#1290 Matthew Lindauer: The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of the Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined by Doctor Matthew Lindauer. He's an associate professor of philosophy at Brook Brooklyn Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center and an associate professor of psychology also at the CUNY Graduate Center. And today we're going to talk about his book, The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts. So, Doctor Lindauer, welcome to the show. It's a big pleasure to everyone.

00:30 Matthew Lindauer: Thanks so much. Great to be with you.

00:33 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so, I mean, for people who of course haven't read the book, er what is the main argument of your book? I mean, er what exactly do you explore there?

00:45 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, so, as someone who, um, was trained at Yale in the PhD program at Yale, I was doing a lot of kind of traditional political and moral philosophy, thinking about immigration justice and our duties to the global poor. And I was also working in, uh, Joshua Knobe's lab, uh, and getting into kind of empirical research, and I had this motivation to think about how these things can hang together. Um, AND there's famously difficulty putting these two, you know, descriptive and normative or the is a divide. These are kind of famously difficult questions, and I guess I thought that there was a piece missing in the discussion of how empirical research could inform work in moral and political philosophy. So in particular, so the book is called The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts, and the idea is that I noticed that, um, either explicitly or implicitly. Many times moral and political philosophers were appealing to Considerations about what happens when a given concept like justice or maybe a conception of justice, like justice as fairness, is implemented in the world. What will happen when it's implemented, you know, what happens when people internalize this concept of justice. Can this concept generate consensus among people of diverse backgrounds? Those are kind of practical factors, right? Um, SO, I think of that as ways in which these concepts can help us to solve practical problems. They're fruitful in that way, they're supposed to be fruitful in that way. And then, the natural, uh, coming in point for empirical research is that you can't know what concepts will do in the real world without, without at least consulting good empirical research, but also often we're going to have to, I argue, conduct new empirical research, and philosophers need to be involved in doing that to ascertain facts about the fruitfulness of normative concepts. So the basic idea is, in order to evaluate. Concepts, we partly have to pay attention to their fruitfulness. Fruitfulness is an empirical phenomenon, therefore, empirical research is deeply part of moral and political philosophy. It's not just something that's of side interest, it's actually part of doing the evaluation of these concepts.

02:53 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, you, you mentioned Doctor Joshua Nova. I've had, I've had him on the show and we talked a lot about experimental philosophy, but I mean, how do you look at the relationship between, uh, theoretical philosophy and experimental philosophy, and then also between on the one hand, uh, theoretical and experimental philosophy, and on the other hand, science.

03:17 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, yeah, this is a great and wide ranging question, and, uh, in some ways I try to narrow the scope of the book to really only focus on normative concepts, uh, and in particular, even within the normative, I say I'm really focused on moral and political concepts, not normative concepts from aesthetics or epistemology, OK. But your broader question is very interesting, um, and, and important, and I would say that, um, I think, and this is taking a note from Josh in a way, um, I think if we went to someone like Aristotle or David Hume, and we said, look, we've developed all these neat scientific tools, tools of modern science, the scientific method, right? And we just weren't going to use them at all to help illuminate. Enduring questions about the human condition and about the nature of the mind and about the nature of reality, they would, they would be completely flummoxed, right? They say, why wouldn't you use these tools, right? So I think um One way of looking at philosophy, and this is from another old teacher of mine, George Beler, who has a very different kind of view, is that philosophy should be thought of as kind of autonomous from the sciences for the most part, and I, I, with all respect to George, um, I, I deeply disagree, and I think that that idea that we would limit the kinds of tools that philosophy had at its disposable, it's sorry, at, at its disposal to only kind of armchair reflection and logic, um, really is out of step with the history of philosophy, that's really just a particular period in the 20th century, and not even the whole 20th century of Western philosophy. Um, SO I think that it's more continuous with the history of how philosophy has been done around the world, um, to think that scientific, um, research methods and empirical facts could go into our philosophical reasoning. Um, NOW, I still think it's really important, and this is why I wrote a whole book about it, to articulate how scientific research can inform our understanding of philosophical questions and issues, because it's not the case that every scientific question is a philosophical question. It's not the case that every result from experimental moral psychology about how people think about right and wrong, is relevant to what is right and wrong. So, I have, I have a kind of view where we have to be really careful about this. We shouldn't just say, oh well, you know, everyone, you know, you do armchair philosophy, I do empirical results, and, you know, we have like a kind of unspoken agreement. I said, I say in the book where we just kind of like agree to tolerate each other. I think we can do better than that. And my book is part of trying to piece together that project in a kind of piecemeal way, focusing on the normative uh areas of philosophy.

05:54 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, you know, I'm always talking about this anecdote, but I can't remember exactly. I wish I remembered, but exactly when this was, but uh, it was either the late 2000s or the, the early 2010s where, uh, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins were at this, uh, event, at this public event, and in the Q&A. Uh, uh, Richard Dawkins was asked, um, why people should trust science, and he said something like, oh, because it works, because planes fly and stuff like that, and both he and deGrasse Tyson, uh, I'm not sure if Neil deGrasse Tyson still has that, uh, opinion on philosophy, probably not, but back then they said that, uh, philosophy is basically obsolete, and I, and I mean. I, I, I, I don't, I don't think that, uh, that's a fair thing to say because I mean science very much needs philosophy and philosophy very much needs science and I mean I, now what. I can't even read theoretical science. I mean, whatever kind of science it is, either theoretical psychology, anthropology, or physics or whatever, without thinking that the scientists are doing philosophy without even noticing it.

07:20 Matthew Lindauer: I think you're completely right. I, it's not unexpected that people popularizing science would sometimes try to give the boldest, you know, view of its importance and its importance over all other fields, um, but, you know, most scientists that you talk to will have much more sophisticated views about how theory, uh, is, you know, um, is important to science, how there are interesting decisions to be made about How to balance different theoretical virtues and constructing scientific theories, there are questions about values and, I mean, the whole, whole history of philosophy of science is fascinating. Um, IF you told someone like Albert Einstein, Uh, you know, or Isaac Newton, that, you know, philosophy was irrelevant to science, they would, again, they would be flummoxed. So I think that this is, um, you know, understandable, and I, I hope to also, you know, make a, make a contribution to these kinds of discussions where it's not just sort of like, oh well, that's, that's arrogant or something, it's also like, no, we can, we can talk about the ways in which, you know, go read what philosophers of physics have to say, you know, is what I would tell these people, you know, read what Evolutionary biologists and philosophers of biology say about about theory, and I think that that's, that's um, that's going to be, you know, more informative, but of course, you know, Unfortunately, um, I, I think without knowing it, some of these ways of, um, denigrating philosophy play into a certain kind of anti-intellectualism, that's, that's just a problem in general, and so that's another reason to be careful about these kinds of matters, I think.

08:50 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I, I mean, Einstein was very much influenced by Kent, by Schopenhauer, and many of the physicists from the late 19th century and early 20th century, particularly the ones who worked on, uh, worked in quantum physics, also said they were influenced by Schopenhauer, so I mean,

09:12 Matthew Lindauer: I guess his important work was a priori, um. Also the influence of of David Hume on Darwin is something people are writing about a lot right now. Um, YEAH, yeah, so I, I just completely agree with you and um Yeah, but it's OK. I mean, I think that, uh, in the spirit, there's something kind of nice about the, the bold. I, I like objections. My favorite chapter, right, was the 3rd chapter where I addressed like 12 objections. It's like, bring all the punches. I think that, you know, Uh, you know, educated, you know, kind of calm, thoughtful people are able to like address these things with reasons, um, yeah,

09:45 Ricardo Lopes: mhm. OK, so, uh, let me ask you then, how do you look at the relationship between moral philosophy and moral psychology?

09:55 Matthew Lindauer: Another great, that's a really great question. So, part of the difficulty of answering is that moral psychology is, is a term in philosophy that means different things to different people. Um, SO some people think of moral psychology as like just studying the nature of action or the nature of intention or something like that, and that that's all really interesting, the nature of autonomy. Um, I think that a broader heading, um, which would be more inclusive of a lot of the most influential work in moral psychology now. IS to say that it's the study of the moral mind. It's the study of how humans think about topics like right and wrong. I would also want to, it's unfortunate that the word moral is the only thing in there, because I also think we think about ethical topics as distinct from moral topics, like how to live a good life, and it's not always the case that the That the good life is, is exhausted by moral considerations. There are also questions about, you know, I have recent work with my colleagues, uh, Anna Gantman and Jordan Wiley on like aesthetic pursuits and aesthetic excellence, right? And there's epistemic excellence, and there's friendship. There's all kinds of things that are not purely reducible to morality. OK, so that said, moral psychology, the study of the psychology of values, and, and, and the things that humans value, the things that humans care about, right? Um, NOW we can ask questions, what should humans care about, right, in moral philosophy. What should they value, right? What is right and wrong, right? And of course, there isn't a 1 to 1 mapping between our answers to questions in the first domain, right? And our answers to questions in the second domain. So, but nonetheless, of course, I think that there's an important, there are important relationships between the two areas. One reason why there's an important relationship that I like to bring out, uh, is, you know, I can, I can refer to a quotation from James Madison in the Federalist Papers, uh, he says, um, paraphrasing, if men were angels, we would have no need for government. Um, SO, so, so I think of it, I think of that as more as equally appropriate to morality and justice. If we were angels, right, if we were these beings with no Material needs, if we had unlimited altruism, if there was no scarcity in our world, right? Uh, WE had unlimited attention, right? Never, never got tired, all these things that make us suboptimal beings. It's not clear that there would be any need for us to be constrained by morality. We would just always help people when they needed help, we'd always support the right things, we would never be driven by vanity or envy or lust or any of these things, right? We would just be driven by the things we should be driven by in each case. Um So that's one reason why there's kind of a deep relationship between how human beings are and how we ought to be. It's that thinking about how we ought to be only arises as a question because of the kind of beings that we are, the kind of imperfect beings that we are. That's why we have to think about how to be. It's, it's because we live in in collectives, right? We live and we, we benefit more from cooperation than isolation. And so these questions of how we ought to be. Naturally arise as solutions to those problems, right? Um. Now, OK, so it must not be the case though that the solutions, these theoretical solutions to these problems are too divorced from the kind of beings that they are. They shouldn't be solutions to problems that angels might have. They should be solutions to problems that the kind of beings that we are have, and that's why I think that that despite being distinct, in some ways, there are deep interrelationships between, um, you know, broadly speaking, empirical moral psychology and moral philosophy.

13:32 Ricardo Lopes: Right, I, I mean, I was going to ask you, uh, what's the relevance of science to ethics, but let me, let me perhaps uh uh broaden the, the question because I mean, I, I always think about because of conversations I've had on the show, like for example with Doctor Owen Flanagan, I mean I really love his book, The Geography of Morals and. And, and things like that. I, I mean, I, I tend to fall very much on the side of moral anti-realism because I think that we can, uh, very much explain why people in different contexts, different socio-cultural contexts and across time. Uh, TEND to adopt certain kinds of moral values because, I mean, they are, uh, uh, I mean, I think that we can very much explain that through anthropology, evolutionary theory, uh, sociology, uh, and so on. So, um, I, I mean, but do you think that Uh, science can actually, uh, solve questions like questions regarding meta ethics as to whether, for example, there are really objective moral values or not. I mean, what, what is the, uh, what do you think is the relevance of science to ethics?

15:03 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. So, so I think that, um, It depends on how broad you think the domain of science is. I would say that the empirical results of studies or empirical data about history or about anthropology alone will not resolve questions about how we ought to live. It'll tell us a lot about how we work, how human societies have worked, why different values arose in different places. And now we can ask, we can ask questions, what should our values be, right? How should we live? And what I want to say is that scientific research should go into the mix of things that we consider when we examine those kinds of questions. So when you want to know what kinds of values should we have, are, are there ways in which our values are suboptimal? They're not helping us solve the practical problems that we actually face, right? You should be consulting and conducting empirical studies to partly Inform your answers to those questions, but it won't be as if we can read the answers directly off the page, as it were, directly off the data, um, and I, and I think that just in general, there is always theory and a certain amount of philosophy that goes into interpreting scientific data, right? Um, BECAUSE, um, the data does not uniquely determine a particular interpretation of itself. There's always a kind of philosophy going on there, um, so, so that, yeah.

16:31 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so, uh, but, but I, I mean, tell us then what is the fruitfulness of normative concepts. I mean, what does that mean?

16:41 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, yeah, I've alluded to this idea. So the central idea of the book, and I'm, I'm borrowing this term from Rudolph Karnap, so people might be familiar with Karnap's work on fruitfulness in theory construction and I'm I'm using it slightly differently than he did. Um, SO what I mean by fruitfulness is, um, the extent to which moral and political concepts like justice, solidarity, well-being, empowerment, the extent to which they are useful to us or helpful for us in solving practical problems that inevitably arise in collective and cooperative living. So concepts are fruitful to the extent that they do so. My account of fruitfulness is multi-dimensional, um, so this includes things like. What do these concepts help to motivate? What do they prevent? Like, when you think about, when you care about justice, or when you think about justice in a certain way, what are the kinds of things that are taken off the table for you, um, because you're committed to justice, um, what will generate consensus, what will guide action, um, what helps us fight back best against problematic social phenomena like racism and bias and misogyny and so on, right? So those are dimensions, those are, those are factors that Make moral and political concepts fruitful, right? And then, of course, as I mentioned, um. Ascertaining whether philosophical concepts are fruitful in these ways is partly an empirical matter, so you have to do empirical research. I've done a lot of empirical research, people might be familiar with on the tendency of moral arguments to actually um increase charitable giving. Um, SO we had, uh, in a, in a paper with Peter Singer and colleagues, we have the first paper finding that a rational argument can actually motivate as much charitable giving as even a very powerful emotional appeal, like the picture of a single child, which was kind of the, the quintessential emotional appeal in the literature at the time. So, philosophical arguments and appeals to rationality can be very powerful. In motivating more altruistic behavior, um, that's the kind of thing just as a, you know, that would fall into the first category of motivational fruitfulness as I call it, but there's, there's much more to the picture, but that's the basic idea, uh, is that, um, Moral and political concepts are fruitful to the extent that they help us to solve practical problems that arise in in the world.

19:00 Ricardo Lopes: Right, uh, tell us about the lock and key analogy that you use in your book. I mean, what is that about and how does it play into the argument or into what you explore in the book.

19:15 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, so I, so, of course, there's another way of looking at moral and political philosophy, um, that says that questions about fruitfulness, you know, factors about what happens when we implement these concepts, these are completely, these might be of interest to someone else, like a marketer or a political scientist, but they're, they're not philosophically significant, right? So I think of thinkers like GE Moore, Derek Parfitt, I kind of go through some of the arguments that these people make, Jerry Cohen. Uh, IN political philosophy and David Esplund, um, I was thinking that, um, You know, justice should not be tied in any way to practical effects of thinking about justice in particular ways, um, and, and that's true of other, you know, ethical theories for people like Moore and, and Parfitt. Now, What I want to say is let's go back to this thought that moral and political concepts arose for a reason. Um, THEY probably wouldn't have arisen for angels, right? So, they arose because we are imperfect beings and we, we also face these practical problems, um, given our, not just, not just that we're like flawed creatures, but we, we have needs, right, and the world does not perfectly satisfy our needs, so we're always gonna have to solve those kinds of problems together, right? So you could think of these concepts, kind of like keys that help us to unlock those problems. So, um, and I'm borrowing this idea of concepts as solutions to problems, by the way, from, um, although I think she would have very strong disagreements with how I think of this Christine Cos guard's idea that normative concepts are solutions to practical problems. So imagine that taking that idea further, just let's think of this lock and key analogy as, right, normative concepts are like keys that help to unlock practical problems, right? Now. I think that with this other tradition in, in moral and political philosophy, um, we're in a kind of fundamental disagreement that goes back quite a long time about the purpose of normative theory. You can see it in Plato and Aristotle. Uh, Aristotle has a really nice, uh, phrase in book two of the Nicomachean Ethics where he says, um, We study ethics in order to become good, and then the next, the next phrase that he adds, which I wouldn't go so far as to say is, otherwise there are some, it's translated usually as something like, otherwise there would be no point. Um. So who is, uh, it seems pretty likely that what he's contrasting his view with in ethics is Plato's view that there's kind of an a temporal, universal, you know, uh, idea, you know, there are forms of right and wrong, right? And I, and, and, uh, Jerry Cohen, you know, will refer to Plato and Platonic views, you know, there's kind of moral Platonism or moral realism as you referred to it earlier, this kind of view that, um, The facts about what's right and wrong just have nothing to do with solving practical problems. For Aristotle, the problem is to become good. How do we become good, right? How do we live well? That's what moral theory for him is supposed to help us to do. So now, because I'm, because there is this kind of fundamental disagreement between roughly people who are more in Plato's camp and more in Aristotle's camp, which is not to suggest I'm like an Aristotelian and I'm not a virtue ethicist or something like that, just, I agree with Aristotle to that extent, um. I don't think you can usually uh You can't usually approach um fundamental disagreements about how to do philosophy head on. So what I instead try to do is I try to build up the best version of this other way of thinking about Moral and political philosophy, what would it mean to really develop a theory of how moral and political philosophy should incorporate empirical research, and what do we get out of it? What are the nice things that you get out of it in the end? And then we kind of see if the, the proof is kind of in the pudding. Is this something that, you know, you like, if you're someone who's kind of neutral between these two perspectives. OK, so going back to the lock and key. Again, this is not meant to be a knockdown argument, but just as a suggestive idea that I bring in throughout the book, kind of like a red thread running throughout each chapter. Imagine if you had people who were locksmiths developing keys that helped to unlock. Locks, right? And they were doing a better job, you know, the first lock was not particularly good or not very strong, so we do some refinements here and there, and we think about different locks and the kinds of different kinds of keys that we need to develop. But what if those locksmiths got really obsessed with the practice of just making keys for the sake of making keys, without attention to the fact that keys are supposed to open locks, right? So they keep developing these more and more intricate, you know, beautiful keys, um. You know, careful attention to the teeth of the key and kind of ornate design of the handle, right? Well, that might be a really nice thing on its own, but it seems like things have gone off the rails in some respect, right? Because the purpose of a key is to open a lock. So that's, so the thought is that moral and political philosophy should remain grounded in the idea that what we're trying to do is open, is open locks. We're trying to develop keys for opening locks and um. That aim, um, is something that, um, we can lose sight of if we do philosophy in a way that's not tethered in any respect to the solution of practical problems.

24:40 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh, SO in the book you talk about 5 different dimensions of fruitfulness of, uh, normative concepts and the norms, theories and principles that fall under them, and you, uh, talk about motivation, fruitfulness, prevention, fruitfulness, resilience, fruitfulness, consensus, fruitfulness, and. Guidance, fruitfulness. So, uh, could you tell us about them and I mean, what do each of them, uh, refer to exactly? Yeah,

25:11 Matthew Lindauer: sure, great. So this is This is trying to explore the contours of this idea that moral and political uh concepts help us to solve practical problems, because that could mean you can solve practical problems in many different ways, right? So, um, right, you've just, you've just mentioned the dimensions of fruitfulness that, and there might be others, I've tried to be as exhaustive as possible, but I would love to find out that there are other dimensions of fruitfulness, um, so motivational fruitfulness is, as you suggested, um, So when we think about concepts and then we get more specific, we focus on what roles, but also like contemporary cognitive scientists like Jake Quilty Dunn would, would, would point to as like conceptions of concepts. It's like specifications of the material that we refer to that's organized by a concept, so. Rawls' conception of justice is justice as fairness, right, and includes the difference principle, so these are more specific ideas. So even when two people, so Rawls and Nozick are both talking about justice or Rawls and Jerry Cohen, they think that different conceptions of justice are more choice worthy than the others, right? And sometimes the reasons he gives have to do with things like motivational fruitfulness or consensus fruitfulness, so. So, now, when we evaluate things like principles of justice, norms, right, theories, uh, arguments also as what I call conception delivery delivery devices, so they help, they help to motivate a conception, um, we can ask questions along these five dimensions. So the first is motivational fruitfulness. That's how will people be motivated to act, right? When they internalize this concept. So 11 way into this, this dimension is to think about the self-effacing this objection to consequentialism. Um, SO this objection says that, um. If people internalize the consequentialist principle, which is, you know, acts are roughly just, um, to, to put it briefly, um, an act is right or wrong depending on whether or not it maximizes overall good consequences, and then of course utilitarians are consequentialists who max who measure the consequences in terms of utility and we have other versions, right? OK, so the, the objection goes. If people internalize the consequentialist principle, they will not do a good job at meeting that principle's own end, at, at bringing about good consequences for various reasons, you know, people are self-interested, they're bad at calculating, you know, long term consequences and so on, right? Now. I'm not taking a stand on whether that's a good objection to consequentialism. What I'm pointing out is that that objection presupposes that it matters what happens when people internalize a theory. You could just turn around and say, it doesn't, right, uh, what happens when people internalize the theory and whether the theory is true or false, are just, they're just at right angles, right? But people making that object that objection are committed. To something like motivational fruitfulness mattering in the evaluation of a theory. Um, NOW another really interesting literature that I've done a lot of work in, uh, where motivate where what I call motivational fruitfulness comes up is the literature on our duties to the global poor, the duties of affluent people, uh, in, you know, Western societies primarily to the global poor. So there's this debate between On the one hand, Peter Singer and on the other hand, theorists like Alison Jagger and Thomas Pogey about how to understand our duties to the global poor. Singer argues, you remember this shallow pond argument, right? That, um, we can extract very strong duties. Merely from the idea that we ought to help people in need, right, in serious need, when it's at little cost to ourselves, that it would be morally monstrous not to help a child who's drowning in front of us, right? Help them out of the shallow pond, if all it meant was that we might miss a job interview, you know, might lose out on getting a higher paying job or ruin our clothes, as, you know, different versions of this case, so. So if that's true, if we think that a person has to take on this kind of cost to save a life, right, then we need to take on at least that much cost to save lives all the time, and we can do that quite easily through giving to effective charities. That's the argument in a nutshell. Other theorists like Jagger and Poggy, um, focus on the idea that, well, it's not as if the global poor were just kind of in the pond when Westerners came along. It's we're kind of more like people who, who either push the child into the pond or whose ancestors pushed the child into the pond, right? And so we have a different kind of duty, not a duty merely to help, but we've in some sense violated some sort of duty not to harm, a negative duty, as opposed to a positive duty, as it's put. OK. Now. There are difficulties with that view because just the ordinary citizen with all their own problems of, of Western societies, you know, which are also facing kind of authoritarian backlash, it's not clear that, you know, there's such a strong causal tie between things that I do or other people do maybe who are less less advantaged, um, and global systems like global, you know, global poverty or. The history of colonialism or something like that, right?

30:35 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, in that, in that specific case it's not even clear that the vast majority of the population were part of, uh, the colonizer countries even played any role in that or uh gained anything, anything from it, right, it was mostly the elites, so.

30:54 Matthew Lindauer: Precisely. So there might be variation of responsibility depending on how much your, how much your current advantages depend on a history of wrongs and exploitation and things like that. Um, MY colleague Christian Barry and my, um, yeah, sadly departed, um, friend and colleague Gerhard Overlin did a lot of work on enabling harm as a distinct kind of causal relation to global poverty that we might be in, and we did some empirical work together a paper years ago exploring that, but. So, back to motivational fruitfulness, in that literature on global poverty, people didn't just say, well, it doesn't matter whether these appeals, these ways of arguing for our duties to the global poor work in practice. Actually, in that literature, people like Judith Lichtenberg, Holly Lawford Smith, Poggy himself, they made claims about what I'm calling motivational fruitfulness. What will be more motivating? Uh, SO Judith Lichtenberg puts it really nicely. She says that there might be a paradox of positive and negative duties, that on the one hand, The singer style argument might be more widely accepted, um, um, because it's, you know, it doesn't implicate us in guilt for, you know, large scale global, global atrocities and problems, um. And we can all see, you know, I mean, these ideas of, you know, children in, in ponds and drowning in wells go back to Confucius and other, other thinkers who mentioned similar examples, so, it's something that motivates people. Um, ON the other hand, it might be following empirical work on what's called the act omission distinction or doing allowing distinction, that people are more motivated, if they accept that they have done something wrong, they'll be right, you know, if you, if you tell me, look, you knocked over this kid and now he's in the pond. As opposed to shouting at a bystander across the way, look, this child's drowning. I, I really have the duty to do something about it, right? So, um, so that's, those are empirical predictions about what will motivate people and what will be widely accepted. And I wanted to say these people were committed to something like motivational fruitfulness mattering, um, to questions about what our duties actually are. Um, AND so that that's, that's another area, and I've done a bunch of work in it that we might talk about later. Um, SURE, so just to go through the other, if you want me to go through the other dimensions more quickly,

33:05 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, yeah, yes, yes, please,

33:07 Matthew Lindauer: yeah. Yeah, so the prevention fruitfulness is just the flip side. It's not how people will act, but it's how they'll be prevented from acting when they internalize moral and political concepts, and there's really interesting work by people like Keith Payne and Cordelia Fine and Jeannette Kennett showing that. Contrary to the views of people like Jonathan Haidt, it's not the case that moral reasoning is just always kind of a post hoc post hoc rationalization of like what we thought anyway or what what our feelings told us. Um, ACTUALLY thinking in moral terms can help us to proactively head off bias and prejudice in our own, in our own hearts. We're actually able to use moral concepts, um. It's like a commitment to egalitarianism to prevent ourselves from, from doing the wrong thing by our own lights, and that's, that's what I would think of as prevention fruitfulness. Um, A third category is what I call consensus fruitfulness, which is along the lines of Rawls' late project in political liberalism. It's the thought that. Look, we live in multi multicultural, multiracial democracies, we have, you know, hope, you know, we hopefully are committed to that, many, most of us are, I hope, uh, and we wanna think about how we can converge on ideas of justice, and, you know, how our society should look in like a less abstract sense, um, despite the fact that we disagree about like huge questions like, does God exist, and what is God like, and how many gods are there, and, you know, How, what food should I eat, you know, for ethical reasons, we disagree about all kinds of first order religious, spiritual, ethical questions. Nonetheless, we have to live together. Rawls offers justice as fairness as a model for something that people with all these diverse, um, other commitments could come together on as an idea of justice in a liberal democracy in our time and then, uh, colleagues like my some of my work with Justin Brunner explores whether Rawls' predictions about whether his conception of justice really is the kind of thing that people tend to agree on most is, is right and. We, we find that, you know, while we applaud Rawls' commitment to empirical research, uh, in terms of consensus fruitfulness, some of his predictions don't bear out. Um, AND then the last two dimensions are. Guidance fruitfulness, this is sort of like action guidance, like does the theory provide helpful guidance to agents looking for what to do to solve practical problems. And then the, the other one is called resilience fruitfulness, which uh, uh, is the idea of it's certainly related to the other dimensions, but the idea of like what conceptions help us to fight back best against problematic social phenomena, and I'm, I'm, I'm drawing on work by Sally Hasslinger on the idea that our conceptions of gender and race should not just be like. Reflecting true facts about gender and race, but should actually help us to address, she says, um, misogyny and racism and things like transphobia, um, and so that would be the kind of thing, um, that we, I, that I'm interested in in this this other dimension, resilience, fruitfulness. Does this conception of justice or or of these other partly normative, partly descriptive concepts like gender and race actually help us to fight back against things that are already problematic in our societies.

36:21 Ricardo Lopes: So, uh, I mean we're going to get into the objections and challenges to your theory of normative fruitfulness that you also tackle in the book, but just before that, is the theory of normative fruitfulness that you explore or develop in your book domain specific to the normative or could it be extended to non-normative concepts?

36:48 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, so, so I'd, I'd love for the theory to be domain general, um, but I do the kind of classic philosopher thing, and I actually think that this is more accurate of saying, um, I really only think that um the argument applies to this domain of normative concepts and again particularly to moral and political concepts that So if you think about, you know, motivating the right kinds of action, preventing the wrong kinds of action, generating consensus, it's not really clear that a scientific concept like electron or planet is really responsible for doing those kinds of things. And so, part of what this is, is an intervention in this literature, uh, what's called conceptual engineering, which has arisen in the last 10 or 15 years, and the idea there is that we should be thinking about. You know, Hess Lager is a big figure in this, uh, as well as others, but we should be thinking about how we should revise our concepts to better serve certain kinds of practical purposes in the world, um, and I think that that literature has been too broad. It's in general, it's tended to focus on concepts, you know, on mass and not really distinguish between different types of concepts, and when you think about those kinds of dimensions of fruitfulness, it really seems like, you know, gender and race. Serve very different kinds of roles and are um responsible for um addressing practical problems that concepts like planet or electron or sex hormone or intelligence, you know, concepts in both the natural sciences and social sciences just don't have very much to do with. Um, I like in the book to go through this kind of joke example of when the International Astronomical Union revised the definition of planet, um, there were, you know, I think it's 2002, right, it wound up, um, Uh, changing the status of Pluto famously from a canonical planet to a dwarf planet, right? Like, my kids have a book here about when Pluto gets the call, it's really funny, right? But there were these protests, but they weren't real. I have photos from them, and even the son of the guy of Clyde Tombaugh who discovered Pluto is there having fun. Nobody's actually saying that ordinary, you know, citizens should get to decide what The concept of planet is, um, the only people who thought that actually were members of the Illinois State Senate who actually tried to, um, they, they, they passed some kind of silly, silly, uh, attempted legislation, and, and the reason was that, uh, that uh, Pluto was the only planet discovered by an American. And uh if you're laughing, uh, yeah, if you're laughing as I am, so that's the wrong kind of reason to oppose the revision to a concept like planet, right? And these protests are, are fake protests, they're fun protests, they're not real protests like no kings or something, um, because it's really not our place as non-experts about planets to decide the concept of planet, but notice that. For moral and political concepts, there is a sense in which ordinary people have to be able to understand and use them for them to serve their proper purposes in solving problems. Take the concept of blame, right? Like if, uh, you know, imagine I blame you for something that you just can't, you just have no understanding of what I'm blaming you for, right? There's a kind of performance error in doing that because the point of the concept of blame. People like Miranda Ficker would say is to help to, you know, align our moral understandings to repair relationships, to, you know, give rise to certain kinds of, uh, reparative emotions and statements and things like that, right? That doesn't happen if the concept of blame is just kind of completely unintelligible to ordinary people. So, these are some of the reasons why I think, and I have, you know, the second chapter of the book really treats this in much more, um, you know, sustained detail, but these are some reasons to think that, um, The the theory is domain specific to the normative. The kinds of practical problems and practical desiderata that normative concepts are, um, responsible for, you know, um, addressing, um, are just very, very different from the kinds of, um, desiderata that other kinds of concepts discussed in the conceptual engineering literature, um, relate to.

41:00 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So let's, uh, talk about the challenges and objections. I mean, the, the first one you tackle in your book. Uh, HAS to do with, uh, I mean, it, it, it would accuse your theory of being committed to an implausible form of moral relativism. So explain that objection and then, uh, what your reply would be.

41:26 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, yeah, thanks. Um, SO, Some people might be troubled by the thought that when we focus on. The fruitfulness of normative concepts, we're thinking about whether these concepts help us to solve practical problems and so as problems change, as conditions change, as people and cultures change, different concepts might be more or less fruitful over time and across space, right, in different contexts, right? So that might, does that imply some kind of, oh, you know, scary form of relativism where certain things are right for you and certain things are wrong for me, um. And I, I have a different kind of orientation than people who are so worried about moderate forms of relativism, um, you know, uh, So, so I'll say, I think we might, we might get to this a little bit later, um, but basically I see this as a feature rather than a bug of the theory. Um, IN particular, as you mentioned, uh, you, you kind of alluded to this earlier, um, when you, when you mentioned Owen Flanagan's work, um. If you think that normative concepts arise to solve practical problems in the times when they do, and, you know, even theorists who are quite committed to caring about justice, think that like Rawls talks about like, Justice, you know, liberal theories of justice arise in order to solve problems having to do with religious toleration, roughly, right? And he's still focused on that, and then in some ways that work though, winds up being not really that helpful for thinking about practical problems that we're addressing now, right? So it's a feature of the view that it gets to say, look, maybe some of these liberal ideas, uh, you know, religious toleration certainly very important, but strong ideas of private property in particular. ARE going to jar against problems like rad, you know, radical runaway economic inequality. We're gonna have, you know, potentially our first, you know, trillionaire on Earth, right? Billionaires have more and more power, ordinary people have less and less power, um, they're potentially devastating effects on labor, um, of, you know, new technologies, which, you know, that's an open question, um. We're certainly told that this is going to be so important, um, but, but, you know, related to this, um, Climate change is another one, right? Uh, CLIMATE change really is a hard problem to address. Matthew Feinberg has a lot of really great empirical work on how our current moral thinking is really almost the opposite of the kind of thing you would want, if you wanted to design agents to address a problem like climate change, right? It's like long term, it's hard to see the consequences, uh, it's hard to spell it out in terms of individual actions, it's structural, all these kinds of things. So, So I think that the theory helps to explain why we, we see conceptual change over time. It's also kind of culturally tolerant. It, it helps us to try to interpret practices, not in terms of, oh, there are those strange people over there doing different things, but to think about why this particular normative framework arose in a different kind of place. What were the kinds of practical problems that people were facing? What, what are the kind of facts on the ground that lead to this practice, that might help us to actually understand. Other people more rather than condemn, to borrow, you know, Spinoza's dictum to what we seek to understand rather than um condemn. Now the further, the last thing about that, that might, uh, allay people who are really worried about, you know, relativism, is that there's still the meta moral question. OK, so we have this, different things are potentially fruitful in different environments and times and places, but still, at least across space, you know, just across, across physical space, we still have the question, how do we interact with people globally, right? How do two people from two different cultures or two societies interact with one another, and that's not a question that can be addressed just by thinking about fruitfulness within one context. That's a meta moral question which is in some sense more similar to Rawls' last project in the Law of peoples. Um, IT'S designing, you know, solutions to kind of global problems, and again, his own solutions are not ones that I think, you know, now look that helpful, but he's still very attuned to this idea. That we should be using normative theory to try to solve practical problems. So that would lead to a kind of more pushing toward objectivity, at least across physical space, this meta moral problem, how do we have these global interactions? Of course, across time that things might change, um, that would be, it might be relative across time. Right,

45:55 Ricardo Lopes: uh, how about the objection that your theory would make morality overly concessive to people's moral failings?

46:04 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, so this is an objection that comes out of work from people like Jerry Cohen and David Estlund, that there's a kind of chilling effect of, you know, if you focus on, so if you say something like, um, Well, it would be a great thing if people gave a certain amount of their income to charity, but you know, people are just too selfish, like studies show, the classic studies show thing, studies show that people are just too selfish to be expected to do that. So therefore, they're not required morally to do that. That seems like, wait a second, you can't, that's, that's a circular argument, uh, you know, there's something, there's something at least deeply wrong with that way of reasoning, and I would say, well, sure, um, it's possible to try to use empirical results to downgrade our moral expectations, but we can oppose those kinds of arguments in just the way that I just did, we can point to flaws with moving from descriptive facts about people's moral limitations to facts about what they're morally required to do, um, and you know, there's a wide literature on the, um, The odd implies can principle and nearby principles that like, it's just a completely independent thing of like whether empirical research goes into our understanding of moral um theory, but notice that my focus is not on downgrading moral expectations. If anything, I think my research, especially on global poverty. Um, SUGGEST that rather than, um, conceding ground to our moral failings, we should be thinking about how to optimize people's moral behavior. What are the kinds of ways of appealing to people, giving people a little bit more credit than that, um, what kinds of ways of appealing to people with reasons and arguments and principles can actually generate the most cooperative and good behavior. So, in slogan form, I say the, the focus is on, uh, optimization, not concession.

47:54 Ricardo Lopes: And does your theory fail to take morality seriously enough, and uh what does it mean to take morality seriously enough?

48:04 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, so I'm, so this is a phrase from uh the book Taking Morality Seriously by David Enoch, and I, you know, I, for all the people I mentioned, I mean this, their work has been very, very interesting and and insightful, and I, even though I'm responding to it, I just want to say that. So, so this, uh, this, so Enoch's idea. Is that, um, Moral realism, the idea that there's a kind of objective mind independent reality, is the only kind of meta-ethical theory that takes morality seriously, in the sense that it really responds, it really, um, reflects the strength of conviction with which people, people arrive at moral, when they arrive at moral disagreements, the kind of strength of their conviction, right? So, You know, you and I disagree about whether strawberry ice cream or chocolate ice cream is better. It's like, well, Ricardo, you have what you want, I'll have, I'll have what I want, that's fine. But if we disagree about a moral topic, you know, David Young says, well, we're probably more likely to like dig in our heels and assert that only one of us can be right. And that kind of level of That shows that it's not really just a matter of taste for Enoch, um, it's, it's a matter of something that we at least are committed to thinking is objective, right? I'm right, you're wrong kind of stuff, right? So I have a few things to say about this, um. One is that It's not necessarily the case that the only way to take morality seriously is to dig in your heels in moral disagreements. Another thought is that being a moral person might involve trying to see others' perspectives in a kind of deep way and trying to think about where other people are coming from and maybe trying to locate reasons why we have different values, right? And why those different values might actually be justified to each of us given the kind of different backgrounds we have, what Rawls calls the burdens of judgment. Um, ALL kinds of facts that make different kinds of evidence look more and less appealing to, to each of us. So, I don't think that taking morality seriously necessarily means always digging in your heels, that's one thing, um. A further thing though, is that it's not necessarily the case that um. Just because you think that fruitfulness or pragmatic factors, for instance, are relevant to the assessment of moral and political concepts like justice, it's not necessarily the case that then when you're opposing an injustice or involved in a moral disagreement, you will be thinking about those kinds of meta-ethical facts at the time. Like I give an analogy to like a a a soccer player or a baseball player, let's let's do, let's do soccer, football, as, as people around the world call it, right? So there are rules in this game. Right? And of course, a soccer a given soccer player, right, um, uh, you know, like Lionel Messi or someone like that, um, they could be thinking, they could like get lost in thought and think, should the rules of soccer be different, right? Like how penalty time works or something. Should that be different? Would that be more responsive to the point of this game? Would that make this a better version of the game? And we know that the rules of games do change over time, so people do sometimes do this. But it's not as if when Messi is up there about to score a, you know, about to shoot a penalty kick, it's not like he's captured by this thought about whether or not the game of soccer is as it should be, whether or not it's as fruitful, you know, a game as it could be. And that's just true of social practices in general. Um, WE can think about things like, you know, should marriage, should we think about marriage differently? Should we think about friendship differently? Should we think about democracy differently? Without being demotivated from caring about sticking up for those things, or, you know, motivating ways, you know, defending those things in various ways in the moment, um. So it's not the case if take like someone like John Dewey, who is like a much more thoroughgoing pragmatist than me. He's more like the domain general kind of guy, right? Um, YOU know, someone's quite committed to racial democracy, and, you know, to to multiracial democracy and doing a lot of really important practical work. So, I think that, um, That idea that we can glean meta-ethics from facts about how people approach moral disagreements kind of elides this distinction between different levels of theoretical consideration. There's the, the internal point of view on the practice, and then of course we can take the borrowing HLA Hart's term. We could take the external point of view, and we could think, is this practice the right practice? Should it be reformed in various ways, so it's not incompatible with taking it seriously. It's actually, for me it's part of taking it seriously.

52:38 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, uh, OK, so let me just say because I, I could just not leave that unaddressed that, uh, when it comes to chocolate ice cream and strawberry ice cream, chocolate is clearly superior, so, and it's not a matter of taste, I mean, I'm willing to die on this hill, it's a matter of, uh, it's a matter of epistemology,

53:00 Matthew Lindauer: so, well, we, we happen to agree, but, um. You and my 4 year old son will be locked in a very long standing fundamental disagreement because he's a partisan of strawberry.

53:12 Ricardo Lopes: OK. So, uh, another objection then, uh, does your theory suggest the wrong kinds of reasons to act morally?

53:24 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, this is a related consideration, so, um. Again, like, you know, if someone is, uh, deciding whether to attend like a no kings protest or whether to donate some of their money to an effective charity to help. Children who are suffering from the effects of severe poverty, uh, is it the right kind of reason for them to act? Should they be thinking, well, Is my action, the kind of action that's informed by the most fruitful normative concepts or something like that, right? Does fruitfulness enter into that? So sometimes people make this kind of wrong kind of reason argument against various moral theories, not uniquely my own, but the idea is that the reasons that the agent acts on. ARE different from the kinds of the kind of fruitfulness-based reasons for which, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm thinking we should be thinking about whether this moral framework is a good one or whether this concept is a good one, right? And I, I, I just would go back to some of this, I addressed this question kind of similarly to the kind of Lionel Messi kind of example, right? So, Messi's reasons for scoring goals are very different from the reasons that he would bring to bear in thinking about whether soccer should be different or what team he should play for, you know, how, how teams should be funded. There are all kinds of meta questions about the structure of a practice that are different questions than the question, what reason should motivate within a practice, right? And that's, that distinction actually goes back to, uh, Rawls's famous paper 22 concepts of rules. Um, THAT are reasons within a practice can be distinct from reasons why we have the practice in the first place. So prooffulness applies at the level of why we have the concepts in the first place, and then those concepts and conceptions of them will have implications for what kinds of age, what kinds of reasons agents have when acting under those concepts, but they won't necessarily be. Just completely, you know, isomorphic, um, there's a 1 to 1 correlation between the reasons for retaining the practice and the reasons why agents act within that practice. Mhm.

55:28 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, AND another objection, uh, has to do with whether your theory makes us overly reluctant to engage in transformative experiences. I mean, in this particular case, what is, or what would be a transformative experience? And then tell us also about your reply to that objection.

55:50 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, this was an interesting point that an anonymous reviewer for OUP brought up, and I thought it was really worth, uh, including in the book. So thanks to that anonymous person. So, Transformative experiences, this is an idea coming from the work of a philosopher LA Paul. So So Paul is, is working, thinking about epistemology, thinking about the epistemology of rationality. She's thinking about certain kinds of choices in life that are transformative in two ways. One is epistemically transformative. They're such that we can't know what they will be like before engaging in them, uh. So once you have that experience, your life may be so different that you, you just can't know beforehand whether or not you would want to have that experience, um, or to, to get to the other side of that experience. Um, THEY'RE normatively transformative in the sense that they can reshape our values. Uh, SO it might be that once you have this experience, your values change deeply, and the core example of all this, she talks about, you know, uh, examples like, you know, whether to become a vampire, but the real kind of example that she's focused on is parenting, and the thought is like, Before you become a parent, you just like can't know what it'll be like to be a parent, um, and you also don't know like whether or not your values will change a lot in virtue of being a parent. I really, I, I hope mine have not changed that much. I hope that I've just learned more about my values, but this does keep me up at night sometimes, as, as a, as a proud, uh, papa. So, So, OK, so, um, what she says is that with transformative experiences, it's, it's kind of irrational to engage in them, uh, except for the fact that you should, uh, it could be rational to want to have the experience, but you can't know that it's rational to engage in it ahead of time. Like you can't know whether it's rational to become a parent in the sense that it will be, you know, it's the kind of thing that will make you happy afterwards, or, you know, that it will align with your values afterwards. It's only The thing that you have to focus on the rationality of is to make, making the choice of whether to have the transformative experience. So now, this person brought up that maybe my view, uh, in focusing on the fruitfulness of our concepts, um, would actually be opposed to our having transformative experiences because we, we assess the fruitfulness of those concepts in terms of our current values. And things that we currently know, and it's sort of like transformative experiences might lead us to have different values, like there might be different kinds of practical aims that we have, different kinds of fruitfulness considerations, right? So a couple of things about this. I wound up, you know, reading a lot of this literature, and what I think this is super, super interesting and important contribution to philosophy, I think that the extent to which experiences like parenting are that, that these are truly transformative in the two ways that she mentions are epistemically and normatively. I think that, I think it's overstated. Christer Bickvist in his, uh, in, in, in their, um. Book review of, of, uh, Transformative Experiences book brings up this nice point, and I, I really think it's true, just to my experience that, um, Yes, uh, becoming a parent is a very, very, very different kind of way of being, but on the other hand, like, if you've helped raise younger siblings, um, if you've like done a lot of like volunteering with like tutoring and teaching youths and like caring for younger people, it's not as if it's completely, it's not as if the experience of parenting is like completely epistemically. Inaccessible to you. It's different, but not so different that, you know, I mean, all experiences in some sense, give us, you know, you try a new type of sandwich, that shouldn't be a transformative experience, so it has to be radically different. I don't think that parenting is necessary, this quintessential example necessarily fits, and It's not also obvious that our values change necessarily so much, and, you know, the same kinds of considerations that go into assessing whether your values pre or post-parent are the right ones to have, just to like, I don't know, sometimes I'm like, wow, I'm focusing too much on my kids and not enough on global poverty or something like that, and I can like hold myself to account about that. Much in the same way as I would have held myself to account as like a 20 year old single person, I would be like, wow, like, you know, you're spending a lot of money on like, this new pair of shoes, like, What's up with that? There are, there are similar kinds of normative reasoning that you could give. So I think that that's one way of kind of Dampening the critique. Um, ANOTHER thing to point out, this is maybe less fun, so I put it at the end, but, uh, it's just that like the fact of normative that transformative experiences exist insofar as it's a problem for the fruitfulness theory, um, it's a problem for any of you that says that we should revise our concepts on the, on, you know, that, that, that sometimes we should think about how to revise our concepts. So any conceptual engineering kind of view faces this challenge. Um, SO it's not like it's a unique problem for my view, and it, it's sort of strange to think that there could never be circumstances under which we try to change our concepts. Um, THE last thing is just that the transformative experiences view is really focused on individuals, and I'm thinking about systems of thought and the kinds of concepts that people use together to solve practical problems. I think that we do a lot less of that kind of like radical conceptual transformation. As collectives, moral changes more gradual at the collective level and more of a piece with what came before, um, so that's, that's another thing, there might be a kind of lack of disanalogy between the level of analysis for transformative experiences and fruitfulness.

1:01:21 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so, uh, earlier we've already talked a little bit about the relevance of empirical research to moral and political philosophy, but another objection you address in your book, uh, asks whether, uh, you give us an overly narrow view of that. I mean, what is your reply to it?

1:01:44 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, so this was meant to be, yeah, this is a good question. So, it might seem that I'm saying that fruitfulness kinds of considerations are the only place where empirical research, you know, comes into play for philosophy or moral and political philosophy, and that's just, that's just not what I mean to say. I'm, I'm focusing on this kind of what I think is like a novel argument for why empirical research is part of the philosophical enterprise in moral and political philosophy. Um, BUT it's not as if other kinds of approaches are thereby taken off the table. Um, AND I think we just have to think very carefully about when and where empirical research is relevant. So in particular, like we mentioned Josh Knobe's kind of view, and he was kind of in this article, experimental philosophy is cognitive science, um, he's articulating the idea that a lot of work in experimental philosophy, um, is best understood as not really focusing on intuitions but focusing on. Understanding the psychological processes that underlie philosophical judgments, what makes a given theory more appealing to someone else, someone or a principle or a view appealing to some people and not others? What are the psychological processes that help to explain that? That's what he thinks of a lot of work in experimental philosophy is doing, and I, I think that that's very, very, uh, plausible and interesting, um, and looking at these kinds of psychological processes using. Scientific methods, it's just something that I'm completely in favor of. It might even also bear on fruitfulness considerations, right? So if you find out that psychological processes, um, are active in underpinning a certain philosophical theory. Where those processes tend to lead to a lot of harm in the world, then that might be actually a reason to, um, uh, to actually try to avoid endorsing that theory. It might be a reason against that theory because it tends to involve psychological processes that are kind of problematic, either morally or epistemically, um, so it's not as if these different kinds of projects are always at right angles, but I, I wanna be ecumenical, let 1000 flowers bloom, um, kind of person, um. But it's just to say that I think that it's also really important to articulate this way in which, um, Empirical research kind of can deeply inform our answers to certain kinds of questions in moral and political theory.

1:04:04 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so let's also talk about the implications that your theory of conceptual fruit fruitfulness might have here or normative fruitfulness, sorry, it might have here. So, uh, we've already ended up talking a little bit about some of them earlier, but perhaps you might want to add a few points. So earlier when we talked about the five dimensions of fruitfulness, uh, we explored motivation, fruitfulness, but, uh, I mean, apart from what you've already said, are there any other implications for the nature of moral motivation and how we approach it or not?

1:04:42 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, so, so I do think, um, some things that I didn't say, although that might have come up in people's minds, um, when I was going through some of that stuff. So, a lot of the literature on the nature of moral motivation at the time when I started doing this work in graduate school. Really seem to be focused on this idea that if you want to motivate people to do good, you have to hit them over the head with emotional appeals like picture of one child in poverty, this famous, what are called the Roia studies in the, in the, in the, in the industry, studies by Deborah Small and colleagues where the most motivating thing. Is a picture of a single child, Roia, who's living in poverty, right? Um, AND then actually appealing to rationality, not only is ineffective in those studies but is decreases motivation compared to, so if you pair the emotional appeal, Rokia's suffering this picture of her with information about other children who are suffering, you actually get less in terms of donations than if you just talk about her. So that seems to, that seems to suggest that not only is rationality kind of motivationally impotent, but it's like, it's like harmful. You should avoid anything in terms of you know, making any kind of appeals to people's rationality, if you want them to be pro-social in this way. And other people picked this up, and there was, you know, at the time, there's a lot of work coming out of people like Jonathan Haidt, suggesting that really rationality is not going to play a big role in moral judgment or moral motivation. OK, so, As a philosopher and as a, a hopeful philosophy grad student getting into psychology and empirical research, I thought, hold on a second, it's not the case that the only kinds of appeals of rationality are, you know, statistical information about other children who are in poverty. That's, that's one kind of, you know, data you could provide, but As someone who, you know, my values had been heavily affected by like reading work by people like Peter Singer and John Rawls and Karl Marx and all kinds of other philosophers, I, I thought, well, there's another kind of appeal to rationality, philosophical argument, and maybe it has a different motivational profile, at least in some circumstances, than, um, than, you know, presenting statistical, you know, data about statistical victims, as it's called, unfortunate term, because these are real people, um. So, when we ran the study, the, the striking thing is that it's not as if all arguments motivate, but well designed arguments that really address people's reasons, uh, in terms of, you know, how to think about a practical problem can actually be as motivating as, as these kind of very powerful Roia style single child appeals, and that's what we found in this, in this, uh, this first paper in. Published in judgment and decision making. Um, SO that's a case study in motivational fruitfulness, and then that literature really took off and other people, I had this, you know, kind of, there's some debates about this, but the real thing that's coming out of a lot of work and there's recently, you know, this argument contest study that's kind of, uh, That that's been done by uh Kirsten Brody and Eric Schwitz Gable and others found also that, you know, many arguments can motivate people to give more and, and looked at what are the factors about these arguments, um, arguments, some arguments can actually motivate, even, even though, um, there's a, there's a paper by Chris McVeigh, uh, and colleagues, you know, suggesting that narratives are more, you know, more motivationally. Uh, YOU know, efficacious than arguments. Well, I never said that arguments are the most motivating thing always, but strikingly they find that some arguments can be as motivating as the narratives in their paper. So this is, this is the idea, it's that, um, we should be thinking more about ways in which arguments can motivate prosocial behavior, and some of the reasons I didn't mention yet are really worth thinking about. So, one is that if you. If I show you a picture of a child suffering, that might motivate you once, but if I show you it tomorrow, you might say, I can't, I can't just keep seeing these images, right? And there, there are also concerns about, you know, what's sometimes referred to, you know, colloquial poverty porn and things like this, right? Like, we're kind of like exploiting the images of people suffering in order to help them, and that's maybe that's problematic, there's a thought about that at least. Um, IF I change your mind. If I get you to see the problem differently and to do careful reasoning, right, about whether or not you are consistent in your values, and that changes something about you with regard to some, you know, lifestyle choice or, or how you address global problems, whether you go to protests or whatever it is, um, that may be more enduring and I have a, a kind of project in the works with some colleagues, um, looking at whether I can empirically support that claim, but I do think at least. Anecdotally, and knowing people who have been moved to change their attitudes and behaviors by philosophy that it can be much more lasting than just appealing to their emotions in a kind of one, in a kind of one-off, uh, one-off shot. So, these are some reasons to think about, uh, the other thing is just that I think that um, In in the politics of my country, like if you think about the Democratic Party, very often Democrats are like focusing on like the one big critique of like the last campaign was like we focus so much on not being Trump that we didn't really stand for very much in particular. I think that politicians, you know, even though Trump isn't really making arguments, there's this thought of he's willing to talk to anyone, like he went on the Joe Rogan show and I'm, I'm not gonna like bear on like whether. So and so should have gone on Joe Rogan. Bernie Sanders had a different view of this, right? Um. People like to think that there are arguments behind what they believe, and they like to think that the people who are trying to convince them of things take seriously their agency. There's some prior research showing that if you give people bad arguments for good conclusions, they rebel against it. They, they think that that's all you've got. So I think that I want my research to be part of a, of a trend of actually trying to use philosophy and careful argumentation, even in politics. It's not the only thing that we should use again. But when we fail to engage people as reasoning beings, I think that we, we lose out on convincing people and showing that we have integrity and all, and all kinds of goods. Yeah,

1:10:54 Ricardo Lopes: uh, so when it comes to the duties of the global affluent to the global poor, is there anything you'd like to add to what you've already said earlier or?

1:11:05 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, I mean this, this work is kind of, you know, in an emerging literature, so I'd encourage people to, you know, check out some of this stuff, but I, I think that, you know, one thing that's striking is that many of the arguments that people thought would not be motivating have been replicated across studies showing that they are quite motivating, these arguments that actually Not so much that we are doing harm to people in the global South, like, like fit like the way you like push a child in the pond, but more, more kind of, um, diffusely that we participate in systems that cause a lot of harm, and that that generates certain kinds of duties. That's not the kind of thing that people feel so guilty about that they are not motivated to act, and So we find that empirically in some of our work that people are actually receptive to these kinds of arguments, um, that it's not merely and that's not merely explainable in terms of politics or religiosity or something like that, um, but you know, if you get involved in any kind of, you know, political spaces, you'll find lots of people who have that kind of view, and it's kind of their motivating view. So I hope that, you know, we can kind of give a rational and scientific anchor to certain things that if we just pay attention to what, you know, people who are motivated to act, um, what they're motivated by, that would be a good thing. Um, SO I, you know, just one like thing on, on that is like a lot of research that focuses on like moral exemplars and why people are moral focus on like extraordinary acts of altruism, like the person who jumps to save someone. Who falls on the subway, or the person who donates, you know, a kidney to a stranger, to a stranger, or a person who donates like almost all of their income to charity and, you know, works as it works in this like, you know, very undesirable, higher earning job and donates all their money, you know, hardcore effective altruist kind of earn to give type person. So, I'm not saying that those are, those are, those can be wonderful things depending on how we cash out the details, um. Um, BUT what about the woman in the polka dot dress who like stands up to ice, you know, in that famous photo, like after work. Uh, WHAT about, you know, all of the people who do all kinds of socially important work. We should be thinking about what kinds of values and, and, and reasons and, and. Moral frameworks motivate those people too, it shouldn't just be about a very small segment of the most individualized, atomized moral agency. We should really be doing, and I think that that's what a lot of, a lot of my findings support is the idea that people can be motivated by concerns of, of justice, and they can be motivated by these concerns for rational reasons.

1:13:36 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, HOW about the nature of justice in diverse multicultural societies? I mean, what kinds of implications would your theory of normative fruitfulness have?

1:13:50 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, thanks. So, um, Well, so Rawls thought that his conception of justice, justice as fairness, would be kind of like the most chosen kind of conception of justice among people who divert, you know, people who have, you know, different religious views and who are from very different backgrounds. And you know, again, I, I think that there's a lot of value in caring about what people can converge on, you know, thinking about justice again as something that arises for human beings because we need to solve these practical problems together. But it turns out that when we, when you look at the literature, and there's a lot of recent work on this too, some of which I've done with colleagues and a lot of other great stuff too, um, it turns out that Rawls' predictions probably were not quite right. It's not the case that people tend to choose the difference principle, in particular as the principle that regulates social and economic equal inequalities. This is the, for people who are not familiar, it's the principle that, um. Social and economic inequalities can only be justified if they're of maximum possible benefit to the worst off. So, you know, doctors making more than gardeners is fine because it lifts, you know, you get more doctors, it creates more supply of doctors, and so people are better off, you know, um, hedge fund managers, maybe that's cut out by the, the difference but so we have to tax them a bit because it's not raising the worst off position, maybe it's lowering the. Worst position in many cases. OK, so value to that, but actually it turns out that something like um and Interestingly, Rawls in his last book, Justice as Fairness or Restatement seems to anticipate this. Um, THERE'S this version of, um, of utilitarianism called, uh, restrict, uh, restricted utilitarianism, which says that, um, there should be a floor below which no one falls, um, but once we achieve that floor, we can maximize utility, taking into account diminishing marginal utilities. It's not like we have runaway inequality. Because more and more at the top does not correspond to generating more utility, right? Every additional dollar in Jeff Bezos' pocket goes a lot less far than additional dollars for, you know, the homeless person, you know, in, in Brooklyn, let's say. Um, SO. That principle seems to garner more support across a wide range of studies. There's a replication in Japan recently. Um, ALSO, Rawls didn't really consider the question, so he talks about what would people choose from the original position, right? And using the original position as this idea, you know, we don't know what religion we're a member of, what race we are, whether we're a man or woman or non-binary, whatever else, right? Um. And then we, then we would all converge on justice as fairness and the difference principle. He doesn't ask the question, well, would we all converge on the original position as a way of choosing principles at the meta level, right? He never asks the question of convergence, and that's something that, um, in a paper in Phil studies with uh Justin Brunner, we explored, and it turns out that people tend to like something more like a Smithian impartial spectator. As a method for choosing principles of justice more than the Rawlsian original position, um, and you know, some of this work really, I am in many ways, as, you know, I'm a hardcore Rolls and in some ways, there's a lot that I've gotten out of this person's thought, and I think I've taken it in some directions that, you know, I wish I'd had the chance to talk to him, uh, about this, um, but, uh, it, it really revised my views to see that, you know, replicated studies are showing that many of Ross's predictions about what people would choose under different conditions just seem not to. Come out and people are being really careful to try to make the experimental conditions approximate the kinds of conditions of choice. It's not just as if a Rawls would be able to get off the hook very easily and be like, well, this is a You know, these are, you know, this is just a hypothetical thought experiment. The real world is much more messy, you can't control for these factors. People have really tried to control for the kinds of factors that someone would point to in trying to make that kind of defense work, and it doesn't look good. So, um, this is a way in which actually the empirical research has really shaped things that I personally think are, you know, are right in moral and political space.

1:18:01 Ricardo Lopes: Right. So one final question then, do you think that your theory of normative fruitfulness could be brought together with other more traditional approaches in moral and political philosophy?

1:18:17 Matthew Lindauer: Yeah, thanks for this question. So I think it's really important to, to think about this. Where does fruitfulness. Come in. So I don't think that um we should be taking like bad arguments or bad the theories that we know are bad on theoretical grounds and then seeing what they produce in the world, kind of like a noble lie style, fruitfulness-based analysis, right? And you know, oh, it turns out that this generates good results and that's, that's not what I'm saying, um. Where I think fruitfulness tends to come in, where our focus is when we're locked in a kind of theoretical gridlock about which approaches are the best ones on purely theoretical grounds, then we should examine these kinds of questions about fruitfulness. Like take something that's already well supported on theoretical grounds. Then these kind of fruitfulness considerations, these dimensions are additional theoretical virtues that you can bring to bear on the theory. So we never look to the fruitfulness of, and so that means that there's a lot of traditional philosophical work to be done in constructing the theories, um, and you know, maybe empirical work goes into that too, like, you know, looking at which intuitions support the theory. There's a lot of, a lot of additional, there's a lot of remaining work to be done. Um, JUST in constructing theories before we engage in fruitfulness-based analysis, and then there are questions about how the reflective equilibrium works when we move between fruitfulness and theory revision or theory construction. Um, SO I hope that, uh, the view is, is also, you know, going, not going to trouble people who want to do traditional moral and political philosophy, which I do actually quite a lot of myself, um, the thought is to try to Develop a theory that gives us a compelling account of how science can be relevant to ethics without overstepping the kind of bounds which, you know, also pointing out ways in which philosophy is partly independent. It's not just completely swamped by scientific research. These things have to be brought together, you know, bring the lab and the armchair together in a way that's going to generate the most defensible theories overall.

1:20:18 Ricardo Lopes: Great, so the book is again the fruitfulness of normative concepts, so we'll be leaving a link to it in the description of the interview. And Doctor Lindauer, just before we go, would you like to tell people where they can find you and your work on the internet?

1:20:34 Matthew Lindauer: Oh, sure. And yeah, thanks so much for having me. Um, SO, my website is Matthew Lindauer.com. Um, MY book is available on the Oxford University Press website and I'm also on Blue Sky, uh, primarily. So yeah, uh, thanks so much.

1:20:50 Ricardo Lopes: No, thank you so much for doing this. It's been a great pleasure to talk with you.

1:20:54 Matthew Lindauer: I, I enjoyed it very much. Thank you. Great to meet you. Take care.

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