Transcript (This is part automated so expect typos and errors)
Ben Yeoh (00:03): Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be talking to Jonathan Wolff. Jo is the Alfred Landecker professor of values and public policy. His work is one of the few in philosophies that I've been following for the last 20 years or so and I'm really happy to be speaking with him. Jo, Welcome.
Jonathan Wolff (00:20): Oh, it's absolutely my pleasure to be with you, Ben.
Ben Yeoh (00:23): Great. So, I'm going to start easy. So, how do you value a human life? When is this something that economics or philosophy should answer or not? I asked this because I first came across your work in healthcare as a background to how the NHS was thinking about paying for health budgets and it was thinking of these concepts of quality adjusted life years or in the parlance, they kind of called Qualis. And I thought, wow, of course, philosophy should have something to say about what we would call distributive effects of justice under limited budget constraints and things like that. And when I was reading your paper that I think you coauthored with Shepley Orr. I came across this work of this idea of, of road building and when people are thinking about roads and statistical life, they would offset the benefits of a new road against the loss of life from road accidents, amongst other things and that was a kind of very eye-opening cost benefit analysis. And it always got me thinking about, well, when do you do that? What is a statistical life? Why a lot of the times it might feel uncomfortable or not? So, I guess that's my first question is, how do you value your human life and when should we, and when should we not?
Jonathan Wolff (01:41): Yeah, well, it's, it's such an interesting issue because if you approach it as a philosopher or a theologian, you think somehow to quote Kant, "human life has a dignity, not a price." The whole idea of putting a price on life is unethical. It's maybe even unethical to raise the question. So, when I first came across these ideas, I was very shocked. I think most of us are if you try to equate life with monetary value. So, everything depends on the purpose for us in the context. And so, I first came across it when I was asked, this must be more than 20 years ago. Sadly, almost everything in my life is more than 20 years ago, but this was more than 20 years ago. When I was asked to look at questions about railway safety.
Jonathan Wolff (02:40): So, what was happening was that the railways in the UK had recently been privatized and there had been a small number of accidents that involved not enormous numbers of death, but significant numbers of people dying. This was turned into a type of national scandal that the railways were regarded as somehow dangerous. They were negligent in regard to safety and so on. And this hit the Row industry quite hard. This side of criticism hit them very hard because they didn't want to be regarded as negligent about safety. They wanted to be doing a good job. They wanted to be trusted. If you look at the numbers of deaths on the railways in a year, it's actually tiny if you think about passenger deaths. So, at the time I was doing this, there were probably around about, on average most years between about 5 and 20 passenger deaths a year on the railways compared to at that time maybe 3 or 4,000 deaths on the road.
Jonathan Wolff (03:53): So the railways statistically were very safe, but they had this reputation for being dangerous and negligent about safety. And there was a movement to try to criticize the railways for their negligence. There were these high-profile train crashes, Ladbroke Grove, people might remember. Potter's bar. We actually remember the name of railway accidents; it's amazing though. Three or four people die, but these are part of our national story now. And so, I was asked by someone who was a former student, if I would come and think about the ethics of rail safety and how do you approach safety making on the railways? Because after one of the crashes at Ladbroke Grove, John Prescott, I think it was the Home Secretary who said that there's no limit to the value you should put on a life. There's no limit to how much you should spend to save a life.
Jonathan Wolff (04:51): And yeah, as long as you're not thinking very clearly, you can agree with that very easily. No, there shouldn't be any limit to how much we spend to save a life. But then if you think, well, what does that mean in practice? Does that mean that we should never do anything that's risky? Because even walking to work, I risk sort of knocking someone off the pavements into the path of a car. They say anything I do, the most innocent thing I do has some risk for others. So really, we could say, well, we want to make the world as safe as possible, we'll not take any risks and we shut everything down, but we can't do that. We'd all die. If we didn't take any risks, we'd all die. Right? Equally, if we wanted to eliminate deaths on the railways, it's very easy. We close the railways, then we won't have any railway deaths. Okay. But we pay other ways. So really, we're thinking about what we are prepared to give up to save lives and what we are not prepared to give up to save lives. So, at the moment a lot of local authorities are introducing 20 mile an hour speed limits in parts of the city. Yet if they reduced them to 10 miles an hour, there'd be almost no deaths on the road. If cars drove at 10 miles an hour. But we're not prepared to do that, we think it's too higher price. And then if we're thinking about road building or railway track building, you can always build more and more safety into any system. You can always make it safer and safer, but you'll slow things down and it will cost more. And so, at some point we will say, it's just unreasonable to do that additional thing.
Jonathan Wolff (06:34): And that's when the economists can move in because they say, okay, we've got a tradeoff here. You've accepted we're going to put some sort of limits on safety. We're not going to pay for absolute safety. So, what benefits do we want? And you might say, well, if it took everyone five hours to get to work, that would be too much. And they'll say, okay, well let's put a monetary value on that five hour it takes you to get to work. And we can start thinking about monetary values. As soon as you start talking about tradeoffs, it's much more convenient to talk about money. And particularly when you're talking about actually spending money to save lives, then you have to talk about money. So, to come around, this is a long arc and I sort of will get to the punchline. When I was thinking about this the first time, I read these transport economists who took for granted that you should put value on life, a financial price on life in terms of there's a limit to how much you should spend to save a life, a statistical life. We'll get to that in a moment.
Jonathan Wolff (07:40): I read this stuff and I thought it's shocking. But then I thought, well, it's very easy to criticize, but what do I actually think instead? Do I think life has an infinite value so that we should put everything we've got into saving another life? Well, I don't think that really. Do I think it's got no value at all? No, I don't think that. So, I think it's got a value between zero and infinity. So therefore, we need to find a point somewhere to put it. A lot depends on the context, because if you are talking about, for example, compensation in the civil law for negligent loss of life, you might put a very high value on that. So, if someone installs your apartment's central heating system, they know to be faulty and it kills you. Then you might think, your family should have a very high level of compensation for that.
Jonathan Wolff (08:44): But if we're talking about something like railway safety, we're thinking of introducing a safety measure. So, here's a real-life example. When I was a commuter in the 1970s on a train. You could open the doors on the train while the train was still moving. And so, when the train got in towards the station, we would open the doors of the train while it was still moving and jump off while it was moving. And you can't imagine probably doing that now, but that was how you just commuted. You just jumped off the train when it was still moving. No, it wasn't going very fast. Every year, about 20 people die through accidents of getting on and off moving trains. And the doors were very heavy, they're on a hinge. They sometimes hit passengers on the platform as well. So, people died by being hit by a door. So, the railway industry had to decide at some point, do they phase out these carriages? They still had some life in them. Do they phase them out earlier and bring in a new safer carriage? So that was literally a tradeoff between money and lives. So how much money do you spend in order to save 20 lives a year? And that's a very simple calculation. They spent a certain amount of money, it saved 20 lives a year. Therefore, they valued life at a certain amount. I think it turned out then it was about 8 million pounds per life saved on that calculation. Is that too much? Is that too little? How do we know? Right. So, this is where we get to the next point, really. But before we change the doors on the carriages, we don't know who's going to die.
Jonathan Wolff (10:23): So, we say, we're going to save 20 lives. We don’t know who those people are. It might be very different if we knew in advance who those 20 people were. So, if we knew we were saving these people whose names at the beginning of the alphabet, say the first 20 people in the alphabet. If we knew it was them and we could identify and look at them in advance, we might think we'd pay even more, maybe much more. But what it is, it's a risk that's spread over the whole population. And what we're doing is saying, how much do we pay to reduce this risk? We're making a very small reduction in risk for everyone. How much are we prepared to pay for it? That's really how the economist wants us to think about this. We're not paying to save a life. What we're doing is paying to reduce the risk, a tiny amount for everyone. When you put it like that, it sounds much more like an ordinary economic transaction because you buy a cycle for your helmets or you buy a smoke alarm, or a better smoke a while. So, we're constantly making these money, risk adjustments in our life. And what they're saying is when you do it on a public policy basis, the numbers get big and it looks like you're saving statistical lives, but you are only doing the same thing on the aggregate.
Ben Yeoh (11:36): That makes a lot of sense. I wonder though, and I'm really glad we have smart people thinking about this for us is whether a lot of this is then directly applicable to health or to what extent it does. And I think you've written about some of the exceptions where we might not use this type of thinking sort of life-or-death situations or extreme situations where we don't really know a lot of the probability and statistics. I'm thinking specifically of the UK NHS, where I think we might spend something like 50,000 pounds. And maybe it's a little bit more now for a qualis, when we think about a quality life adjusted. And part of the thinking is if you had to spend a 100,000 pounds, you could spend that much more and save more lives at this kind of 50,000 level, particularly when you're thinking about new drugs or new inventions like that and they can do a calculus to get that. But I think actually already in your paper, and if you ask the person in the street, there's already some inconsistencies which come up. Because if you ask society typically, we are prepared to pay more, for instance, for preterm babies, which tend to have much higher, or actually these so-called rare diseases, genetic diseases, which don't affect very many people in absolute numbers, but there's no other way of saving them and this is life there. In fact, I think the NHS already produces exceptions to that because they actually understand we're trying to reveal choices in society or not. So, I'd be interested to think, how well does this reflect within health and that whole public policy sphere? Have we got it philosophically broadly, right? Or are we applying this thinking too often, not enough or something like that?
Jonathan Wolff (13:25): So interesting. So, it's such a fast-moving landscape and there are so many debates going on. So, I don't pretend to be absolutely up to date with all of the literature coming out. No. Any public policy scheme is very easy to criticize because everything is a compromise. And so, if things were compromised, that means objections, roughly speaking. And if you're just pushing one of the objections that's very easy. It's more sympathetic, maybe more intellectually responsible in a way to put yourself in the position of the person making the decision or put yourself in the position of the official. So here you are now. You are the head of the department of health and you have this budget, it's incredible budgets of God know what it is this last year.
Jonathan Wolff (14:17): But it's been around about what 110 billion or something in previous years. So, it's a fast budget, and now you have to spend it somehow. And so, what principles are you going to use to spend that money? And the thing that would occur first is you want to get the best value for money. You've got the money. You want to get the best value. What is the best value? The most health and the fewest deaths, most likely. And if you can reduce that to a single formula, like a quality adjusted life year, then you can say, well, what we should do with that money is maximize a quality adjusted life year as we can get. So, this means making as many people as healthy as possible, but as soon as you say that you realize there are all sorts of exceptions that come up too.
Jonathan Wolff (15:11): So, for example one of the things that is much discussed is if you are already disabled, then according to the calculations, you are only capable of a low level of health. And so, if there's an organ available for transplants, and there's someone who will be restored to full health and someone who will continue to be disabled after they have that transplant. You'll get more health for your money by giving the organ to the person who can be restored to full health than the person who will be restored only to a disabled health afterwards. And that just seems unjust. It's as if it's compounding on unfairness, rather than doing something which is justified. So, you start thinking, well, how can we adjust the formula to make it that we don't discriminate against people with preexisting disabilities? Or should we give a lot more weight to young people or people in the middle of their years? Should we give more weight to young mothers? If you think about cases where there's a cancer drug that hasn't been made available on the NHS, quite often, tabloids will make a story about this. The mother with three kids, the NH is too inhuman to pay for her drug. Right. And you think, yeah, she should get it, but you think, well, what about the person at a similar age who doesn't have the three kids? Shouldn't they get it? Should you get a drug just because you've got kids now, is that fair?
Jonathan Wolff (16:48): So many dilemmas around fairness and discrimination that it is very hard to come to something which everyone will agree to. What a lot of philosophers have done is criticize. What they haven't done is put other proposals forward about how we should do it. I've seen a few philosophers say, it's fine just to criticize, it's for other people to come up with the proposals. So, I don't myself agree with that. I think that these sorts of areas of justification are comparative rather than absolute, meaning that unless you've got a better theory, unless you've got a better way of doing it, keep your mouth shut.
Ben Yeoh (17:27): I'm sorry. Didn't [Wittgenstein] say something similar on science theories. There's no point destroying a theory unless you've got something better to put it in place, or at least equal to compare it with.
Jonathan Wolff (17:38): So, he may well have done that, but that's the view I take. I mean, of course criticism is important. And, you need to see what's wrong with the theory to try to prompt people to come up with a better one. That is, that is true. But the idea that you can just criticize and cross your arms and walk away smugly and thinking I've won is not very helpful in these areas because we need a way of distributing. I mean, I think broadly speaking, I think we do need to think about cost effectiveness in health, but I think we don't do it very well because our focus is only on some novel pharmaceuticals. And that's actually a rather small part of the health budget, and it's probably not where most good is to be done. So I'm a great believer in the work of Michael Marmot on the social determinants of health. And I think, yeah, most of what determines our health isn't about what drugs we get, but the way in which we live our lifestyles, things around poverty, things around disadvantage, even status hierarchy, these are all things that affect our health. And so, if we're spending money effectively, we might want to put in a completely different place for a health service. Although that's a difficult argument to make given how much we love the NHS and so on.
Ben Yeoh (19:01): Yeah. Well, I agree actually, there's a lot on that, which I come back to, whether there is a good philosophy or political economic framework. I would just throw in, there's a famous quote amongst playwrights actually that playwrights ask questions, but don't necessarily have answers, but that actually shouldn't be true of people within public philosophy or other spheres. And actually, the best plays often do put in some starts of an answer. And I think your thoughts about health are quite interesting because actually, if I recall correctly, drug budgeting overall is only about 5 to 10% of healthcare spend and new drugs are much smaller than that as well. And social determinants, a really big factor. So one study I've looked at is, again, healthcare percent of GDP, a very broad thing, but the US is almost 20% healthcare spend of GDP.UK is closer to 10, but the healthcare outcomes in the US aren't so great. And actually, if you look at it, it's because the social spending, the social determinants of health in the US are much poorer. So when you put them together, you can see that some of these social determinants are much underspent in some nations.
Ben Yeoh (20:14): Maybe then going one step broader and thinking about COVID a little bit before maybe going back is, do we have a good political economy or philosophical framework to think about some of these exceptions or things like this? Because it's interesting. I read a lot of economists who actually, whether they're left right or up and down, broadly show that if we were to spend globally, particularly in poorer countries on vaccination and COVID, and things like that, you'd get very good returns put in monetary value or even in the value of lives. And I think you've done some work from a philosophical point of view, talking about COVID equity that actually richer nations, not only is it in their own best interest and comparative economics in trade but actually there's a moral and ethical slant as well. But then when you look at a lot of rich nation governments, and presumably they are reflecting a political economy or political choice may or may not be reflective of what they view their voting popular is. A lot of nations have opted to stay within the country. And you can also argue within the country, whether richer or more privileged sections of society have also had better access than some of these other minority groups as well. And in fact, some countries have let some kinds of vaccines almost expire rather than ship them out to poorer countries. So I'd be interested maybe broadly, what you think about that and then actually, do you have any start of an answer for a political economy or philosophical framework that we could look upon rather than we can critique and say, well, like you say, there seems to be a lot which doesn't fit or is wrong or doesn't feel fair, but do we have anything better?
Jonathan Wolff (22:11): Well, yes, just a small question. Yeah. So I don't have my own overarching framework that is for sure. And I haven't written specifically about the general idea of duty, but I can tell you what has upset me and disappointed me a lot during the pandemic. So a lot of people have criticized pharmaceutical companies for being profiteering, for denying access to lifesaving pharmaceuticals. And I've often felt in the past that some of this criticism was overdone and that the people I know personally who've been working in the pharmaceutical industry are very goodhearted. They think they're saving humanity. They are upset they're getting such bad press for it. So they've on the whole, they've gone in with the finest motives and they're doing their best and working really hard. And in some cases, great saviors of humankind. So I've been relatively defensive of the pharmaceutical industry, even though it is incredibly profitable. And I thought, well, it shouldn't be as profitable as it is. There is a problem there, it should be better for access, but it was getting its act together a little bit. And some drugs for some conditions were being donated and, and there was progress. But all of that now looks just like window dressing and I'm coming around much more to the more critical standpoint. Because if there was ever a moment in history where the pharmacies in industry should have got together as a body and worked together.
Jonathan Wolff (24:07): If the companies that are capable of making vaccines had wanted to, they could have massively increased production around the globe. And I'm not saying they could have stopped the pandemic because we never know about the next variants of concern or so on how effective the vaccines will be. But if the pharmaceutical companies and governments had wanted to get together and stop this, they could have done by now, or at least made it much better than it is, but they failed to do that. And there are ways in which they have been creating obstacles. So some of the pharmaceutical companies have been signing contracts, supply contracts, which would make it a breach of contract to pass the vaccines onto another country. So, this is quite common in vaccine manufacturing when you have price differentials. So you sell it cheaply in one market and say, you can't sell on the gray market and that's fair enough under some circumstances, but at the moment you would think that pharmaceutical companies would just want to get together and sort this out. So that's one thing.
Jonathan Wolff (25:18): Another thing I have heard, and I'm not sure whether this is right. There's an issue now as new vaccines are being made available or want to be made available and for the late stage of testing, because the existing vaccines are successful enough that it now seems immoral in many circumstances to try placebo-controlled trial, that we wouldn't think it, it was morally legitimate to say to some people, through the next year, you are not going have access to the vaccine if you're in the control arm. So we won't sign people up for those trials. So, what we need to do now are comparative trials where you look at the efficiency of a new vaccine against existing vaccines, and it's not scientifically as strong, but it's ethically better. And it's the best we can do. I have heard that some companies are not making their vaccines available for these comparative trials because they don't want to be found inferior because the whole purpose of these trials is to show that someone else's product is better than yours. If you are a fully commercial entity who would do that. You wouldn't put your vaccine up for that comparison. Now, if you've got a good market, you've got a monopoly. If you treat it purely from a commercial point of view, why would you want to create your own competition like this? Whereas I felt that the industry should be taking a corporate view, where there should be the pharmaceutical industry, that's trying to save us at this point rather than there being a dozen companies that are competing with each other and trying to hoard market share.
Ben Yeoh (27:02): Sure. Okay. That's very interesting. I'll try and take maybe a couple of points to try and defend the industry. Not that I'm sure I'm going to be very capable of it before maybe moving on to a little bit of thinking about minorities and disabilities. That latter point does feel very unusual to me. Also, that countries could actually requisition those other vaccines for their own trials. That does seem that I would've thought that's unusual, but it could be the case that the companies are holding back those older vaccines. But I guess on the first point without sort of putting responsibility one way or the other. A part of it, to me, does seem to be a question fairly simply of money that if you gave me something like 2 or 300 billion, which kind of seems like a lot, but actually rich governments could pull together and have this amount quite quickly. You could do all of this. Factories cost in the order of 1 to 5 billion and there's some tech transfer. But you could do this really relatively easily. Now the fact is no one stakeholders really stumped up this money, even the sort of non-governmental groups, which are trying to get this money are really only in the kind of looking at the very low billions. And they have some other things to do with that. So partly I have a lot of blame for everyone in the sense that if all the rich governments simply threw 10 billion into the pot, you could have done this. They would've at least washed their faces. They could have done this in a way, which would've been win-win. And I still don't quite understand why that hasn't happened except that global good coordination is a difficult thing, which actually doesn't even be very hopeful for climate, which we might come into otherwise.
Ben Yeoh (28:48): Although the second other defense and I do think to almost counter myself that there probably is something special about healthcare, we don't necessarily argue that Apple should be giving up its iPhones or telecom companies should be giving up sort of mobile. For instance, you could argue mobile bandwidth would be really important for some people at the moment and there would be a positive good to that. Yet we don't kind of say, well you should just give away that for free and that should be fine and all right. But there is something special about healthcare I do think because a lot of this is life and death, which is something that you talk about, but I do you think they could sort of make the case of well, Apple and Microsoft or Facebook and the likes, don't have to seemingly give up as, as much as, as much as we can. But I think they could well have done more because you could have done this sort of 10 billion investment in somewhere like India, transferred your tech and got that production going and it isn't actually in the grand scheme of things that large amount of money.
Ben Yeoh (29:51): So, I don't defend them completely and I don't know whether I apportion things. So unlike climate, there's a lot of difficulty, many factors to this. There's actually only a handful of challenges that need to be overcome and a coordination problem and some money. And we actually have the solutions to a lot of those challenges, which is kind of why I find it sort of very disappointing from an economics point of view. Because if you want to be very hard nos and monetary, this is a net benefit to everyone on money values or the ethical point of view in terms of lives saved, reputation, social capital, and human capital. So, I'm kind of a little bit disappointed that this is where we've ended up, but obviously this is where we've ended up.
Jonathan Wolff (30:39): So, I agree with a lot of that. I make the distinction not original to me between who has the obligation to act and who has the obligation to pay for that action. And it seems to be the pharmaceutical companies are the only people in a position to act to bring the pandemic much more under control, but it doesn't follow from that, that they have to pay. And in fact, it's you and me that should be paying through our governments through our taxes, so on and maybe benefactors. So there just seems to have been a failure of leadership that if pharmaceutical companies had got together and gone to governments and said, we will pool all our resources, but we need the 200 billion or the governments. Or maybe it was a problem that was President Trump, who was president of the US at the time. If governments who got together and said, look, we've got this 200 billion. You get your act together and so it could have been solved, but it wasn't. And there was the attempt through COVAX which has done something but is nowhere near as you indicate getting there. But the point I want to make is, I did some work on Business Ethics from years ago and one concept that I like the look of a lot, I haven't done any work on it is an idea of what was then called an informal license operation.
Jonathan Wolff (32:05): Of course, in most areas of business, you don't need a license to operate. You could set up. You need certain licenses to show competence and safety and good character, if you are in the casino business or something. So, there are various tests you have to go through, but we don't have this idea that you have to show you're giving something back to the community or you're acting responsibly. And there are companies that act in a certain way in which you can say, they've sort of lost the faith of the nation and they've lost their informal license to operate. And I would like much more to be made of that. It’s a real privilege. Well, it's great for us as consumers, that there are these companies competing and because competition brings down prices and raises quality. But at the same time, it's a great privilege for people who are owning stocks in these companies and that they can make money out of this system. So, the thought is we all owe something back. We all owe something to make the system work. And I think the pharmaceutical companies have not really lived up to their license to operate and what determines there to operate partly depends on the nature of the business that they're in. So, if you're making money out of life and death, then you've got a much closer connection to life and death. If you're making money out of broadband or something, then maybe you have a special responsibility for keeping the pollution down. I know that's a stupid example.
Ben Yeoh (33:40): Communication Open. Yeah.
Jonathan Wolff (33:42): Space pollution, right. Maybe making sure you monitor dangerous space objects or something. So, there are certain areas that because you're operating in that area, you have special responsibilities in relation to that area. I think we could make much more of that as a society. The type of individualism of the economy that we have makes that a much more difficult thing to force through and get across.
Ben Yeoh (34:08): So, I think the social license to operate ideas is slowly gaining traction, but I would view the progress as slow. The interesting thing about the secularity of it is that at the end of the day, for instance, in this country and in most of rich nations, it's you and me, the person in the street, which ends up owning a piece of these companies through our pension and that's been very atomized. So, in fact, certainly most people we meet will actually have a very or partial ownership of these various companies. So, we are also profiteering and the customer, and we are part shareholder as well as stakeholder. The fact that we could somehow use our voice and ownership to bend on that social license is only beginning to get the kind of traction that actually we have in terms of those rights in law, and also the exercising of those rights. So, I do think that's quite an interesting thing. Maybe circling back to something that we mentioned and I know you do a lot of work on, which is on times of minorities, I'm particularly interested in disability. Because actually there is, I think this view that perhaps a disabled human life is somehow less. There are worse health outcomes, there are worse job outcomes and you can actually observe this for a lot of other minorities. May I stick with disability, partly as stats suggest that.
Ben Yeoh (35:38): For instance, in Britain, one in five people are disabled and it's a very large minority globally. And I'd be interested in what you think philosophy has had to say about this. It's partly because when I've been reading around, I kind of felt that ideas which have come from disability studies, social models of disability, even things like gender studies and the like for other things seem to progress ideas here more and in a more practical way than perhaps some mainstream philosophy. I don't know if this, your reading of what philosophers have had to offer on minority in disability debates, albeit that your work and program now is kind of a lot focused on the rights of the minority and civil institutions and that. I'd be interested in your thoughts of how we progressed on this or not in the last few decades.
Jonathan Wolff (36:32): Well, it certainly got a lot better than it was. So, I started working on disability roundabout, I suppose, about the year 2000. And I can't now completely reconstruct why I did it. But I think I was giving a talk about Dworkin's theory of equality. So, if you go back to John Rawls in the theory of justice 1971, he deliberately doesn't discuss disability. He makes it explicitly, he's leaving questions of disabilities to one side, and he was roundly criticized for that because as you say, it's a very significant minority. So, Ronald Dworkin comes along and gives a theory of justice, which does accommodate disability, but he considers disability as a deficit that if you're disabled, you need more money. And so, his approach to disability was about finding a formula to tax people who were not disabled and to transfer that money to people with disabilities. So, Dworkin has a sort of tax and redistribution approach to disability. He doesn't describe it like that, but that in practice is what it was. I think I remember giving a talk on this in a multidisciplinary conference. There was someone from disability studies who was sort of snaring with contempt at this approach, or tried to explain it. And even, I think I was using the word handicapped at that point. And you could see that he thought I was in the dark ages in the way I was talking. Yet, this was sort of cutting-edge political philosophy. And I got quite upset, sort of almost offended on behalf of philosophy here to think why was it that we were being so misunderstood.
Jonathan Wolff (38:41): So, I started reading around some of the work. I bought some disability studies books and started reading. I just realized how prejudice I was around, around issues of disability and how narrowly I had thought of it. So physical disability, I always thought of as like a medical problem. And the ideal thing to do with disability was to put people in hospital and cure their disability. And so, it was a real shock to me to read people who were paraplegics who were denying medical treatment and partly it was because the treatment they were offered was very poor and wouldn't help. Partly it was that being in a hospital for half your life is a terrible way of spending your life, but also people were quite happy with their body, so they said, and they identified with how they were and they didn't want to change. I thought, well, fair enough. Why should they change? Why should anyone have to change to fit in with other people's ideas of what's normal? In a way, it's a deeper philosophical question about what is normal and within political philosophy, we hadn't really interrogated this. So, we'd assume this thing would be normal and everyone wants to be normal. And if you're not normal, there's a deficit. And if there's a deficit, then for the purposes of distributed justice, you should be given some compensation for your deficit, from people who don't suffer that deficit. This was a very, very narrow and demeaning and insulting and thoughtless way of handling questions of disability.
Jonathan Wolff (40:19): There were a few philosophers who were not doing this. Anita Silvers, for example. Shelly Tremain is another. Most of the philosophers who were dealing seriously with issues of disability were disabled themselves and found the mainstream discourse very upsetting. The few people like me, who came in from mainstream philosophy, wanting to think about disability and then finding disability studies much more philosophically sophisticated than the philosophy. And that was a surprise because if you're a philosopher you're brought up to think you're the most sophisticated person, you are the smartest person in the room and you've certainly got a monopoly on philosophy. And then anyone else who thinks they're doing philosophy; they're probably doing history of ideas or sociology or something. They're not doing real philosophy. Then to find that these works were ontological and epistemological more sophisticated than we were certainly doing political philosophy. I mean, I found out a revelation. And so, I've been a sort of import/export agency between philosophy and other disciplines. Trying to bring in ideas from other disciplines to show how we in philosophy can learn about philosophy from reading other things. And it's not just that we've got the truth and we're somehow spreading it to others.
Ben Yeoh (41:38): I find that really fascinating. I think from the disability world, if I mentioned philosophy and disability, we inevitably run into the work of Peter Singer. His type of consequential thinking of applied philosophy has actually done a lot for animal rights and animal suffering and has also created effective altruism. So, a kind of expected value is hit to things like charitable giving and the worth of a life. Yet actually when applied to this type of disabled life has kind of, at least viewing disabled lives as lesser as you're kind of indicating. Or more exactly, I think he would say he argues that the parents of disabled babies should be allowed to end their lives. I was wondering what you kind of thought with this. I mean, maybe it’s part of the problems about this more extreme utilitarian type of thinking. I think they have this thing, like, what it, the dismal scenario, whatever, is where everyone's kind of in hell and you can make it a little bit better, but everyone's still in hell and well, that's no good is it because no one's really happy. But I was wondering that because it doesn't go down well in the disability community and it does seem to chime a little bit differently but from a sort of a very cold, expected value type of thing I can kind of maybe get there, although it doesn't seem to chime whatsoever. I don't know. Do you think political philosophy has anything to say about that?
Jonathan Wolff (43:08): So I think political philosophies got a lot to apologize for and I spent my time doing that, actually apologizing on behalf of political philosophy. Now, I think I've reached a point in my career where I don't have to read things I don't agree with anymore. And I like a lot of Singer's early work. I think he is very thought provoking. I think he's done a lot to make people think about various prejudices they've had around equality. But I haven't really paid a lot of attention to his work on disability. I'd be much more interested in the work of people like my friend, Tom Shakespeare, as a disabled person. Just trying to work through what it's like. So Tom earlier in his life was not a sort complete defender of the social model of disability, but he thought, a lot of disability was constructed, but he's changed his view as his own condition has changed. And you think, well, pain is not socially constructed. Pain is pain and pain is a real thing. If you're living your life in pain, then there's no way of changing society where that pain doesn't matter or disappears or something. So, within the disability studies community, there's a lot of thinking around what can we do if we think more creatively in society and what can we fail to do? And for me, so much of my work in philosophy now in political philosophy comes from what I take to be sort of the central insights of the social model of disability. And so that insight is because of the way people are constructed mentally and the way the world is constructed mentally, physically, socially, culturally, some people fit into the world more easily than others, as things are.
Jonathan Wolff (45:10): So disability is a type of misfit between the person and the world. So the naive assumption is we have to change the person to fit better into the world. The social model says, no we should change the world, so everyone fits in. And in a way, that's my ambition for everything. Now, when we're thinking about any type of minority, you think, well, what is the misfit here? Should we change the world so that people fit in? In some cases this is impossible or not a great idea. So Dan Wikler in the seventies wrote a paper called something like "Paternalism and the mildly retarded." And he said, how badly the social model works for some forms of cognitive disorder. So if you think about what it would be to rearrange the world so that having a very low IQ wasn't a disadvantage. It would have to get rid of the banking system. It would have to get rid of everything sophisticated. So that feels like that's too high a cost. So there are going to be limits, but just this idea of the lack of fit between the person and the world. And in some cases, we want the person to change. We want to educate people and we want to make people able to read. We want to make them numerous. And in other cases, if you only have stairs going into the building and you could easily put it on the ramp, then you can make some people's lives a lot better, with minimal effort. And there's no reason not to, if you can do that.
Jonathan Wolff (46:44): So you change the world rather than trying to change or assist the person. Once you understand that, once you try to change the world to accommodate more people that means things like disability become less stigmatizing. That you don't have to identify in order to be helped, for example. So this is one of the things of the type of Dworkin scheme. If it's about redistribution, you have to identify as a disabled person to claim your benefits. If we've rearranged the world so that being a disabled person in that respect is no longer a disadvantage, then no one even has to think about it. You just get on with your life, right? Now this is sort of an inspiring vision I think that disability helps us think through. I normally don't like to do this sort of ideal world theory but I think in disability cases, it's very interesting to think, how would we have constructed the world differently if we took people with disabilities seriously from the start. Because what we've done is construct a well for the 80% who aren't disabled and have made small adjustments around the edges for the other 20%. If we had started from the point of view that the world is a diverse place with people with different mental and physical attributes, how would we've done things differently? I think now that is a great thought experiment that can be quite inspiring to policy.
So do I think a disabled life is less valuable than a non-disabled life? No, I don't. I think we may have constructed the world so that some lives are much more difficult for people than other lives. Some people face much more obstacles in their life than others. Certainly some people can do more than others. Certainly some people are in more pain and discomfort and lack of mobility than others. So there are differences. It’s possible that some lives are not worth living. If they're very short and full of pain then you might say that's a life that's not worth living, but beyond that any type of life is worth living and it's the only life that the person has got. And it seems to me that they're trying to grade different lives with different values. It is very unfortunate. Of course, the type of question that say Parfit raised was around abortion and disability. You mentioned yourself about whether parents have a right to or even a duty I suppose, in some cases to terminate a pregnancy because of disability. I mean, is that what you wanted to pursue?
Ben Yeoh (49:26): Well, we don't have to go there in the sense that I do think we were questioning that there was a definite difference between, and I think society broadly views the same, although obviously there's debates for when you're ending the life of someone who's being born. And obviously this is based on that versus not that's partly because Singer takes it all the way to when is baby is born, whereas sort of unborn is a lot more accepted to be a lot more complex. Although … you’ve got some very interesting second order effects. For instance, in Iceland currently essentially no one is being born with Downs because you can essentially, you can screen for that. And the second order effect is that that doesn't happen. And the cousin observation would be in the deaf community where you can medically lose deafness versus hearing communities. And there's an extremely rich deaf culture, which is being eroded will likely if you follow this be eroded over time. And so, to extend some of your thinking, I do think it's probably the case that you can bring the world closer to a lot of these communities not only at no cost to everyone else, but in a way that enriches everyone much more often. There are maybe some points, let's say, severe schizophrenia, which would be very difficult to map around.
Although in isolated cases, I was reading accounts of how people treated what we might think of as people having visionary episodes as prophets today that we might view as having schizophrenia. And actually, in some olden times in isolated communities, they were looked after very well. And actually, the world might've rotated around what visions they were having. Perhaps putting that altogether, I mean, this just extends your ideas and thinking about the importance of the social model. Thinking about minorities, I think that there's someone who calls himself probably more of a risk philosopher, Nassim Taleb, who is more famous for thinking around risk and black swans. But he's actually posited something about minority rule in complex systems. This is the idea that it takes a courageous group of minority people for society to function properly and he gives an example of a disabled person might not have access to a regular bathroom, but actually if all bathrooms were accessible, this would be equal for non-disabled and disabled. So, if that would happen to the world, it would just actually be a net positive broadly. So, all bathrooms are accessible and actually your problem is solved.
So perhaps interesting in extending that I was wondering what you were doing in your work on civil society and institutions protecting minority rights, and maybe talking a little bit about your idea of a society of equals. This idea that may be a society which avoids negatives, avoids exclusions and exploit exploitation is something that philosophy should be thinking more of because it does seem to be an extension of taking some of these social model ideas, but putting them maybe more broadly into a philosophical framework.
Jonathan Wolff (52:49): Okay. Thank you. So, this is an ongoing project of work, of course. And it goes back again to the debates. So, I mentioned Dworkin's work on equality. Dworkin presented a view that came to be known as luck egalitarianism which says roughly that we should insulate people from the results of bad luck. So, if you're born disabled, that's bad luck for him, you should be compensated for that. That was part of his view. But things are down to your individual choice, then you should bear the consequences of that. So, the luck egalitarianism views as an equal society are one that compensates for bad luck, but allows people to bear the consequences of their good and bad choices. Now there are two main features of that view. One is it gives a high premium to something like individual responsibility. So, it tries to insulate you from things that are outside your own choices, but requires you to pay the costs of your choices and get the benefit of your choices. So, responsibility and choice are really important. And the other thing about it is it thinks of a quality in terms of distribution of resources of goods in the world. And that became sort of the mainstream view in theories of equality. That is lucky egalitarianism and there are lots of variations on it. There are lots of ways of generating debates within that framework of thinking, well, should it be resources or maybe should it be equal happiness we will have? Or should it be resources, or should it be opportunities for resources?
There are lots of debates, lots of positions. Jerry Cohen, my teacher, took an exempt position. Dick Arnason took a position. Many other people, John Roemer. So, there was a debate broadly within the same assumptions. And one of the amazing things about a set of assumptions is that no one realizes I'm making them until someone points them out to them. So, there was a debate that looked like these people have big differences between each other. Then there were a set of criticisms. Criticisms from me, but more importantly from Elizabeth Anderson that pointed out that this whole group of views had these things in common around choice and distribution of something. And the view I was presenting at that time and she, also Sam Schaeffler and others and David Miller before us, starts from this idea that if we think about what attracts us to the idea of equality, it's not really the idea of sharing something else equally between people that equality isn't about equal income or equal wealth or equal happiness. It's about not looking up to people and not looking down on them. Thinking of yourself as an equal with others. It could be equal respect, some people think. But it could just be the bland idea if you want to live in a society where everyone regards each other as equals, and that might have consequences for distribution, but it's not defined in terms of distribution.
So, a society of equals is one which is constituted by a certain type of relations between people. And that's the basic idea. And again, you can have a million people writing their PhDs to try to tell us what these relations are. And yeah. So, I came up with this version of this few in the late nineties, I thought, okay, so now my task is, what is this relation? What is the bond of equality? I spent a few years trying to come up with it. Didn't get anywhere. I had a couple of PhD students. They sat down at the task; they didn't come up with it either. They didn't solve it for me, but they did very good work, but they didn't solve it and I sort of abandoned it. Then I was doing work around public policy and my approach in public policy was always to start from the problem. So, if you're thinking about the problem in public policy, don't just think about the policy area and think about what would be an ideal system for railway safety. You start with, what's going wrong with the system we've got? What are the dilemmas for the system we've got? Almost like an engineer's approach. Now, what's going wrong? How do we fix it? And I thought, well, maybe that's the right way to think about equality too. So rather than thinking, well, what would be an ideal society where everyone relates to each other as an equal?
Well, maybe there's not one model. Maybe there are thousands of different ways in which we can have a society of equals. So, the idea that I'm going to promote one model and say, join my model, put my flag on it and say, sign to my model of equality. It's ridiculous. No, one's going to sign up to us and do it right. It's utopian thinking but what we can do is look at the society we're in and think what are the greatest and most pernicious inequalities in our society. We've talked about disability. Most people who are writing about this are salaried employees. So, they tend to think about income as something that's really important. I came to think that inequality post-employment is actually much more important than inequality in employment. So, the lives of people in retirement run from extreme poverty to extreme wealth for contingent reasons. Were you lucky enough to be able to buy a house and pay a mortgage and have paid it off and don't have rent to pay? Do you have the good fortune to have received inheritance just as you're retiring or not? Do you have a private pension? We we're talking about it before. So, someone like me, I'm in about as privileged a position as you can be because by the time, I retire I would have paid off my flats. I got a pension from the USS before it all went wrong. I will inherit something, not a lot, but there'll be some things that will pay for my vacations in my retirement. Something whereas if I didn't have any of that, you know, I could be living hand to mouth.
So, you think, okay, there are these unnoticed inequalities, or there are qualities that we don't think much about. One thing I thought a lot about before was so-called benefit “cheats”. I've got a paper coming out on this for you there because we all hate benefit cheats…except who are benefit sheets? So, people who cannot survive on the starvation benefits they have and try to do something so they can buy their kid a birthday present. I'm not in every case, but there are people who are among the hardest working potentially hardest working in the country who are labeled as cheats. So, you start looking at these injustices and inequalities and start thinking, well, what can we do about that? So, relations like exploitation, exclusion, hierarchy, arbitrary, power violence. These are all examples of inequalities that we can address. We don't need new philosophical theories to tell us these things are wrong, but we do need a sort of heightened perception about the ways in which our societies can be deeply unjust and the ways in which we can begin to try to address this. So, the idea of a society of equals, that's an aspiration that I don't believe we'll ever get to. For example, I think it is impossible, probably psychologically impossible to eliminate hierarchies, even though they're unjust. So, I'm not one of these people who think every problem has a solution. I think there are some problems that we will never solve.
So, I think hierarchies are unjust and inevitable, but that doesn't mean the extent of hierarchy is inevitable or the pernicious consequences of hierarchy is inevitable either. So, there are going to be things we can do to mitigate it and make it softer and less problematic. So, it's not exactly an aspiring vision, but the thought is that we should be attending much more carefully the ways in which our societies go wrong and think about how we as philosophers can try to contribute to projects, to help repair.
Ben Yeoh (1:01:10): That's really fascinating and it might not be very catchy as a vision, but I actually think that form of what I would call incremental progress or applying insights that we have are out there. But we're not applying them as well as could be is probably really important. I haven't heard it articulated in the way that you have. So that is going to leave me thinking and is really valuable. So, thanks. I thought we might do a short sort of overrated/underrated section where I throw out a phrase or a name and you can pass, and then you could say overrated or underrated or why and then end with a couple of questions. Unfortunately, we're sort of running out of time because there's so many other things, I was going to ask you about, like when can you ever have responsible gambling and how should we trust an expert or why should we become a philosopher? We haven't even hit on things like climate change, but I think we'll have to save those for another one. So overrated/underrated, feel free to pass or not: direct or deliberative democracy.
Jonathan Wolff (1:02:13): Good. I thought you were going to ask me about people and this was going to be very embarrassing. So, the idea of direct democracy, I think my views are changing on this. I have written that direct democracy suffers from the defect that Oscar Wilde said about socialism and that it would take up too many evenings. And that if we really were going to have direct democracy, we'd have to spend so much time. We wouldn't be very good at this. It’s a bad idea. I haven't completely moved away from that view, but now we do now have technological means to do things better. I found out about mini-Publix, where you can have not everyone deeply engaged, but a thousand ordinary citizens for a year say engaged in the political process. I think part of the problem is that for most of its time, political processes only draw in a small selection of the population as representative. So, before the 20th century, pretty much everyone in parliament was from a very narrow male, privately educated, wealthy background. We had a few decades with the rise of the labor party. When you have people from trade union background, people from different walks of life, getting into politics and that was maybe quite a lively era. That now feels like something that has passed. We're now back to a situation where almost everyone who is elected as a member of parliament has spent a lot of time around Westminster. Has been a SPAD, has been something to do with parliament, or maybe on the Tory side in business, but has kept close to politicians.
So, the people who are representing us, we're a very narrow proportion of the population. I think it would be wonderful if we could work out ways of having a much wider range of people, different experiences. Yeah. A few people with significant experience of unemployment in parliament would be fantastic, more disabled people in parliament or close to parliament. So, if we could have some type of, much more representative system as a sort of satellite, I think that would be wonderful. So, I would say I understood the right way direct democracy is underrated. It as it's normally understood. Probably, overrated.
Ben Yeoh (1:04:43): Very fair. Okay. Multiculturalism?
Jonathan Wolff (1:04:49): Wow. So, it depends what you're contrasting multiculturalism with. So, if you're contrasting multiculturalism with monoculturalism where you want to have a society where everyone is the same background. Well, this doesn't fit with me very well at all. I've written about how I'm descended from three generations of asylum seekers. So, any one of Jewish descent at my age has gotten that as a background. Even if, like me, people think you're sort of quintessential Englishman, you have this quite different background. So, multiculturalism is definitely very important in relation to monoculturalism, but more subtly it's contrasted with policies of assimilation. So, my great-grandmother who I never met apparently lived in England for half her life, but only ever spoke Yiddish. So, was that a good thing or a bad thing if she could only speak to members of her own very small Orthodox Jewish community? That seems to me a shame. So, I wouldn't want to force assimilation, but I would want to make assimilation available. So, I think multiculturalism, with the right amount of opportunity for being part of a mainstream culture, is important. But I think in my own case, completely assimilated. But for people who don't want that, I think that is absolutely fine and adds to the glory of the countries for there to be multicultural. So, I'm in favor. In some ways I find it quite difficult to understand the opposition. It feels to me somewhat narrow and maybe rather fearful of people to think there's something wrong with many cultures living side-by-side.
Ben Yeoh (1:06:58): Sure, that seems fair. Adam Smith?
Jonathan Wolff (1:07:04): Well, Adam Smith? So, what you're meant to say is Adam Smith was this defender of capitalism. So, the right-wing thinks, but actually there's much more to him than math. If you read a theory of moral sentiments, you find he's this other person, except people can't quite tell you what this other person is except he's very humane. Has other things going on. Has a theory of the impartial spectator. A couple of years ago, I decided that I was going to read the wealth of nations cover to cover because no one does and when I finished that, I realized why no one does. Well, defenses of obsolete economic policy, which has no relevance now around the currency and so on.
Ben Yeoh (1:07:49): Yeah. Labor and stuff.
Jonathan Wolff (1:07:52): So, the parts that people read are probably the right one. There are a few hundred pages or 50 pages or something. I think he is probably a much more subtle thinker than he's often taken to be. So, I wrote a little book on Marx and I've spent some time looking at the early writings, the economic and philosophical manuscripts. I realized looking at it a bit more carefully than I had done, not as a scholar, not as a deep scholar, but just looking at it properly. I realized that Marx's criticisms of capitalism were pretty much all taken just from reading Adam Smith. So, all of the observations that lead to Marx's theory of alienation are already there in Smith. About the commodification of labor, about the working day being punished, about the early death, all of that is there taken by Marx's from Smith. If scholarship had gone a different way, Smith's today could have been regarded as a critic of capitalism rather than a defender, I think, from his writings. So, is he overrated or underrated? It's a beautiful question. I think I've given my answer.
Ben Yeoh (1:09:10): Yeah, you have given him a neutral. It is true that actually he is almost certainly in most of my reading of him, not pro big business. He's anti-big business aside from everything else, because even in his capitalist market interpretations the tendency towards monopoly is not actually good for market competition of which he doesn't fall into, but like you say, most people don't read them, but probably for quite good reasons. Last couple, pronouns?
Jonathan Wolff (1:09:46): Pronouns. Yeah. I haven't really got my head round this. In some respects, I regard myself as a pioneer. In my writing, I've never had a problem using the singular “they”. I know for some people it doesn't sit right for them. It sounds wrong, but to my ears the singular they have always been okay. Sometimes it's a bit forced, but normally you can rewrite the sentence, so it's not too clumsy. So, I tend in my writing as much as I can and I just tend to avoid using them. So, you can put things in a passive tense, or you can recast things, so you don't have to use pronouns. In terms of the use of pronouns, I wish we had a language which didn't have them. It would make things much easier. I believe the Chinese don't have them.
Ben Yeoh (1:10:42): Not really. Not in the same way at all.
Jonathan Wolff (1:10:44): There's a book, I think it's Marge Percy's "Women on the edge of time." I'm not sure it might not be that one, but I read it when I was a teenager. And I remember in the book, the author of the book replaces pronouns with per, which is short for person. So instead of him and her, you just have per; so per says. I think that was great. If we had done that life would have been so much simpler for us. So I think this is my way of saying, I would like to avoid the questions of pronouns rather than come down some way. But is there something particularly behind your question that I've missed?
Ben Yeoh (1:11:23): Well, I guess very tangentially, I'm thinking a little bit Amia Srinivasan who I guess is also a philosopher at Oxford router, extended sort of essay in the London review of books and things. And I guess there's been a movement particularly around identity with this fight around that, which actually adds to your commentary about having something which had a different language would completely sidestep. But the thinking of that has evolved or is more evolved. I'm finding my way as to what it all really means and that's why I thought I'd throw it out to a philosopher, but that's a perfectly adequate response. Cryptocurrencies?
Jonathan Wolff (1:12:11): Yes. So I'm not in an expert position. I have not put my money in cryptocurrencies, but then that's partly because I don't have any money to put anywhere. So that's neither here nor there. I keep expecting them to crash. But of course, even if it's a pure bubble, there's lots of money to be made if you're lucky with your timing. I'm not sure there's such a thing as calculating the timing right because these things are so random. But some people have made an absolute fortune. I know no doubt there are some people who've lost their fortune and not telling us either. I don't know. I mean, I think before COVID, I thought I had an understanding of how economies work. On the basis of how economies work, if we went into lockdown for a few months, everything would grind to a halt and it turns out I was completely wrong. We went into lockdown and we lost a few points of growth, probably and most things carried on and we seem to be able to infuse unconditional, basic income at a very high rate without doing any harm. Okay. We've borrowed money or we've printed money or whatever we'd done, but what I've come out of this realizing I know nothing about how the economy works.
Ben Yeoh (1:13:32): That's good. So supposedly a lot of macro economists fight with one another because none of them understand how the economy works either. I guess I was slightly hinting at the nickname. The affectionate nickname would be crypto bros. And a lot of crypto bros argue that some form of cryptocurrencies are a kind of decentralized libertarian view of trying to do an economy rather than a kind of regulated a central bank way of doing an economy. So some people would very much associate it with a kind of a libertarian worldview to simplify things dramatically versus a regulated worldview. But I do think you're probably right. Most people are just in it because it seems to go up and down a lot and therefore you can or not. Okay. Last couple. These are more sort of, I guess, the questions, which would be one is any thoughts on the future of the city and another is just the span of your work I picked up on the philosophy of music performance. So you can feel free to comment on either or not.
Jonathan Wolff (1:14:51): I got a project at the moment about equality in the city and how paradoxically, some of the cities that we regard as feeling most equal come out on indices very unequal. So Berkeley, for example, in terms of you have people in absolute poverty and multibillionaires living there. So by some measure, that's very unequal, but if you're an egalitarian, that's a city you'd want to live in. but that wasn't your question. Your question was about the future of the city.
Ben Yeoh (1:15:28): I mean, the future city viewed through a lens of equality or that sort of work is equally interesting.
Jonathan Wolff (1:15:35): Yeah. I mean, I think there's a cycle going on. At the moment we're seeing people reassessing whether they need big office space and encouraging people to work from home and maybe downsizing the offices and people won't be coming in. So those offices are then being converted into apartments, and this seems nice. You can come and live in the city, but at the same time, a lot of the reasons for living in the city might be disappearing. So if everything turns into an apartment and there's nothing else other than the apartments. So you've just got this big dormitory. So I think there's an ecosystem system. The city is an ecosystem. And one type of change will have other types of change as well. I think what people are attracted to is a sense of liveliness. And if that disappears, so if the businesses aren't here, so the restaurants closed and the bars closed and the cafe's closed and the little gift shops can't stay, then they're not going to feel the same. And there may be less reason, but then people might move out and probably get cheaper and new types of business move in. So I think this has happened in the past where things have gone in waves. You have a wave of gentrification, but then you, maybe you have a wave of abandonment for whatever reason and then you have re-gentrification. So I think, yeah, I don't think the city is going anywhere at the moment. I don't think the city is disappearing. They're getting bigger and bigger, but we are at an inflection point, but house prices in the countryside are going up more than in the city, much more. A three or four bedroom house with a garden that you might not have been able to sell a few years ago now is a prime property and so on to exaggerate, but I'm not very good at telling the future. I'm not very good at even thinking about what it's going to be like next year, anyway. So I'm not going to try to be a futurologist.
Ben Yeoh (1:17:38): Fair enough. Musical Performance.
Jonathan Wolff (1:17:40): Musical performance. So the work I did here, so it's a very narrow work. I've got a friend who's a music therapist and he was a professional musician, still is. A very highly accomplished musician and he was a music producer as well. I’ve seen him with kids or friends to just go in a room and an hour later, they come out with a very polished track that the kid has written. So the kid didn't know they've got any music or talents or then two hours later, they've got something that sounds like a professional recording and it's their work, not his work. So he’s giving them technical assistance and musical assistance, but he's building on their ideas and their lyrical ideas and their musical ideas. And he's been doing this with people with mental health problems. And some with very complex mental health problems, even to the point where some people won't communicate by speech and just send him texts when, even when they're sitting next to him. But even so he's managed to get a very high standard of musical performance from many of the people he's worked with. And what it's done is increased their self-confidence, it's given them something tangible and it's connected them to family and friends. And I just think this is a really fascinating way. It's a really interesting example of relational autonomy and that they're being autonomous, but their autonomy depends on another person to bring it out. And it depends on a social context to bring it out.
So it shows at least in some contexts, autonomy is not a sole individualistic matter. It depends on the people around you, which is something that feminist philosophers have been arguing for years. I'm building on those ideas and just applying it in this one case. Their ideas in Marx about how you express your individuality by seeing yourself in the external world, through your creation. And so you have in the musical performance and either in the performance or in the recording of it, or videoing of it, you have people who now are proud of something. And you have for the first time in their life, in some cases, the people around them are jealous of what they've done, which is quite an amazing feeling for them. So that's the type of work I've been doing. I've been seeing some philosophical connections with this work.
Ben Yeoh (1:20:06): That's very insightful. I've never heard it articulated like that, but I have seen it within music therapy where it's interesting because you can give people with challenging behaviors or things more autonomy and agency through that because like you say, you're actually helping them along. You're not performative yourself, but by your presence and your doings or the laying out you, you get this sort of performance. You see it in some performing arts as well, and improvise arts again where that is, where you will then actually be part of the act but it doesn't work if you're not there, but it doesn't work without the other person as well. So it's only a complete thing. Well, actually with the relationship part of it is in the interaction, not even in the whole pieces, supplied by both music and performance by having made the leap into a philosophy or even a feminist theory. So that's quite interesting. Great. Okay. Last couple of questions. One is, what does a productive day look like? Where do you get your ideas? Do you reread many philosophers? Is reading part of that productive day? What does that look like for you?
Jonathan Wolff (1:21:23): So lots of different types of days. Most of them at the moment involve sitting in the same chair in front of the same computer much of the day and talking to my computer, which wasn't part of my life until 18 months ago but it depends where I am in a project. So suppose I'm in the middle of a project that's going reasonably well. And what I do is I get up early. I'm at my desk at seven o'clock for two or three hours and then my day is done in a way that I think my work is done. My real work is done, that I can get on with things like...
Ben Yeoh (1:22:10): Podcast?
Jonathan Wolff (1:22:12): Podcast. I mean, then you get into it. I mean, it started early on to me. So when I first started work in 1986 there was only one word processor in the departments and no one else got in before 10 o'clock. So I got in at eight o'clock in the morning and had two hours on the word processor before everyone else came in. And so, in a way I had two hours of pre-work before my day started. So I'd have an absolutely full diary from 10 till 6. I'll be writing for two hours beforehand. I've just got into that habit of being most productive in the first few hours of the day. So I work much faster. My writing is much more fluent, and I know that if I try to do more than about three or four hours of serious work in a day, first of all, it won't be very good. And secondly, it will tire me out. So I won't be able to do it the next day. So I think the important thing for me, when I'm in the writing phase, is just understanding my rhythms and that if I've done well for two or three hours, that's intense enough that I shouldn't do more, but I should do other things. I read, reread, tweet and answer emails, all of the things of that.
Ben Yeoh (1:23:21): Is there a particular philosopher you reread the most?
Jonathan Wolff (1:23:25): So I'm more someone who wants to fill gaps. So at the moment, for example, I'm reading Tocqueville: "Democracy in America" because I never have done so. I've seen many people saying what a wonderful writer he is and what great ideas he had and formed some very strong impressions. There are also some very boring bits, like with any writer. Something else I'm working on. You mentioned multiculturalism. One of the things I'm thinking about in relation to my new projects is nationalism and alternatives to nationalism. So people often contrast nationalism and being a globalist. You're either a nationalist or a globalist. Someone from somewhere or someone from anywhere. That seems to be a very crude contrast. And so it seems to me, we form allegiances, which are neither national nor the whole of the world. So we're members of all sorts of different communities. So I'm thinking of a view, which I'm tentatively giving the title multi communitarianism as distinct from multiculturalism, because any one of us is a member of many communities of which our national community is only one and maybe not the most important. So all of these things help form our identity. But also give a source of value as well. So some of those are geographic regional, some of them are not, some of them are intellectual. So we're part of the community of scholars. That's an international community, but also, I'm someone who now lives in a certain part of London. I feel an affinity for that and so on. Apart from one year in my life, when I knew I was coming back, I've never lived more than 30 miles from central London.
Yes. I'm somehow someone from anywhere. So I'm a grounded cosmopolitan or rooted cosmopolitan. So the reason I'm mentioning this is that I came to this view through reading a number of books. And then I realized the reason I was reading those books was that they had all been mentioned in Anthony Appiah's book, "The lies that bind." I thought, oh, have I just reinvented Appiah's own view. And going back to read Appiah, I realized he's doing something related, but different. So that's something I often do. And this goes to your other question, where do I get my ideas from? So I have this conceit that I'm quite often better at explaining other people's ideas than they are. So this is one of the reasons why I write books for students, my introduction to political philosophy and my little book on Marx. I puzzle through ideas and I find a way of explaining them. But when I do that with living philosophers, they never recognize the views I'm giving back to them. I'm always changing and reinterpreting them. So the influence of the views I have often are very influenced by people. And the fascinating thing is quite often, I find myself inventing views I originally disagreed with. I read something and I think that's wrong and I think about it and think about it and I go off in a different direction and come back. Then I realized that the view I'm now inclined to is something that I thought I'd rejected early on. So, I react. But well, if I'm writing a paper or writing a chapter in a book, this is going to sound very pretentious.
So I was reading something about Mozart, so it's already pretentious, and why there were so few corrections on his manuscripts on his musical manuscripts. So for most composers, apparently rubbing things out and trying again. Mozart was asked why there were so few corrections. And he said, well, it's as if I hear it all at once and then write it out and that's what happens. So if I do get an idea for papers like that. So I'm in the shower and the structure just hits me. I mean, yeah, it's not a symphony, it's not an opera. It's a 20-page paper and probably not a very good one, but it's just that once I start writing, I sort of know what it's going to be. I can work very fast, that may be why I write these sorts of three-hour intense things and I've pretty much got the whole paragraph in my head before I write anything. So what puzzles me is not fast writing, but slow writing. So I hear people who think they can only do a few sentences a day. I think, well, how is that working? How does that work for you? How do you know where you're going? And it's like having a conversation. When you ask for a sentence, you know how it's going to end, but you've never formulated that in your head when you start, it's not as if you, you practice and then it comes out, you know where you're going, but it takes a bit of time to come out. So writing for me is a bit like that, that you sort of know what it's going to be. And then it takes some time to put it down on paper.
Ben Yeoh (1:28:52): That makes a lot of sense. I have read and actually know a lot of creators who do that way of creating that it is more formed. It might take them their whole lifetime to get to that idea of what they fully formed but they can sometimes write it very quickly. I know playwrights who will write a whole play in a weekend, but it actually took them years to come to that. Or I sometimes say you might have a really good idea what it would have been like to have your mum stuck in a lift with Donald Trump. You could maybe write that very quickly. Maybe no one else would be interested in that, but you have a very fully formed idea in your head about what those two characters might be. But like you say, there are some people who write slower and often they write because they are editing their sentences and their wordplay very much as they go along and they can't, they don't shut off that editing brain. And they haven't, they haven't fully formed it in a way that it's pre edited already, but obviously there's a [Inaudible:01:29:53] way of doing it. So the last question would be, do you have any advice for perhaps young people today, or maybe people who are thinking about the relevance of philosophy or public policy? Or yeah, just some advice for people listening today about what they should think and do in the world?
Jonathan Wolff (1:30:18): Advice for young people and what they should think and do. Right. Okay. So I wasn't expecting this question, so, but let me start in an almost negative place. So when I was in philosophy at UCL I had a joke with some of my colleagues about some students who we said weren't really interested in philosophy, but they were interested in being interested in philosophy. That is, they really wanted to be someone who spent their days doing philosophy. They didn't really have it. So then they have this desire, but it wasn't really part of them. I thought that was such a shame. They had chosen something that they weren't really excited about. They're excited by the name, they're excited by the aura. It seems to me that people should work actually excites them. What actually interests them and do it, particularly at university. When I used to do career fairs, I would love it when six formers would be there with their parents. So I could say to the students, choose something that really inspires you, choose something that really interests you at university, because you've got the rest of your life to be bored.
So this should be the three years where you really make the most of it. Don't do something just because you think you're going to get a job from it. You're going to get a job, or you might get a lot of money depending on what you want to do, of course. You may already have everything worked out. I'm not talking about finding your passion. I hate this idea that people have to have a passion, but you can be interested in something. You can find it fascinating. You want to spend your time for now with it and do that. But at the same time many of us are in a privileged position and we do have responsibilities that come from that. There were things one ought to be doing. They're thinking about how simple things you can do can make things better and worse for others. I mean, it really pains me. For example, when I see ordinary people making life difficult for someone serving them in a bar, or people just showing off to their friends by being a bit snotty to waitresses. So I'm like hey, what's the point? It's just as easy. Okay. So I'm going to sound like some old vicar, or it's just as easy to be nice as it is to be nasty, because I was asked on another podcast what are the three things that I would say for my view of morality, and luckily, I'd been writing something similar. So it looked like this was just coming off the top of my head. First of all, be kind. Secondly, always try to see things from the other person's point of view. And thirdly, never forget the position of power that you're likely to be coming from and the effect of that. So that is, I suppose, my advice to everyone- be kind, try to see things from the other person's point of view and never forget your power or privilege that has put you where you are.
Ben Yeoh (1:33:56): Well, that's a great insight. So with that, thank you very much. Thanks so much for chatting.
Jonathan Wolff (1:34:04): Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks so much for setting it up and for your time to Ben.
