can just shift the currency. But the deeper question you're asking is to what extent do we have responsibilities to others because we have chosen to enter into a kind of social contract with them and I think that what Nozick would say is that the fundamental social contract, there's the fact that we use the dollar. He would say that, look, that is also voluntary, that Wilt Chamberlain might say, I'm not going to use dollars to trade anymore, I'm going to go into Bitcoin and that's where it's going to be. But all of those things, I think that he would say, are voluntary and individualistic as opposed to collective. So the dollar, so now I understand what he would say. Yes, he would respond to you this way. He would say that no, your premise is fundamentally wrong. The dollar is not an expression of our collective or shared reality. Instead, the dollar is something that each of us as individuals decides to use in a system of exchange and it could be that tomorrow we'll decide to use something else, Bitcoin or gold or something like that. Now that may be right may be wrong but that's the response. The response would be to come back against your premise and say no the dollar does not express a collectivity and therefore the collective cannot make this case against old chamberlain I think that's what he would say as the person

Other speakers: Who's forever talking about how currency is used the yeah now you're in my ballpark okay So the thing about the dollar is that the only thing that is the societal collective about that dollar is that Mr. Chamberlain must pay his taxes in that dollar. He can trade in anything else he wants for everything else he buys and sells, but he must pay taxes in that dollar. So it is the requirement of taxes that drives any currency. And in the case of sovereign currency, and the sovereign fiat currency in particular, taxes don't even actually pay for anything. Taxes are simply a way of gating the economy. So the point of the fiscal policy that surrounds the tax level that Mr. Chamberlain is paying has to do with a societal decision that Congress has made, but it isn't actually related to the dollar. The dollar is simply the coinage by which taxes are paid and nothing else. Nothing else. Yeah.

James Brusseau: Though we would say that just as I was fairly extreme when I was defending the utilitarian and the organ harvesting, so to speak, I will be fairly extreme here too. And I will say, well, I never said that you could do taxes. I'm not so sure I want to go there either. I'm not so sure I want to allow any taxes. Now, I may voluntarily pay taxes because I see that that's paying for police officers and so on, and that's good for me. But the idea that I am obliged to pay taxes, I resist that. Taxes are things that I decide individually to give in. Again, it's a different way of expressing the point I made previously. Taxes are not something that are imposed upon me. They're not a source of coercion. Instead, they're something I decide to do today and I might not decide to do it tomorrow. And if I decide not to do it tomorrow, then you other members of society out there, let's say I'm Bill Chamberlain, you other members of society, there's no ethical ground upon which you can stand to take away that money that I have without violating the ethics of freedom.

So that's where someone who goes for freedom would come back against that form of the argument which is, I think it's a different form of the argument that the collective can impose responsibilities upon the individual. Those who promote the freedom ethic say no, the collective cannot impose responsibilities. The only responsibilities are imposed by freedom itself. And those freedoms, those responsibilities are real. When you go to Mexico and you see where you have this abundant freedom and you see how that has had the effect of destroying freedom so widely in society, it's a real force. Saying that freedom can stop, can impede freedom is a real thing. And saying that freedom can work, that devotion to freedom can work against wealth inequality, there's a real argument that can be made there. It's not just a pure theoretical argument, but it does require a complete change in the premises. We don't want to talk about the collective, it's all individual choice now.

Other speakers: Well, let's explore that because I'm someone who would start arguing social contract at this point. That's my main go to when I run into the freedom argument that, you know, if what I end up arguing that essentially property is theft. If you are arguing from that framework that hasn't worked in arguments against libertarians because they totally reject every premise I make and I totally reject every premise they make. So let's figure out how to argue here within the freedom model. How does freedom become destructive to itself? Can you lay that out with some of the other thought experiments that were more advanced in your video?

James Brusseau: Well, I think we can see this.

Other speakers: Again, it seems to me that Mexico is a very good choice.

James Brusseau: But I think it's also true. I think you can see in our society too that there is a very similar dynamic. I As it happens, I live literally a block from Wall Street. And so I see that I'm with my Wall Street comrades every day and night. I think you can make the case that for things like, let's say, buying a home, that the Wall Street finance industry, which on one hand, when it's functioning properly, in fact, does increase individual freedom by moving money around in ways that facilitates the purchase of a home for an individual. That's real freedom for a person when they hear she could buy a home and Wall Street banking does serve that interest. However, when that freedom that those bankers have to manipulate and move money, when it gets out of control, that freedom in a certain sense disallows the buying of home. And that's what we saw after 2006, right? When the housing, the mortgage collapsed, etc., this extensive system that we had created to allow individuals to pursue their own destiny and the homes that they purchased, that whole thing collapsed. And it collapsed why? Why? Not because someone dragged the dollar out of the economy or something. No, because the freedom of the Wall Street bankers, their own liberal, not in a sense of politics, but liberal in a sense of freedom, their own liberal actions and decisions destroyed the entire, to a certain extent, destroyed the system that had made them and allowed them to become wealthy. So I think that would be another example. Just the mortgage finance breakdown would be an example of the place where freedom worked against itself. And therefore you could say, to wrap this up, therefore you could say, look, That's the justification for strapping certain kinds of regulations upon this industry. The justification is not the equality justification. The justification is not the fact that this industry is not allowing everyone to get homes. Instead, the argument is that this industry is destroying the very freedom it itself promotes. And therefore we're going to strap the regulations on them. So you get to the same end but by a different route perhaps.

Other speakers: Perhaps. That's fascinating to me and something I'm going to have to consider a lot more. And that's one of the important things about what you're doing is helping us hear the other side, as opposed to just immediately responding with, well, but the social contract is real. Well, I never signed a social contract and all those other sorts of arguments you end up with value autonomy to a rather extreme degree. Right. And then to sort of be in a certain

James Brusseau: Sense of devil's advocate here. I mean, it'd be interesting, you might even want to say that, look, if you want to enforce equality in society, I wonder if it's possible, perhaps, it's possible that the best route to that is not through the ethics of equality, but instead it's through the ethics of freedom. Perhaps the strongest argument against inequality is precisely that it's destroying freedom itself. It's not that it's going against equality. I'm not sure, but it's an interesting possibility. It allows people to see the issue in a very different way.

Other speakers: And so you could make an argument then that wealth inequality or a basic income is actually about freedom of choice, which is an argument that I made in a previous video on the housing crisis.

James Brusseau: Well, I think that that's—I'm glad you brought that up because that's an issue that I am very, very interested in and when I read about—when I read commentary about Because this is, of course, still kind of a fringe idea, this notion of a negative tax or helicopter money they sometimes call it. I think that there's a lot of instability within the people who talk about this, a lot of instability about whether or not this is sort of a Democratic idea, a Republican idea, is it a right-wing idea, left? What kind of idea is this exactly? So it's a very interesting topic, and I think that it's sufficiently nebulous and unformed that it allows people this is the kind of thing that people could talk about without already having determined before the discussion starts where they're going and so I'm I am tuned into that but I have not myself formed a position yet but I think it's a very interesting issue and one where people can interact in very constructive and positive ways I believe have you

Other speakers: Heard the arguments on both sides of the current swiss debate on basic income guarantee I know

James Brusseau: That it was rejected. The Swiss are special peoples. I'm not sure exactly how transferable that experience is. I'm not prepared to speak reasonably, to say things on that quite yet, though I am preparing myself, but I'm not there yet.

Other speakers: The conversation was interesting, and I also followed it when they were talking about job guarantee programs to help drive the Greek economy. And I think Marvin Minsky and there's been good work on this out of the modern monetary theory community and from Marvin Minsky, and it's worth touching base on.

James Brusseau: Well, what do you understand as being sort of the basic? Is it possible for from your understanding to connect that to, let's say, the conflict between equality and freedom or is that those categories not work so well for the basic income?

Other speakers: Go? Basically, the argument behind a job guarantee program is that, frankly, people want to work. People want to contribute to society. When you poll, when they poll or survey people who are receiving societal benefits, whether it is unemployment or any of a variety of the social safety net benefits, when you poll them, the far greater majority of them, those who are able to work, want to work. And in fact, the desire to work is in their top three things that they want. In other words, it comes before wanting to own a house. It's way up in their priority list. And it isn't just the drive for money, it has to do with self-esteem. It has to do with the way people see themselves. So a job guarantee program isn't helicopter money. It is work that is valuable in society and there are a lot of ways in which modern monetary theory talks about it in terms of economics but the social side of it, which is really what we're talking about here, is that it allows people to contribute to society in a way that they desire, in a way that they succeed in their own eyes. Other speakers: And to me, that is a freedom argument.

Speaker uncertain: Yeah.

James Brusseau: And then I would just quickly ask, so let's say that I'm one of these people who was thinking about, I have no job, I'm thinking about signing up for it. But then I decide, you know what? I'm not going to go to work. Do I still get the check or not?

Other speakers: The unemployment check?

James Brusseau: Well, I guess I want to get underneath and just ask quickly. Is this a form of guaranteed income and it's nice if you go to work? Or is it a form of guaranteed work but no guaranteed income? You only get the income if you go to work. No

Other speakers: No, you would still be eligible for benefits, but if you want to work, there's a job. And you would make more working than you

James Brusseau: Would receiving the benefits. Right. So it just seems to me that there are two very different things going on there. One is that basic, it just seems to me, and I wish I was further along in my thoughts about this because I'm so interested in it, but it just seems to me that there's something fundamentally different about receiving a check in the mail every week, period. And that's it, no matter what you do and the entire set of discussions that have to do with working in the value of work and receiving a greater or lesser amount of money for a certain job and so on I guess I as a philosopher I like I'm very drawn to the purity of the idea that everyone gets a check what does that mean why are we doing that what how is that justified those are the kinds of questions that I'm interested in but I have no answers but I can't contribute to your I think that that captured, I think you guys have done a very good job of helping us explore the main issues in the documentary. And I think that, as I said, the documentary attempts to take a fairly straightforward approach to the traditional views and philosophy and ethics about wealth and equality. And so I think that we've covered the ground well and given a good introduction for people who might want to go look at the documentary themselves.

Other speakers: And the website for this, correct me if I'm wrong, is wealthinequalityworkshop.org? That's correct. Wealthinequalityworkshop.org. It's a really interesting documentary that runs through these arguments in a comprehensible way. James, it's been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed having this conversation. Fascinating. Yes, I'm very glad you're able to have me. I've enjoyed thank you so much well folks you've been listening to hopping mad thank you for joining us this week we'll see you next time