I’m starting to think the culture wars could use some ethics of actual wars. Obviously there are disanalogies. There is no such thing as a uniformed culture warrior, for instance, and states are typically the primary actors in culture wars. But insofar as people see themselves as combatants on crusades to wage battles against their enemies, many of the principles should apply. Many of the principles are just principles about moral conduct in any kind of human interpersonal conflict.

Take the most basic moral principles involved in the ethics of warfare. Proportionality states that the harm you cause on the road to victory cannot be disproportionate to the ends you seek. If your goal is to secure the return of three hostages taken by a hostile force, it is disproportionate to issue a nuclear threat, let alone a strike. Necessity states that you can resort to a harm to accomplish your objectives only if every less harmful alternative is unavailable or known to be ineffective. For instance, if a soldier facing a lethal threat from someone driving a car at them from 100m away can simply get out of the way, then he must do so rather than resort to shooting the driver. While shooting the driver might be a proportionate act of self-defense, it is not necessary.

Then there are the issues of the aims of warfare, of which the culture wars are a part. Strategically, war can have aggressive, defensive (including humanitarian), punitive, economic, or restorative aims. Only a subset of these have ethical justifications. And what kind of wars they are can determine what conduct can be ethical in those wars. Wars of self-defense and defense of others, for instance, permit more collateral damage to civilians than punitive wars. For instance, Finland in protecting itself from Soviet Invasion is permitted more leeway in collateral damage on Russian civilians in their responsive strikes than, say, the US is in invading Panama simply to punish its leader for crimes. Civilian deaths are not acceptable losses in punitive acts generally, as evidenced by the fact that we do not believe cops have a right to execute civilians in order to arrest a wanted fugitive, even if they do so unintentionally as a predictable side effect of their raid.

And finally, the ethics of war have principles concerning legitimate and illegitimate targets. Classically, combatants are the only legitimate targets, and civilians are not. Even those who challenge this distinction argue for alternative principles differentiating the legitimate from illegitimate. For instance, perhaps the distinction is whoever makes a significant material contribution to the war is also a proper target, so civilian workers in munitions factories count. Whatever the right principles, who counts as a legitimate and illegitimate target greatly affects, and is affected by, the other ethical principles, including proportionality and necessity. If a soldier is a legitimate target, then their death counts for less in a proportionality calculation than an illegitimate target, i.e., a civilian. The principle of necessity tells you who you must ultimately protect, the illegitimate targets, before you engage in a warring activity.

One of the features of classical just war theory that is helpful to consider in the context of today’s culture war is that the ethics of conduct in war is completely divorced from the ethics of the cause itself. This feature creates a symmetry between just and unjust sides with respect to how they are supposed to conduct themselves in their battles. You might be absolutely opposed to all matters DEI and affirmative action, and stake that as your primary cause in the culture war. Or you might be an ardent supporter of DEI initiatives. Regardless of which of these is the correct side, there are just and unjust ways of fighting the DEI battle common to both combatants. Supporters of DEI are not necessarily acting justly in all of their conduct if that turns out to be the just position, nor are opponents of it. This kind of symmetry makes room for legitimate moral criticism that is not simply another epicycle of the pro or anti-DEI fight.

The ethics of war in the context of a culture war means that you accept that action you take in fighting such a war has harmful effects on your enemies, and that those harmful effects must be evaluated relative to their ultimate aims. Let’s say your ultimate aim is to influence casting decisions in Hollywood in a manner you deem just. And let’s say your strategy is to dox the casting director of the latest Hollywood blockbuster you believe has a cast that is incompatible with your aim.

Does this act have a legitimate target? I don’t think so, but even if you disagree, having principles that determine whether people fall into one or another category shows that you have done due diligence and are on the side of morality in your culture war. But even after these questions are answered, there are questions of proportionality and necessity that you must answer. Is such a strategy proportionate to your aim, or is the risk of collateral damage too great? My view is that it isn’t, but if you disagree, how much harm to illegitimate targets are you willing to accept for aims of this kind, like to the casting director’s spouse or children, or parents?

These are hardly abstract issues in the context of culture war, and they are not exclusively meant to be moral constraints on the excesses of a particular side. Famously, during #MeToo and the height of Title IX investigations concerning on-campus sexual assault, there were plenty of activists who openly said that they were willing to accept many false positives, or shame and get fired men who are unjustly accused of sexual assault, to correct for the longstanding structural problem of underreported sexual assaults. This is precisely a claim about proportionality and acceptable collateral damage worth debating as being consistent or inconsistent with the ethics of warfare. Are we talking about defensive or punitive aims? Claims like the acceptability of false positives appeal to general principles you may not want to be committed to once you see the implications in the ethics of warfare. Let’s say Nation A has a history of unjust persecution resulting in millions of deaths over many, many years. They now respond to an attack by engaging in a war killing mostly illegitimate, innocent targets on the other side. Whether there is a justification to target current innocents on the enemy side on the basis of past moral violations of the allied side is a longstanding issue with repercussions across all kinds of wars.

Having absolutely no explicit ethical constraints or vocabulary to hold culture warriors responsible for their activities in the culture war leaves conduct entirely at the hands of informal mechanisms of shame and sanction. On the internet, it means it is entirely in the hands of mob justice. Even the actual mob, whether it is Italian, Chinese, Irish, or Russian, has an ethics of warfare that outlined sharp constraints on who counts as a civilian (illegitimate target) and what constituted violations of proportionality. In this respect, the culture wars of the internet are less moral than the mob.

I do not believe that we are going to converge on the correct principles of the ethics of the culture war, just like we have not converged on the correct principles of the ethics of war even after two thousand years of thinking about it. But I do think the ethics of war has had a constraining effect on war, even if it has been imperfect. It might not seem that way when egregious violations continue in all wars. But the historical record is unambiguous that introducing international standards of legitimate and illegitimate conduct in war has been an advance for humanitarianism. I hope the same can be true of the culture wars.

I’ll just end with a few speculative thoughts about some principles I think ought to be accepted as jus in bello constraints on the ethics of the culture war. I do think the combatant/noncombatant distinction is an important one, and that pundits, politicians, and polemicists in the culture wars have liability to some forms of legitimate attack in ways that mere members of groups implicated in culture wars do not. Back to the DEI example; a mere beneficiary of a DEI initiative is not the same as a public defender of DEI initiatives. A person seeking an abortion or a doctor performing one is not the same as a politician passing amendments.

And I think proportionality and necessity are wildly under-appreciated. If you strongly believe that it is an injustice for a certain person to play soccer on a certain team, you have to go through the least harmful means of securing that goal before you advance to the more harmful ones. And the ultimate harm you inflict cannot exceed the degree of injustice such a person playing soccer on that team inflicts on the world. The ethics of war crucially recognizes hierarchies of wrongs and injustices, otherwise nuking every last enemy no matter how small the violation is permitted. The culture war sometimes looks like it lacks this basic humanitarian feature.

Political philosophy has an engagement problem.

The genre of sci-fi is an enormously successful and impactful way for the general public to think about metaphysical and moral issues. Star Trek directly influenced the design of iPads, cell phones, and people today were prepared to discuss AI because of sci-fi. Even before artificial wombs have been invented, the theme of ectogenesis has been in literature for quite some time, in Brave New World, in The Matrix, and in a novel by Helen Sedgewick called The Growing Season.

Over the past few decades, political philosophers have generated an extraordinary range of proposals that radically rethink how societies could be organized: epistocracy, sortition-based systems like lottocracy, post-national governance, algorithmic coordination, and more.

These are very important proposals. The philosophers who advocate them have thought very seriously about their benefits and problems, and these should all be serious alternatives to all of the political arrangements that have populated this Earth before this time. Yet outside of academic circles, almost none of these ideas feel real. They do not get discussed by political pundits, they do not get discussed by journalists, students outside of graduate-level seminars in political philosophy do not get excited to get together to talk about them.

They’re not on TV, in movies, they’re just not in the culture. Science and even ethics has solved this problem with fiction. Science-fiction isn’t a genre that just describes new technologies, they ask people to imagine what it is like to inhabit worlds shaped by them. Religious theology and fantasy novels are not about tenets, but about what worlds are like inhabited by metaphysics entirely different from the manifest image people see every day. Their entertainment value is why people love talking about these issues.

This is what we need for political philosophy, a genre of short story, novels, screenplays, etc that is like sci-fi, poli-fi, only it is not fiction with a political theme, of which we have an abundance. It is a genre of fiction that treats political systems themselves as the primary speculative variable in a fictional narrative.

The Variable in Fiction

One way to see the gap between sci-fi and poli-fi is to ask a basic question of any piece of fiction:

What fundamental constraint is being altered?

Malcolm Gladwell famously thought that in fiction about law enforcement, or the procedural, you just alter two variables and you get the four major genres. The first variable is the moral quality of the justice system, the second variable is whether the hero is an insider or outsider.

1. The Western-there is no law and order. An outsider appears and imposes it on a lawless place. Jack Reacher is a Western.

2. The Southern-Law and order exists but is corrupt. It is selective; going after black people for instance and letting white people off the hook. A hero who is an outsider appears and fights the corruption from the outside. John Grisham novels are Southerns.

3. The Northern-Law and order and the justice system works as it is supposed to to deliver justice. The hero or heroes are all insider law enforcement doing a noble job. Law and Order the TV show is a Northern. You simply do good detective and prosecutorial work and the bad guys get put away.

4. The Eastern-Law and order exists but there are bad apples inside, and there is a whistleblower on the inside, and the insider takes out the trash.

In science fiction, what is materially possible is the variable altered. Physics and technology is the variable. Change one physical or technological thing and you get a piece of science fiction.

In fantasy, metaphysics is altered. You have immortality of certain kinds, magical spells or demon/dragon/human chimeras who have discontinuous memories.

Science fiction and fantasy are well-developed because they know what to keep fixed and what to vary to systematically explore the human consequences of that variable. Science fiction and fantasy involve protagonists that are more or less psychologically just like us in the actual world. They have goals just like us. Characters within the world who are navigating it against the backdrops and constraints that the physics, technology, or metaphysics, present as opportunities and obstacles. The alternative physics or metaphysics are experienced by characters as real and natural in the same way we take, say, representative democracy, or authoritarianism, or monarchy, as real and natural. These fictions don’t just introduce a new element, they build worlds where that element structures everything. And then those of us outside of those systems can let our imaginations fly about what it is like to be in such a world. That is the pleasure of sci-fi.

Political philosophy rarely gets this treatment. Political fiction critiques existing systems (dystopias), or dramatizes familiar structures like elections or corruption or dynasties.

Political philosophers should do something more ambitious, such as create and sustain a genre about radically different political systems and show people how it feels to be inside of them, the very kind of thing that engages people when they watch Sarah and John Connor confront the iterations of Skynet over the course of the last 40 years. We should invent Poli-Fi, and make it as sloppy and interesting as sci-fi.

Lottocracy

Lottocracy is a perfect start. This is an idea I’ve been seeing a lot in recent years from friends in the field like Jason Brennan and more recently Alex Guerrero. It is the idea that political power should be distributed by random selection (sortition) rather than elections.

In academic writing, this appears as arguments and empirical data, about representativeness, about models of deliberation, with critiques of elections and all of their pitfalls. These arguments are of significant interest to political philosophers and should be of interest to more people, except ordinary people all still trying to survive until the next political news cycle. They have no time for political philosophy.

But instead of considering what the best arguments for lottocracy are, how about we begin by doing something that the public is more likely prepared to engage with: what would it feel like to live in a lottocratic society? What are the human conflicts that emerge in them? How might an eight-episode Netflix series, or a short story, involving a small business owner, unfold as she is selected randomly to be a legislator? What would she do with her business? What team of lobbyists would suddenly descend on her looking for political favors? Does she meet the team of other people selected? Does she get drunk with power over the course of her years as lawmaker? Would it be a comedy or a thriller?

There’s a reason science-fiction has had such a big influence on technological imagination. It allows us to simulate consequences before implementation, allows us to simulate all the different range of consequences, and we also know that they are simulations, they are fiction. The reason we’re in the particular stage of debate about AI we are in is only because of the uncertainty of where we’re headed. We’ve been prepared ahead of time for both the utopian and dystopian possibilities and are imaginatively prepared to engage with them precisely because of sci-fi.

Speculative political fiction could do the same for governance. Fiction makes abstract systems emotionally legible in all of its many facets, something very important if we want people to engage with our ideas.

If you are a political philosopher working on a non-traditional system like lottocracy, I’d like to issue a self-serving challenge. Write one piece of fiction. Use sci-fi as the model. It would be good for reception of your work, and it would be good for philosophy. And if it is successful, you better bet that teams of aspiring fiction writers will be taking your courses or coming to you for ideas to develop more.

This is a seriously untapped resource. Who knows, you might even get a Netflix deal.

This piece was originally commissioned for an online magazine but got killed so I’m posting it here:

I used to live in a small city in upstate New York that had unusually contentious school board elections. One candidate knocked on my door and started ranting for thirty minutes about how she was the target of a local conspiracy to tarnish her family’s reputation. Her husband had sat on the school board for a term and was voted out.

My wife taught in the local high school, and I asked what the deal was with these school board elections. She mentioned that she heard that food supplier contracts, custodial jobs, even after-school programming contracts were given to family members of the school board. As people cycled in and out of the board, the school went through five principles in four years, the board sued to terminate the district superintendent, who then turned around and implicated board members in misallocation of school funds. Every four years or so the board either sued, or was sued, by some former employee of the district. The district and the teacher’s union went for six years without a renegotiated contract. I kept thinking about all of these rumors about board corruption, how none of it was covered in the local press. When lawsuits were filed suddenly there could be access to court documents from anywhere in the world, and some underpaid freelancer thousands of miles away could then summarize the case from those documents and the story would appear as local news in the local paper website. This is a pattern known to all observers of media whereby about a decade ago conglomerates would buy out hundreds of local papers, lay off all the reporters, outsource the writing to freelancers who would just put out Google alerts on documents released from city hall meetings, court filings, and blog posts, and then write summaries for websites which would then count as local news.

In another era, a person on the local politics beat would get a tip on a public corruption story, show up at the school asking to look at the supplier contracts, and interview a few people to figure out if the suppliers were related to school board members. Rumors of this kind of corruption happening all over small town America might lead to hundreds of little stories like this, culminating in some enterprising national reporter on the education beat doing an investigation of how widespread small town school board corruption is, what effect it has on school budgets and allocation of state funds to schools, and whether this is more prevalent in rural or urban school districts. Ongoing local investigations of this kind over time would provide the data for an academic researcher who can plot whether corruption is increasing, decreasing, or staying the same over time in America, what interventions seemed to fix it and what patterns of response seem to exacerbate it. Downstream from all this work, there might be a very good commentator on the internet who cites facts about school board corruption as one amongst many pieces of evidence for some political or policy intervention, maybe even serve as a weapon in the ongoing culture war that gets hundreds of thousands more clicks than any story of local school board corruption.

Instead, local reporting has been outsourced to rumor mills and gossip apps like Nextdoor and Neighbors, with the only official sourcing of facts coming from publicly available documents issued from the government or corporate press releases. Exclusive reliance on sources of this kind skews the facts, to say the least. The same happens when national or international newsrooms layoff a third or half of its reporting workforce. shows data here that newspaper jobs shrank from over 400,000 at the turn of the century, to about 78,000 today. Questions and answers that serve as important data points for downstream analysis simply vanish. Front-line reporting is where all the little facts from the small corners of the observable world are supposed to come from, facts which serve as evidence and material for analysis and commentary. Every culture war figure or political pundit depends on such reporting, as much as any ordinary citizen who simply wants to be informed. We need the stories first before we know whether they are outliers or endemic, before they are representation of trends or fleeting moments of entertainment.

With the decimation of journalism, what people have called “legacy” journalism like the LA Times, Washington Post, network news, and at this point we might even include millennial publications that are hardly legacy, like Vice, Buzzfeed news, and so forth, one question often raised is whether places like Substack or Reels, Youtube, or the content-creator economy can or should pick up the slack. I wrote a note recently on Substack expressing skepticism, to which I faced either responses like “duh” or strong pushback. My view is that the quality of Substack newsletters, or Reels, or other content creator platforms generating subscription revenue to individual creators, is downstream from good journalism, not a replacement for it.

Good journalism, like good academic research, is about uncovering the previously unknown, and uncovering it in the places where you might not antecedently know that the information is valuable. How do you price the value of knowing about school board corruption in small-town USA, or about the emergence of dissident networks in Nepal, before you know whether any of it exists? If a piece of information is valuable for a hedge fund to find out, information that moves markets, they will pay handsomely for their fact-finders to go out and find out, and report back to the hedge fund. But even for hedge funds, you do not know ahead of time the value of all unknown things. It was impossible for anyone to know the value of gila monster saliva research in the 1990s and how it would eventually turn into an $80 billion dollar industry of GLP-1 drugs decades later. Journalism is to the pundits, think tanks, podcasters, and Substackers what basic scientific research is to the development of monetizable technology and pharmaceuticals. You need a wide net covering as many corners of the unknown as possible, including much of the unknown that you do not know to be valuable.

Can this kind of good journalism exist, and exist in a sustainable way, on a platform like Substack? It is not impossible. Some of it exists already. Critics of my notes point out that a lot of good frontline reporting from Ukraine is happening her on Substack, and similarly for Gaza. In some kinds of reporting, Substack’s independence exceeds the stifling qualities of legacy reporting. But there would need to be very big changes for Substack to match the advantages that legacy-type newsroom have in other areas. In the front-line practice of reporting, legacy-type newsroom have a big advantage to Substack. Here is a list of just some of the structural advantages.

(A) Reporting admits of a set of ethical constraints that good organizations sign on to, and journalist who work for them must adhere to, such that when they violate them, they are required to retract or apologize or are fired as a result. These include journalistic ethics like:

1. Have two independent sources before stating that an event happened (as opposed to stating that so-and-so said that it happened.)

2. Independent fact-checking statements for accuracy.

3. Do not reveal off-the-record sources, and do not report off-the-record statements.

4. Do not pay sources or tipsters for information.

5. Disclose gifts from sources or other conflicts of interest (like former employers, or married to/related to sources.

6. Give subjects of critical coverage a meaningful opportunity to respond.

7. Do not bury relevant information unfavorable to sources in the story.

8. Do not plagiarize.

Can Substackers sign onto these same sets of ethical constraints? Absolutely. Is there an easy way to hold Substackers accountable to them, such that there is easy oversight and proportionate punishment? Any ethical code that relies on the honor system, like journalistic ethics does, requires heavy front-end, voluntary self-policing in professional communities of honor and reputation. Newsrooms provide editorial oversight on every story, and controversial stories receive extra-careful, perhaps even too-careful auditing on the front end. Newsrooms do not always get this right, even with such oversight. On the other hand, how much faith should we put in absolute zero-oversight on the front-end of news-production, and make it all happen on the back-end, from readers and crowd-sourcing and subscription-cancellation? Is there going to be a Substack-newsletter auditor, and how many newsletters can such a person reasonably oversee? The deck is stacked against Substack simply from the institutional design.

(B) Reporting against powerful individuals and institutions often require FOIA (freedom of information) requests, legal review, and are subject to legal threats and require legal counsel and protection. There is nothing more litigious than a powerful institution or person who does not like a story coming out about them. Newsrooms with pooled resources, like subscription or advertising revenue, can have in-house counsel dedicated to applying pressure to governments who fail to abide by FOIA law by stonewalling or dragging their feet. In-house legal counsel can manage threats at fixed cost to the organization, and provide review at wholesale rather than retail rates, even for journalists working on stories that might not be of significant national interest. Can Substackers with thousands of individuals doing individualized reporting at audience numbers spanning from hundreds to hundreds of thousands manage to report on the powerful in the face of such legal pressure and in need of legal protection? On this I am most skeptical, knowing how economies of scale work. How much will Substackers persist in reporting that butts up against the lawyers at an app company that workers are claiming are stealing their wages? Will only successful Substackers be able to afford legal counsel? Will they be willing to pay into a fund to subsidize smaller-audience reporters, even those reporting on things they don’t particularly like?

(C) Newsrooms with their pooled resources and pooled risk offer an environment where no individual story, individual reporter, or individual beat requires monetization for the entire ecosystem to work in a way that those stories and beats can exist. Substack works in the opposite way. Individual reporters or newsletters or beats need to obtain a certain level of monetization or they will disappear in the Substack marketplace. This is not a way to incentivize reporting on unknown areas of public interest, any more than the pharmaceutical industry is incentivized to engage in basic scientific research that poses a high risk of not being monetizable. Instead, such an industry chases already market-tested variations on already popular content or drugs. Only if an individual celebrity writer decides to cast their net wide enough on enough beats can enough unknown corners of the world be uncovered. But the individualized market for information is biased toward monetizable information, which is not the same thing as important information. Unmonetizable information may have significant political, cultural, or impact for people who do not have much money to buy such information. Today’s unmonetizable information may be tomorrow’s monetizable information.

(D) One of the biggest and well-known problems that individualized monetization faces in journalism is audience-capture. Substack is supposed to free journalists from the stifling constraints of institutional-capture, the idea that the editors or owners of the Washington Post or the New York Times or the Star-Tribute need their journalists to stay in line with the specific idiosyncratic agendas and constraints of particular newsrooms. Substack does do this, but it does not entail that that journalists are free from all forms of capture. In the age of subscription monetization, we’re not talking about dependence or independence, but a trade-off between two forms of dependence. You can have dependence for your livelihood on a subscriber base for you as an individual writer or reporter, or dependence on editorial permission from an organization funded by a larger subscriber base, or billionaire owner, or government subsidies, or an endowment. Both are forms of dependence, and generate their own forms of bias. Evidence from this era of journalism as well as centuries of journalism going back to the printing press suggests that subscriber/reader-driven funding generates far more partisan and polarizing media. Subscribers/readers are far more disposed to cancel, organize boycotts, or create other forms of flak when a publication displeases them than Mercedes, McDonald’s, or Ford are disposed to cancel advertising when reporting pisses them off, so long as the eyeballs are still on the news stories. Substack metrics capture growth, engagement, and subscription-conversion at the individual-writer level, with A/B testing capability that reward conforming content to those metrics. This is not true independence, simply a different kind of dependence. I think everyone can point to plenty of Substack writers they think happen to be heavily audience-captured, using the same criteria we use as evidence than certain legacy writers are institutionally-captured. This is not to say that Substack isn’t better than legacy publications on many dimensions or measures of independence. Perhaps Substack is on net better than the bureaucratic inertia and editorial gatekeeping plaguing newsrooms. But what newsroom have at least is resource-pooling and the kind of independence that brings. Whether newsrooms exercise that kind of independence well or poorly is a matter of good or bad decision-making at the editorial level. Independence is a matter of discretion. Substack writers are beholden to individualized monetization metrics

None of (A)-(D) are insurmountable obstacles, but simply reason for skepticism that Substack can replace the kind of reporting of public interest that newsrooms provide (albeit imperfectly). Everyone knows the business problems that journalism faces, and the trust problems that legacy journalism faces. It does not look like advertising will pay the bills ever again, and it looks like only a few publications will end up receiving subscription-levels that support a modicum of journalistic independence. In the space downstream from reporting, i.e., thinking and commentary about what is reported, there is nothing legacy and quasi-legacy outlets provide that Substack does not. But front-line reporting has become like a lot of things of significant public importance that has failed market-based financing. Other examples include basic scientific research, rare-disease research, prison to society reintegration programs, cultural heritage like classical music, endangered languages and cultures, or environmental disaster cleanup. All of these things are of significant public value, but do not admit of market-based financing. It is a very optimistic opinion, contrary to a lot of evidence, to think that individual, crowd-funded subscription-based financing will fill the void for news reporting any more than it has filled the void for these other public goods.

Barry Lam is Professor of Philosophy at UC Riverside, and Host and Producer of Slate’s Hi-Phi Nation podcast, a show where philosophy and reality meet . He writes about discretionary decision-making in his book Fewer Rules, Better People published by Norton.

I’m a Beatles completist. I know the chords to many songs. I know who wrote what, the disputes about particular lines of lyrics, and even details about particular production techniques they and George Martin used on particular tracks. But even the casual Beatles fan, or the most casual Beatles listener, will know the arc of their career. The Beatles started with candy, bubble-gum pop. For about two years, they wanted to hold our hands, loved us yeah yeah yeah, and talked about love from me to you. Then in the middle years, about 1965-1967, they started singing about paperback writers, the dentist who gave them acid in a coffee cup, the burdens of progressive taxation, and experimented with parallel fifths, musical impressionism, and Indian sitar music. Then in the final years, they had an epic double album, an attempt at a completely live one-take album, and a final album containing a 16-minute medley. Casual Beatles fans will have their favorite era, with most critics settling on the middle, Rubber Soul and Revolver period as the group’s most recommendable to new fans. But most will recognize that the Beatles progressed from pretty and light to heavy and epic.

Taylor Swift’s arc bears a family resemblance to the Beatles. The early country pop era was about crushes, unrequited love, small-town life. Then there is the peak pop icon era, themes of betrayal, affairs, emotional development, lots of grievances, a kind of political awakening. The third phase, pandemic and postpandemic, I’d say is something more adult, themes of grief, inner life, something more existential.

I had a literary criticism professor in college at UC Irvine, a rather legendary figure who passed away young from a chronic condition, named Richard Kroll. He was an iconoclast, the kind of person who today we might call an “eccentric Tory”, an old-school British modernist in a department of postmodernists and Deconstructionists (Derrida was a regular faculty in that department). Kroll used to tell us that we were shitty writers because (1) our Republican parents didn’t want to pay their taxes and so we went to shitty high schools, (true, this was a reference to California and prop 13)) and (2) because we listened to rap music, when really we needed to listen to Wagner. He said the Romantic poets and their stoner hippy rock-n-roll descendants of the 60s ruined philosophy of art and criticism with their emphasis on“feelings” and their conception of art as self-expression, which was all a crock of shit because real art was craft. We can thank the Romantics for killing our greatest artists, he said, because they invented the idea that to be good you had to be a drugged out genius who died by 27, preferably by suicide. He said The Color Purple was a shit novel, and Woman Warrior a shit memoir, but we were all were being forced to read them in our courses because his colleagues in the English department were incapable of distinguishing between good writing from shit writing that happened to have powerful themes. (For the record, I think of both as masterpieces.) If Kroll lived to see the day, I’d imagine he’d be some kind of anti-woke warrior, a defender of the traditional canon, and a never-Trump kind of Christopher Hitchens figure of literary criticism.

Kroll said that much of English and other Western European poetry followed the arc of Virgil. At that point I only knew Virgil as the author of the Aeneid, which I read freshman year. But Virgil was a career poet, who as such was hired by Augustus Caeser to create an epic that would define the mythology of the Roman empire. Yet Virgil was not an epic poet. He started his career writing pastoral poetry, the Eclogues. The Eclogues is kind of like early American country-western. They were a celebration and romantic idealization of the bucolic country life, nature and its healing properties, the theme of love and longing, and shepherding rather than cowherding like in the American West.

Then Virgil went through his second phase, “the didactic” exemplified in the Georgics. These poems were about the struggles of life and how to manage and navigate them: making a living, disease, mortality, fate, or the loss of agency. A good modern analog might be Woodie Guthrie’s music and lyrics. There’s labor, there’s war, the Depression. The poet is the people’s teacher.

Finally, you have the Aeneid, the epic. Poetry is mythology and nation building, it is not literally instructive. The epic is about the arc of individuals doing great things as an analog for nations and political systems doing great things. Epics are propaganda for empires or the rebels who seek to end them (like Star Wars). The role of the artist is to valorize a particular mythology, or to be the rebel who single-handedly destroys one.

The old school way of understanding this arc of Virgil’s career was that it served as a template for Western poets, Medieval, Renaissance, even the Romantics, to follow. It was simultaneously descriptive, as a way of seeing the influence of Virgil on Spencer, Milton, even Wordsworth and Shelley, and prescriptive; the proper path for a good, “major poet” to take was the path of Virgil.

Kroll’s theory was that Virgil created the arc of the artist. What it is to be a proper artist is to do something quaint and pretty first, something instructive and educational and connected with the world second, and then something ambitious, epic, and momentous, as your finale. Every artist is either following the footsteps of, or reacting and rebelling against, the Virgilian paradigm. The reason we have Taylor Swift is because we have all the people who influenced Taylor Swift: Shania Twain, Dixie Chicks, Joni Mitchell, Chris Carrabba. And these people and pretty much everyone else are influenced by the Beatles, who trace their career to American blues, rock n’ roll, and the emerging 60s neo-Romantics. The Beatles were essentially co-creating, which then all trace back to Virgil.

The Virgilian theory of the artist is pretty much one of those unfalsifiable grand historical narratives. Everyone who fits the paradigm confirms the theory, and any counterexample is someone rebelling against the paradigm. You can force fit Toni Morrison into a Virgilian arc for instance, but it requires very broad interpretations of what is “pastoral.” George Lucas made a somewhat pastoral film first, American Graffiti, and then an epic, (Star Wars trilogy). but then made Howard the Duck, and then some more epics. This arc is hardly Virgillian. Nothing Picasso did can be categorized as any of the three, nor does his career arc seem to fit any particular story. The entirety of Frida Kahlo’s oeuvre is not about nature, nor is it trying to teach much, nor is there any grand narrative. Kahlo is almost exclusively self-expression. But you can force these cases into the theory by claiming these were all rebels against a standard artistic paradigm exemplified by others.

But despite the fact that probably the Virgilian theory of the artist is not universally descriptive or normative, and maybe a little pseudo-scientific, I kind of like it as a generic description, and as loosely normative. Generic generalizations admit of exceptions, even a great many, but are still helpful. When there is a pattern to childhood or adulthood development, it cries for explanation. Why do so many children go through the terrible twos or threes, have stomach-aches around seven or eight, develop anti-parental attitudes in early adolescence, and engage in risky behaviors in their late teens? These are generic patterns not universal ones. The patterns admit of exceptions, sometimes even a great number of them. Some children never go through a terrible phase, some adolescents never become anti-parental, and there are large populations of teenagers in other cultures and in other points of history that are positively risk-averse, rather than risk-taking. Nature versus nurture debates erupt in academic research circles trying to explain all these generic truths. Some say it is the natural course of brain and endocrine development. Some say these are the courses of life prescribed on television or social media for the relevant age groups. Whatever the explanation, there is something to the idea that human development follows a particular arc despite the many exceptions. The Virgilian and Beatles’ career arc seems to be generic enough that it admits of the same need for explanation.

As for whether the Virgilian arc is normative, i.e., an arc that artists ought to follow, I like the idea as a “loose norm." When you’re trying to prescribe a course of action that you know admits of a lot of counterinstances, you generally use “loose norms,” or heuristics. College students these days come to me for career advice, with many saying that their dream is to become some kind of Youtuber or Social Media Influencer. This is part of the general trend that young people want to be what they see and admire. And they spend an inordinate amount of time watching these people on their phones. Anything I say in response to them is going to be a loose norm. “Don’t do it, you’ll never make it,” except of course the people who do. “Follow your dreams, commit to it,” except of course the 99.9% who just waste their 20s putting out videos no on will ever watch. “Learn what you want to learn in college, follow your dreams of being a Youtuber, but always have something to fall back on to pay the bills.” Even this is a loose norm, because of course the people who do it as a main hustle are likelier to succeed than people who do it as a side-hustle.

I think imposing the Virgilian arc as a a loose norm on a career is sensible, and I even think it is a reasonable frame by which to evaluate certain creators. Artistic work generally, as a matter of generic description, runs contrary to the mathematician or athletes arc, where the most epic work occurs in your early rather than later career. Mathematicians and athletes work primarily with raw processing power and speed. Lots of worldly knowledge and embodied experience can contribute to the greatness of athletic and mathematical achievement, but it never makes up for the loss of the young mind and body. I just watched Federer play an exhibition at the Australian Open and I have no doubt that the wisdom of Federer 2026 in the body of Federer 2006 would beat Federer 2006 handily. But no amount of wisdom in Federer 2026 makes him a contender even against Djokovic 2026, let alone Alcaraz and Sinner, and makes him a shadow of Federer 2006. Fields Medalists are awarded to mathematicians under 40 for a reason; that’s when they produce their more impactful work.

The artistic mind follows a very different arc. It follows the arc of growth and maturation just like human development. It would be incredibly odd to imagine the Beatles early career work being the songs of Abbey Road, and the last album they make the songs of Please Please Me. Even if the youngest music of a pop artist are their most popular over the course of their career, the career arc itself would be odd if it culminated in the sounds of their 20s. I had to watch poor Warren G perform “Regulate” as a man in his 50s live and the poor man looked so bored and embarrassed rapping about the “gang of hoes over there on the curb”. There is an understandable and even goodness to the development of the Beatles and to G’s artistic sensibilities in their mature years that makes their creations have an air of maturity in their older years. If Paul McCartney wrote a new song, in his 80s, and it sounded like, and had the themes of, early Beatles, I would wonder if he had dementia.

So if I had to characterize the arc of the Virgilian artist, I’d say that it matures from youth to old age, from the hedonic aims of the self, from the Romantic conception of art as self-expression, and builds outward to security and mastery of one’s craft, responsibility to and engagement with the world and larger societal issues, and finally ends with grand narratives like history and legacy. If an artist diverges from this development, or even more ambitiously, decides to do things in reverse, the standards are far higher and it is far easier to fail. If you had to advise a path to the young artist, the path of the Beatles and Virgil is better advice than the path of Orson Welles. Of course Orson Welles and some others are counterexamples, geniuses whereby their epic created in youth is their magnum opus, and later work was more pastoral. But we’re talking about loose norms here.

I think it is not outlandish to think that if you encounter a 20 year old pop star, and they claim they’ve made an epic double album, or you have a 25-year old aspiring writer whose thinks their memoir will transform the literary scene, they probably need a few more years or decades to be believable. IF you had to listen or read such a thing, its very easily cringe.

Philosophy and my fellow philosophers are deeply reflective people about the content of their specialized work, but I do not talk with them much about how they see the span of their careers or lifework as a linear whole. In the analytic tradition, where I have been trained, everyone has for very long thought of themselves more like mathematicians and scientists advancing specialized knowledge that the issue of their own arcs do not really come up. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, however. Historical philosophers definitely did have an arc. Even Bertrand Russell did. Continental philosophers and historians are very sensitive to these things when they study the oeuvre of admired figures. There’s early, mid, and late Plato, early and late Wittgenstein, or existentialism.

Right now I am reading, slowly and carefully, the Aeneid of one philosopher who is trained almost identically to me, but whose career path went completely differently (and far more successfully I might add), . Her book is The Mattering Instinct. It reads as an epic. The book is system-building, an attempt at unifying theories across a wide-swath of the universe. In his case, it is unifying physics and the laws of thermodynamics, the evolutionary theory of human nature, and meaning, purpose, and motivation in life.

Goldstein’s book also reads as a mature epic. I’ve been around philosophy long enough to have encountered a couple of generations of very ambitious young minds who have epic views. They too are trying to unify a great number of theories into a coherent and consistent whole. I once had an undergraduate propose to me a senior thesis offering a grand unified theory about how to do philosophy. I thought at the time he should try doing it for a few decades before settling on such a theory. Goldstein however has had a long literary and philosophical career and has been developing the view in the book since the 70s. This seems to be right to me, as a loose norm for the development of a career in ideas. The Virgilian arc is a good arc to follow even if the object of your creation is alethic rather than aesthetic. Write the epic when you’ve figured a lot of other things out, and have developed the view of decades of thinking about revision, adopting the lessons of a lifetime of observations and learning.

This piece went out on the early last week. I’m reposting it here for my (much smaller) subscriber base who may not have seen it.

There are two different approaches to speaking and writing. The first I’ll call “assertion as expression.” The idea behind this approach is that whenever you say or write something, you are expressing what you think, as thoroughly and comprehensively as you are capable of articulating at the moment. Say you’re at Thanksgiving dinner and the subject of Uncle Phil comes up, who you think is awful for what he did to Aunt Mildred. When the subject of Phil comes up, you express yourself honestly and thoroughly.

The second approach is “assertion as strategy.” On this approach, you see yourself in the middle of a game-like circumstance whereby there is an aim, and your speaking and writing is a move in that game in the interest of accomplishing that aim. You notice at Thanksgiving that Aunt Mildred has been putting on a facade of strength and resilience, having not mentioned anything about Uncle Phil all night. She seems content not to bring him up, only the blabbermouth Cousin Dave brings up why Uncle Phil isn’t there, and he asks your opinion as to why. You can be honest, or you can be strategic given your read of how Aunt Mildred is acting in this circumstance. The aim of the circumstance as you see it is to save face for Aunt Mildred, so you says “Ah I’m sure Phil had something come up, I’m sure we’ll see him soon,” and avoid expressing your sincere thoughts altogether.

Politicians making assertions is a classic case whereby we are very savvy to the difference. Asked what he thought about same-sex marriage during his first campaign, Barack Obama famously said something to the effect that marriage was between and man and a woman but that he supported civil unions, later saying something like his views were evolving. There was a general consensus at the time amongst politically knowledgeable people that these were strategic assertions. Very few people believed Barack Obama would ever pursue an anti-same-sex marriage agenda. In this case, people took themselves to know Obama’s thoughts, and interpreted his words as strategically misleading. In other cases, like in the case of Democratic leaders currently making expressions about Trump’s ICE raids, politicians say things like “We should require ICE officer to undergo rigorous training in upholding civil liberties.” Most observers do not know whether these assertions are expressions of what these leaders genuinely think, or if they are strategic. Do Democratic leaders really believe that the current problem with violent ICE raids is that its officers are under-trained? Or are they strategic and trying not to alienate Trump-voters who support such raids but might be winnable on other issues, like the economy? Perhaps politicians are being both. The general problem with assertions by politicians is that people know they are strategic, and so the extent to which their expressions are ever sincere reflections of their thinking is opaque. As a result, citizens always read into what politicians think rather than take it to be transparent from their speech.

There has been a lot of soul-searching amongst philosophers in my social media feeds in recent months who want to take stock of the assertions coming out of “the left” during the “peak woke” era, which I would place at the tail-end of the Obama administration. Most of the discussion is about whether things like “defund the police” or “sport is a human right” were strategic errors in the path toward justice.

Some of these philosophers agree with the politics behind these assertions but criticize the strategy. Some of these philosophers disagree with the politics and the strategy. I don’t think any should deny that some of these assertions were made as expressions, others as strategic, and some as both. But there is a general agreement between people who criticize these left assertions of the era that the slogans were “unforced errors” on the part of the people making them, that the backlash to them is far worse than anything these statements could possibly have accomplished. The slogans were neither persuasive nor coalition-building enough to generate lasting change, and they set the stage for reverse-strategies and the “woke right” that is now using institutionalized canceling, the defunding of basic scientific research, concerted governmental efforts to get comedians taken off the air, the removal of Plato and Toni Morrison from college curricula, and so on and so forth.

On the other end of the political spectrum, philosophers I follow on social media believe that the Trump right do not believe anything they say. They think Trump supporters do not genuinely believe that Renee Good was shot out of self-defense, they do not genuinely believe that Trump’s bombing of Venezuelan boats and the removal of the Venezuelan president followed by the sale of Venezuelan oil for American profit abides by international law. Instead, they claim, Trump supporters are simply saying what they need to say to win at the game of political assertion, the game of political propaganda. The aim of the game is to exhibit as widely as possible allegiance to the President so that there is an appearance unity and support behind the President’s agenda. Speech is always strategy, never expression of sincerely held belief.

The question of whether a certain kind of speech makes for good or bad strategy presupposes that speech ought always to be understood as strategy, even if an individual never intends it as such, and is only trying to express their own thinking. Speech, we are told by philosopher J.L. Austin, is an act, and the conditions on rationality and propriety of action reduces to the rationality and propriety of strategies. That is why the working model of the rationality of acts reduces it to the rationality of strategy (game and decision-theory).

But is it true that any and all speech ought to be understood as strategy, and that there ought to be no context whereby we reserve speech as purely unadulterated expression. What would that be like?

In my book Fewer Rules, Better People, I dedicate a chapter lamenting the fact that a setting once concerned sacrosanct for sincere expression has instead become purely strategic. The courtroom is a place where witnesses and defendants swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They are even under threat of penalty and jail for failing to uphold the oath. But now, even the people who enforce those threats, judges, have decided to turn these settings into places of purely strategic speaking. For instance, there is a widespread use of “fictional pleas” in open court, whereby a prosecutor, defense attorney, and the judge know that the defendant is pleading to a crime they did not commit. They do this because the plea is in everyone’s best interest, the defendant, the prosecutor and the judge. I tell the story of a judge who asks a defendant in open court to state that he has not been coerced into pleading guilty, while it is the the judge himself who coerced the defendant to plead guilty to a crime the defendant did not commit, just so the judge could give a lighter sentence in the defendant’s interest. Everyone knows the speech acts happening in court were acts of strategy not expression, even though part of the strategy involved everyone pretending that they were all acts of expression.

Like with courts, the entirety of the public sphere of political discussion has turned into a domain of pure strategy. Even when people are trying just to express, they are read as being strategic, and then criticized for having poor strategy, or praised for having good strategy. People are being charged with “giving ammunition” to their political opponents. Everything has become strategic. Sincere expression is a by-product, not the aim of speaking. I see this everywhere, but to a much smaller extent in discourse between philosophers, both here on Substack and elsewhere. Publicly-engaged philosophy still aspires to be expressive, rather than strategic. Whenever someone makes a claim, they still provide the best possible reasons they can provide, and when challenged, respond with evidence. Whenever someone charges a public philosopher with bad strategy, there is a general consensus that such charges are distasteful (at least, I think this). Outside of philosophical exchanges, however, it is almost all strategy.

Those of us who are specialists in the philosophy of language and engage in bringing philosophy to the public need to be more effective in highlighting why the development in our political and social discourse away from expression and toward strategy is detrimental to our public life. Trust and respect for the truth depends on speaking as being a primarily alethic rather than strategic activity. Alethic activities are aimed at the truth, not at some kind of practical benefit for the speaker or others. If I always think of you as being strategic, then I know that your honesty is always subsidiary (secondary) to your strategy. Strategic speech is about what your speech wants of me and from me, and what your speech wants of others and from others, and not about whether your speech is a reflection of your thinking. Once speech is no longer a reflection of your thinking, speaking and verbal engagement no longer becomes an activity where we hold a person to the truth of their claims as opposed to the effectiveness of their claiming them.

Consider an analogy with sports. The primary aim of baseball is to score more runs than the other team, so as to win the game. The primary aim of gambling on baseball, on the other hand, is winning money. If players gambling on their own games were not only legalized, but became the primary way players made a living, and everyone treated sporting competitions as such, the entirety of sporting would be undermined. The rationality of a strategy in sports would then be solely subsidiary to winning a bet, not winning the game. The fact that a player can bet against their own game undermines trust entirely of sports as an activity of competing to win. There would no longer be any point to watching or playing in sports, thereby undermining the gambling also. This is precisely what is happening to political and social issues discourse. When everything is a strategy, saying what you think it subservient to saying what is best to service your political or social aim.

Outside of political and social issues, it is common knowledge that people in a community together are aiming to speak truly to each other, and can be held responsible for the truth of their claims, unless we have evidence to the contrary. If you pull over to ask for directions from a total stranger, it is part of conventional discourse to assume the stranger is telling you the right directions to the best of their knowledge. If we started assuming that the totality of speech activity was people trying to sell us a product, we would then assume the stranger was directing us to a business where they get a kick back, and the entire practice of asking directions from strangers would be undermined.

When a culture decides that in a certain domain, like in political and social issues, people are almost always speaking strategically, or that we should read, interpret, and evaluate others on strategic grounds, it leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy that those who aim simply to express themselves do not want to take on the burden of being read and evaluated as doing strategy, well or poorly. In fact, we are dangerously close to the idea that maybe people do not think or feel anything sincerely, they are only moved to be strategic in one way or another. That is as far away from alethic discourse as we can get, and very soon everyone is to everyone else simply someone trying to sell them something.

The burden of human communication, J.L Austin taught us, is that strategic speaking is unavoidable, because human thoughts are not transparent to each other, and speaking is just another act like running or jumping. But at the moment we are one of the lowest points of trust in media, in political institutions, in medical institutions, in educational institutions, and in each other than we have ever been. Amongst the many reasons for this, one reasons is that every assertion we now treat as coming from an interest group trying to sell us something, and we respond accordingly. This way of understanding each other has mistrust built into it, and we will never break out. The only we we can break out is to apply a little simple philosophical analysis to every exchange, and start engaging only with those who are trying to be alethic rather than only strategic.

Twenty-five years after the events of American Psycho, a string of gruesome serial murders plague New York City. FBI agent Daniel Ward is on the hunt for the murderer. U.S. Attorney Claire Benton is the prosecutor in the Southern District of NY in charge of the jurisdiction. FBI data analysts notice a troubling pattern.

Two days before each murder, the charity firm NetGood, a favorite of Wall Street philanthropists because of its use of data-analytics to maximize lives saved for every dollar donation, receives a wire payment of $100,000. There is no break to this pattern, from the very first murder to the most recent. On this very morning, Ward receives a tip from an insider at NetGood. A $100,000 donation has just come in from a U.S. account. Ward and Benton have two days to track down the serial killer before the next murder. They are in the offices of FBI profiler Ivy Proffit.

Proffit: I just got off the phone with our source at NetGood. The money is coming from Joan Street, a high-frequency trading firms that is a favorite of elite university quants. That completes my picture. I have this guy figured out, and it is definitely a guy. We’re looking for a 25-35 year old Ivy League graduate. He has an insatiable urge to maximize. He engages in hectic, highly stressful quantitative situations on a daily basis, looking at numbers, returns, data about commodities, currencies and securities. He is able to compute derivatives in his head instantly. He is acquiring wealth at as high a rate as he can, but he keeps none of it. He finds no pleasure in material goods. He is disconnected from interpersonal relationships, finds them alienating and impossible to figure out. But one thing he derives pleasure from is his ability to control the happiness and suffering of someone in front of him, which is what he gets out of these murders. Some time in his youth, he found out he was incapable of making people in his life happy, but completely capable to making them suffer. In his murders, every single moment he is in control in a way that he does not feel in control in ordinary everyday interactions.

Ward: What kind of psychopath donates money to lifesaving charities and also brutally murders other people?

Proffit: The donations are part of his maximizing; he watches the lives he saves as he sends these donations. I would bet he keeps a running tab of them. But its not like he is capable of saving someone in real life, like pull people out of burning buildings. The people he saves might as well be investments like soybeans and corn. Them going up is a high for him, it is why he gives. But that giving is also the precursor, his reason for justifying the murders. He takes the lives he saves as giving him permission to commit his next murder.

Ward: I’ve asked my Wall Street sources to do the math. It takes about four weeks for a guy like this to make $100,000. These murders occur once every five weeks. I figure the guy waits until he gets a paycheck, pockets just enough to pay rent and live, and sends the rest to NetGood, after which he scouts, identifies, and attacks his next victim.

Proffit: He’s earning to give. It is a central tenet of this movement he learned about in college, Effective Altruism. This is a pattern amongst the quants there. These people have up-to-date information about how many lives you can save with your donations, they know exactly how much good they’re doing. His number is 30. When he’s earned enough to save 30 lives, he commits his next murder. One life taken in exchange for 30 lives saved. They’re connected. He’s not going to murder until he first saves another 30 lives.

Ward: That is some sick twisted logic. Benton, you got a warrant for the Netgood donor list. And you have the Joan Street employee listing. What do you have?

Benton: This is our hit, Max Bateman, twenty-seven. MIT physics undergraduate, Harvard MA is applied mathematics. Donated $100,000 every four weeks for the past fifteen, but also donated long before that. Lives in Manhattan, single, active poster on the internet blogs on crypto-investment. This guy doesn’t live like a rich guy, though. He lives in Inwood.

Proffit: This is our guy.

Ward: All right let’s get him.

Benton: Not so fast. Do you realize what we’re doing here?

Ward: Yeah, we’re arresting a sick serial killer.

Benon: Right, and do you realize what’s going to happen after we bust him?

Ward: If we do it right, we get him off the street, he goes away for life. This man has killed 15 people. Its going to be our biggest arrest in a generation.

Benton: And how many people do you think he’s going to keep killing? I’ve done the math. I predict that if we don’t nail him for the remainder of the year, he’s going to kill 10 more, right here in New York City.

Ward: That’s not going to happen, we’re nailing him.

Benton: Yeah but that’s $1 million to NetGood. That’s 300 lives saved. You’re trying to save 10 lives at the cost of letting 300 die. I asked NetGood, they get a good number of donations, but they’re not making up for Bateman’s. This guy goes away, that’s $100,000 gone, every month, for the rest of the year. That’s 300 dead people because we bust him.

Ward: Since when do we in law enforcement let murderers go because they have give money to charity? Since when do we let them go because they do something else to save lives? Come on Benton, you saying we don’t arrest a serial killer whose also a firefighter? We don’t arrest murdering doctors?

Benton: We go easy on murderers all the time Ward. Last year I had a huge RICO case involving three hitmen for the cartel. I cut them deals, two aren’t going to serve any time because I put them in witness protection. One is doing five to ten. Their testimony got me the head of the cartel and his top two lieutenants. Letting two murderers go and going light on the third saved this country about 10,000 fentanyl deaths this next year. You remember the Massoud case?

Ward: You’re giving me PTSD Benton. Yeah, sick Middle Eastern oil tycoon who had his henchmen follow his daughters to Minnesota who were trying to escape him. Those two guys shot the daughters’ bodyguard and drugged and dragged those girls from the Mall of America in broad daylight. I would have nailed them if you didn’t intervene. You made me let them go!

Benton: Completely above my pay grade Ward. The State Department and the DOJ intervened directly in the case. We had to let them go. It was part diplomatic immunity, but also part of the fact that we are in tense negotiations with that country right now on oil rights. My point is, we make law enforcement decisions on the basis of the greater good all of the time.

Ward: If you’re trying to talk me out of going after Bateman, its not working If you don’t give me the go-ahead, you’re doing as much to kill his next victim as Bateman. I’m busting him whether you prosecute or not. That way he knows I’m on him. I’m not having any more murders on my conscience.

Benton: You’re not killing them Ward. Bateman is killing them. He’s doing something wrong by killing one person every five weeks. You and I are just letting the victims get killed. We’re letting them die. That’s bad, but that’s not the same. But you arrest Bateman, you’re letting 300 people die, maybe even more. So you’re letting people die whatever you do. You just have a choice between letting 10 die or letting 300 die. How is that not on your conscience?

Ward: My conscience is squeeky clean. My job is save American lives, New York City lives, these people pay my salary, I swore an oath to protect them.

Benton: You don’t swear an oath to God to protect all lives?

Ward: No, I don’t. The 300 people NetGood is saving, where are they? Its Africa isn’t it? Its always Africa. Don’t arrest a serial killer in New York because there are kids dying in Africa. It sounds like the worst 80s TV movie ever. There are other way to save dying kids in Africa without letting serial killers murder innocent people in New York. You know that, everyone with common sense knows that.

Benton: I don’t think you really mean that Ward. If NetGood was saving kids in New York, you’d suddenly be more sympathetic to my argument? Of course there are many ways to save kids in Africa but they’re not going to get done. Who are we going to ask to donate $100,000 because we arrested a guy who donated $100,000 for being a serial killer? Could you imagine the PR? FBI agent asks for public’s help; donate money to save 300 lives so we can have a clean conscience and arrest a Wall Street serial killer. All those people are already not giving to NetGood. Us asking them to do it for the reasons we’re asking are not going to convince them. Bateman is paying for 30 lives saved before everyone one of his next murders. We bust him, no one else is saving those 30 lives. That’s a fact.

Ward: Let me be clear boss, are you arguing that what Bateman is doing is all right? That you can just earn enough money to save 30 lives, and that justifies you killing someone?

Benton: Not at all. This is a seriously wrong act. There is no such thing as moral licensing, where you earn your right to do a wrong act by doing good acts to compensate for them. I’m making an argument about the morality of our use of discretion, law enforcement discretion. It is our duty as FBI agents and federal prosecuters to eventually nail him. But you know as well as I do that you have a big caseload, and that you could have an even bigger caseload if the FBI didn’t turn down so many state murder cases that remain unsolved.

Ward: Yeah Benton. I got a big load, and it could be bigger. But this is the biggest, this is fifteen murders.

Benton: With 450 lives saved. That is part of the case. You can’t deny that, because of Bateman’s sick logic, 450 lives saved is part of the case involving 15 murders.

Ward: Maybe I deny it but go on.

Benton: Surely you think that if we had a stack of murder cases, the serial killer who kills 20 is the bigger priority than a spurned lover who shoots his spouse.

Ward: Of course.

Benton: Let’s say we’re going to raid a city block. There are five houses, and in each house, there’s a murder happening, all simultaneously. So you know you’re only going to be able save some of the people, even if eventually we will catch all of the perps. In the first house, its a doctor who is about to kill a man to use his organs to save five others. In the second house it is a someone who is about to murder his brother. In the third house, someone is about to murder an EMT who is trying to save one other dying person. In the fourth house, someone is murdering three people. In the fifth house, a mobster is about to execute ten people.

Ward: I get it. If we have the intelligence on an operation like this, the target sequence is obvious. Five, four, three, two, one.

Benton: Yeah this is unquestionable. Our operational priority in the field is to maximize lives saved on the block. All I’m asking you to do is set your emotions aside for a second and think of this as a breaching order problem. You got other murder cases right now?

Ward: Yeah, two girls disappeared and found, murdered in similar ways, on Staten Island.

Benton: That’s a net loss of two girls, maybe more. Bateman’s doing a very wrong act giving us a net gain of 299 lives every five weeks. That’s an argument that he’s second in the target sequence, not first.

Ward: That makes him last on the target sequence forever Benton. I have a stack of cases right now. None of the killers are donating money to save lives in Africa. I get a new case come in every week. Bateman’s just given us every incentive to let him off permanently. His an even sicker and more of a genius than I thought. You already accept that it is wrong, that you can’t make your act right by paying off with good acts. But if that’s right, then you’re arguing that we should also let wrong acts pass, if part of the act also produces good things we won’t get otherwise. Now we have an incentive for every wrongdoer to tie their wrong acts to good acts, to make an advance payment for wrong acts with good acts so that we have to let them pass. The morality behind our use of discretion demands it. That’s twisted shit. This is a hostage situation in which we lose all of our power to go after the evil-doers.

Benton: You find me a morally relevant difference between breach sequence in raids and arrest sequence in murder cases and I’ll admit you have a point. In the meantime, I’m asking you as a boss to sit and wait. Get a warrant, track his communication, his movements. If anything changes, like he gets a thirst for murder without donating, bust him.

Ward: But if he’s acquired a target, we know who the target is, do we thwart the attempt or bust him in the act?

Benton: If you have the knowledge, bust him. But know that thwarting the attempt or busting him endangers his future of donating, so keep yourself from knowing as best you can.

Ward: Benton, I respect you. We’ve worked together for five years. I’ve disagreed, but we we always respected each other. But this is not a proper ethics of policing. This is not what I signed up for. I am supposed to stop evil, not let it slide even for a greater good. I don’t know if I can continue in this job if this counts as ethics.

Stand-up comedy is at the other end of replayability in popular art forms today. If Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas need to sit down for a good year to compose, arrange, and produce an album that is about an hour long, a stand-up comedian will also need about that much time to come up with about an hour’s worth of new material. The comedian’s material is more “empirically tested” than Billie and Finneas’ more a priori work; comedians need to test out jokes and stories in clubs for months and months, doing A/B tests to see how small turns and twists, slight changes in wording, affect the amount of laughs. Billie and Finneas may show friends and other producers drafts of productions in progress, but its not really good practice in music to play new material to large audiences for a year to finalize a track. The comedian, then, will take that tour on the road, get income from live performances, culminating in a one hour television/streaming special that the masses can then consume, and it is usually over for that routine. Hardcore comedy fans may revisit that special from time to time over the course of their lives. Television might rerun that special for the millions of people who didn’t see it the first time. But by and large, compared to music, comedy is a low replayability art form. Billie Eilish will monetize and replay her songs for life. Comics do rely on some passive income for their comedy, but by and large comedy is a one-off form of art for most consumers.

If you had to categorize human creative productions on a spectrum between low and high replayability, comedy and comic improvisation is on one end of the spectrum, music is on the other. Even within a specific kind of art form this spectrum exists. For novels, mysteries and thrillers are on the lower end of replayability. Documentaries and slashers are on the lower end of replayability for film. Epics on the other hand, are on the higher replayability range for both. Film and fiction books do not come close to music in terms of replayability. At best, film as a category is a medium replayability art form, fiction probably even lower.

The static visual arts like painting, photography, sculpture, and digital creations are high replayability forms; these are things we copy and frame so we can look at them in our environment or backgrounds of our phones daily. Street performances are probably the lowest. I think I’ve stopped once to watch the guy juggling knives standing on a stool balanced on ropes, and have walked by that particular act a hundred other times. Live performance in general we treat as low replayability; maybe some people have seen the same Cirque de Soleil many times, but that is mostly a one and done show for me, no matter how impressive.

If you have young children, you will know that almost everything they enjoy is high replayability. As highly replayable as music is for adults, children will listen to the same nursery songs on Cocomelon on repeat daily for months. They will watch the same episodes of Bluey until they’ve memorized the lines. Preteens of the moment will watch K-Pop Demon hunters on repeat for weeks. Being the X-ennial that I am, I’ve been a fan of Homestar Runner, by the Brother’s Chaps, since the early 2000s. I started showing my child clips of it since she was two. She is now thirteen, and every time I’m on the road and Facetime with her, she still wants to watch Homestar Runner clips and the follow-up series by the Brother’s Chap Two More Eggs!, with me. Did I say comedy isn’t highly replayable? It is for kids. She and I must have watched ‘Lil Brudder’ 100 times by now.

The last decade or so we’ve seen the rise to dominance of the short-form video. It started with the app Vine, but is peaking with Tiktok. Obviously shorts have been around for a long time, but technology did not make the ongoing consumption of shorts easy until recently. Television treated shortform video in one of two ways; they are either commercials, or clips in anthology shows like “America’s Funny Home Video” or “Fail Army”. YouTube maximized for longform watching. Vine and now TikTok essentially transformed this very form and made it pop music; high replayability, compilable, algorithmically feedable. The most replayed form of video before TikTok had always been the 30 second ad. The 30 second ad was the archetype what is memorable and replayable across mass audiences and generations in television. A lot of people know the ending of MASH or Seinfeld, but even more will know the same advertising jingles, slogans, and characters of the past. That form is now the default form of video consumption for most young people, as all of the video platforms and the entirety of the media, including the news business. All of media is going through a phase of creating 30 second highly replayable ads. The connection with the ad and Tik Tok is not accidental. As P.J. Vogt talked about with Ryan Broderick recently, TikTok is by and large an ad platform. Its entire design and purpose is for content-creators, i.e., users, to make their own advertisements and for each other to share advertisements of products. TikTok’s influence on internet culture is entirely secondary. This is completely continuous with the ad industry of the past. “I’d like the buy the world a Coke” and “Mentos” were cultural phenomenons secondarily, their purpose was to sell sugar. The point of TikTok is to create and share ads that leads to the purchase of products. The purpose of short form video is to monetize content for passive income by transforming video into something highly replayable.

Critics who bemoan the attention-span-zapping features of short-form video are not wrong that constant consumption of such things at the cost of longer-form content might affect the ability of young people to develop aesthetic and informational patience. I actually believe this is true, and see evidence of it in my classes. I am currently teaching a 400-student lecture of which about 100 sit in the back scrolling TikTok for the entire hour and 20 minutes. These kids clearly don’t want to hear or talk about moral philosophy, and me making them sit there they are repaying with TikTok scrolling. They actively resist the low replayability aesthetic of the college lecture, even when I make it entertaining.

But the same has been said of song versus opera/symphony/musical, and television versus film. Plus, the era of TikTok is also the era of the absurdly long and drawn out serialized Netflix series, or four-hour episodes of bro podcasts. There might be an effect on attention spans, but not necessarily because video shorts are short. I think there is a far more interesting difference in high replayability versus low replayability, which cuts across shortform and longform content. If we are transforming our consumption of media into more high replayability forms, then what is good and bad about short-form video isn’t its shortness per se, but what is good and bad about high replayability media and low replayability media. The lesson we should learn about short form video is the lesson we learn from pop music. There is good pop music and bad pop music; or more precisely, there is pop music that is good for things like appreciation and development of musical knowledge and aesthetic sensibilities, and pop music that is not good for such things. There is a certain virtue of high replayability forms of arts, and certain vices of it, as there are certain virtues of low replayability forms of arts, and certain vices of it.

Famously, Theodore Adorno criticized popular music, which was a particular form of jazz at the time, as predigested, unsophisticated, opiate for baby brains, infantilizing listeners and destroying their critical faculties. Its an old fuddy-duddy critique now especially in the age of poptimism, but there is something correct underlying it. The high replayability of music admits of far different hazards than something we are going to consume once, maybe twice in our lives. Its kind of like considering the importance of food. If you’re going to eat to the occasional one-off meal consisting of highly unhealthy stuff, like funnel cakes, its pretty easy to let go any of the hazards of such consumption. But if you’re going to buy a certain snack over and over, consuming it daily, it matters a lot more what you end up choosing.

I think one of the takeaways we should have in the era of poptimism (which might be coming to a close?), is that, at it worst, pop music is completely innocuous. It is not harmful, but its ongoing consumption as a high replayability form has opportunity costs for aesthetic sensibilities. Its not that you listen to endless hours of Kenny G, its that you are not listening to Sidney Bechet or Coltrane. In the era of the Tik Tok consumption is not even of full songs, but moments of them. We don’t have full films, only scenes. The playlist-ification of consumption in the current era of art-monetizability makes the ideal consumer someone who is provided a bombardment of a familiarity-dependent aesthetic.

Low replayability forms of art rely on a “surprise-dependent” aesthetics while high replayability forms rely on a “familiarity-dependent” aesthetic. Music plays on whatever part of the human experience values meaningfulness and fulfillment in familiarity. Think, your favorite menu item at your favorite diner, monogamous relationships, family, careers. Stand-up comedy plays on the part that values surprise, novelty, interestingness, intensity of pleasure; think extreme sports, vacations to exotic location, one-off love affairs, talking to strangers, eating coagulated raw blood salads on a trip to Vietnam.

These different aesthetic tells you what the hazards of the bad forms of each kind of media. Good low replayability media is epistemologically virtuous; you learn something new about the world, you experience something you haven’t experienced before. Good high-replayability prompts emotions you want to relive over and over again. Both bad high-replayability and bad low-replayability make you feel anaesthetized. You feel like you’re wasting your time with it, the emotions are dulled.

I don’t think it is an accident that very young children have a very high familiarity-dependent aesthetic, while adults have a higher surprise-dependent aesthetic. That children want to repeatedly listen to Cocomelon at an age where they still get sad every time mom or dad leave, and want to eat spaghetti and meatballs every time they go to the diner, has to be a feature of cognitive development. Part of maturity is to move out of familiarity-dependent aesthetic toward surprise-dependent ones. One of the things to lament about the dominance of pop and short-form is that it is a kind of arrested development. The transition to surprise-dependent aesthetics is not easy. I know people who are in their 30s and refuse to touch Indian food (their loss) and I knew people in their 60s in my family who refused to eat raw lettuce (because in China, they always cooked their lettuce.)

Right now, there are people, in my college class, but also in many other contexts around the world, who are actively refusing to develop out of their familiarity-dependent aesthetic. But I know a lot of people like this, who have no problem with longform content. What they don’t have is particularly appetite for surprise-dependent content.

Happy New Year Everyone!

I just turned in a draft of a book about obligations to past people and our past selves, and a lot of it is about generational wealth. It required a brief foray into theories of property.

One of the things I discovered is that most very rich people hardly own anything. What I mean by that is, if you listed all of the rights you have to have in order to count as owning something, the list that legal theorists and philosophers spent decades coming up with, it turns out that rich people don’t have full property rights over most of their “net worth,” real estate, stocks, bonds, businesses, etc. This is mostly because rich people, at least the smart ones, manage their wealth in such a way so as to avoid taxes and avoid estate taxes upon death, and this requires them to do all kinds of things that make the legal status of their “property” not really their property. Instead, their assets are tied up as collateral to loans, their assets are in a variety of “irrevocable” trusts that remove them from their estates, shield them from creditors, all things that make them beneficiaries but not owners. These are all kinds of things I explain in great detail in the book. Knowing all of this about the assets of the wealthy has made me very bearish about the effectiveness of wealth taxes (You can’t tax billionaire wealth if you simultaneously give it a legal status where it isn’t their wealth, a subject for another post!)

Because of this brief foray, I decided to try and come up with an exhaustive list of relationships people have to stuff, concrete things like houses and cars, and abstract stuff like credit default swaps and the Beatles catalogue. The common sense categories are ownership and non-ownership, but there’s are far more interesting ones. Holding something as collateral, or having given things up as collateral is in between ownership and non-ownership. You don’t have some of the rights that are necessary conditions of property. So is trusteeship, conservatorship, guardianship, so is being a beneficiary, which is the biggest topic in the book.My philosopher friends came up with a few other very interesting ones I couldn’t get to in the book. The most interesting one to me is “calling dibs” on some item, which thereby gives you some kind of informal right of use.

Calling “dibs” is a very pervasive social phenomenon. In Boston, Chicago, and other snowy regions, you have dibs on a parking spot you dug out during a blizzard. You have dibs on items you put in your shopping cart at the supermarket before you pay for them. You have dibs when you have items placed on layaway at a store. If you put your sweater down on a chair at Starbucks and then get in line, you have dibs on the seat. Children have dibs on the driver’s seat when they “call shotgun.” Dibs is a cool little sublegal, informal practice of making a claim to some property you do not own and you do not otherwise have a right to use, but by merely doing some kind of conventional gesture, you thereby generate some kind of norm of exclusion; now other people have some kind of standing obligation not to interfere with your use of the item. Dibs is staking a property claim without thereby having the claim. Having dibs is being in an in-between state between having and not having a property right, and dibs is something no one believes ought to be elevated to the status of law and legal enforcement. Someone is definitely doing something wrong by taking items out of your shopping cart, but they aren’t stealing from you, nor from the store. Neither is parking in the spot you dug out, or moving your sweater to take your Starbucks seat. But they are definitely violating a norm.

Calling dibs and having dibs looks to me like a classic phenomenon admitting of conceptual analysis. Its the kind of phenomenon that admits of boundaries we all deploy without thinking about. We intuitively know when someone successfully calls dibs and when they have not (the felicity conditions on a speech act, as J.L. Austin named it). Relative to a community, we intuitively know the kind of things we are allowed to call dibs on, and things we aren’t. We all know where dibs end and ownership begins, and we instinctively have a sense about when dibs run out over time.

For example, having lived in Poughkeepsie, NY for sixteen years, if you’re not back in your street parking spot 24 hours after you’ve left it, you’re just plum out of luck. Digging out gives you dibs, but not for that long. If anything, I think it expires closer to the eight hour mark. Shopping carts are a little tougher. So long as you’re walking around with the shopping cart, for everything in it you have dibs. Even if you abandon it to use the restroom, you still have dibs. But I once stood behind someone in line who had to leave the entire shopping cart to the side because they forgot their wallet, and wanted to go home to get it. There’s got to be some time whereby the supermarket is allowed to restock the items or people can just pick stuff out of it they need to. If I had to ballpark an expiration time for shopping cart items, I’d say two hours.

Starbucks seats and other such examples are a tough call. I’ve been to a variety of festivals, open seating concerts, venues, public parks, and tennis courts, whereby some dibs behavior I thought of as perfectly legitimate, and some I deemed incredibly rude. How do we feel about large families setting down clothing items on two tables of ten, to have dibs on twenty seats while they all go get in line for food? Does it matter how busy the Starbucks is? What if the line is very long and you are at the end of it but you put an item of clothing down for dibs on a chair? Doing this feels inappropriate to me.

If I had to speculate a priori at the moment (I’m sure someone out there has written a paper doing a more precise analysis), dibs looks like a solution to a coordination problem, a particular strategy for dividing up the commons. Stuff is going to be distributed in the commons in some way. Calling dibs gives a tie-breaking reason to start in a particular way. “Shotgun” is the “first-come-first serve” way. If two cars show up at the same time to claim the same empty parking spot, the first car to signal gets dibs. The “digging out” method identifies labor as generating dibs. Dibs finds any salient solution as the arbitrary starting point for distributing resource. If this is right, it follows that you cannot call dibs whenever there is some already conventional system in place to distribute the common resource. If seating is explicitly first-come first-serve at a Starbucks, with a sign posted, then you are not allowed to called dibs by putting your sweater on a chair. If someone sees you doing it, they are allowed to pick it up and hand it back to you.

I have heard that there are three different conventions for getting onto a bus or train in different cultures around the world. There are “swarming” cultures, whereby once a bus arrives, everyone on the platform swarms it. There are “queuing” cultures, whereby once a bus arrives, people get into a line, but everyone tries to get as close to the front as possible . Then there’s “arrival-order” cultures. People in these cultures show up to the bus stop and pay attention to who arrived before them, and who arrived after them. When the bus arrives, people queue according to the order in which they arrived at the bus stop, and take it as rude or an affront when people try to jump their arrival order. Barry Schwartz describes this as a “normatively saturated queue.” and it amounts to using arrival times to call dibs on the order in which you board the bus.

All three boarding conventions tries to distribute bus-seating according to some kind of condition of fairness. In a swarm, everyone is in “the original position” as soon as the bus arrives. The competition is only one of speed, strength, and tolerance of physical discomfort. In a “loose queue,” everyone is equally entitled to jockey for position in the queue, but there are some norms of position and politeness. Once the appearance of a straight line is established, you are not allowed to jump the queue. In arrival-order cultures, everyone abides by the same impersonal rules and enforcement mechanism whereby if you arrive earlier you board the bus earlier. You are allowed to jump the queue if you called dibs on that spot in virtue of your arrival order. The swarming method privileges the physically strong, the fast, the aggressive. The loose queue method privileges people who are higher on the asshole-dimension, i.e., the social version of speed and strength. Arrival-order privileges temporal ordering, people who have the privilege of arriving early. The egalitarian ideal is that access to shared resources should not turn on morally arbitrary advantages. Arrival-order queuing and dibs aspire to that ideal by converting earliness in time into entitlement. For bus-queuing, this is in fact at least somewhat morally connected to entitlement to get onto the bus early.

Two other concepts that I’m writing a lot about in the book are expiration and assetization. If there is a convention of calling dibs, there should also be a convention of when dibs expire. The problem is that conventions for expiration are not nearly as clear as conventions for staking a claim. This is true as much for full property rights as it is for dibs. Famously, property rights were supposed to expire according to the Rule Against Perpetuities, lives in being plus 21 years. Now that that has been repealed in a variety of states and countries, there is a “wait and see” approach. For art and music, it is life of author plus 70 years. For dibs its going to be much shorter, minutes, or hours. It is interesting to think about why conventions for making claims are so clear but conventions for expiring claims is so murky.

As for assetization, there was a practice in Boston and Chicago, whereby people who dug out their parking spaces starting putting traffic cones in the spots, trying to turn “dibs” into a more formal arrangement, prompting city officials to have meetings about how best to respond. Some argued that dibs is an institutionalized process, so that it should be codified with formal enforcement mechanism so as to resolve conflicts. People get into fistfights and long-term neighborhood beefs over parking spot dibs and their violation. Others argued that the whole point of dibs is that it has to be informal, otherwise it turns into something uglier. Formalizing dibs makes possible for the commons becomes monetized and assetized, and then it is no longer the commons.

For example, people starting digging out parking spots, put a traffic cone on it, offers to sell it to a neighbor for a price. An app developer creates CONE-Spot, an app whereby those who dig out spots uploads the location the app then puts up for auction, giving the digger a market price minus a 10% commission that it takes. Venture capital puts money into CONE-spot requiring a 10x return. Now parking access on residential streets is no longer the commons, but a tradable asset.

Dibs is a little microcosm of informal claims to property that is both a precursor but also a kind of parallel practice to formal property rights. It also gives a model for how the commons disappear. Paid layaway practices for instance are a kind of intermediate practice between dibs and property rights.

My daughter's middle school PE class has a target of a 10 minute mile. The kids hate it. Maybe 90% of the kids can't hit that target. Also, the teacher doesn’t train the kids, like run them twice a week un-timed, or teach them how to improve their running fitness and endurance. Instead, the class does a timed run maybe once every few weeks. If you hit the target, you get a pass so you don’t have to run it the next time. Running a 10 minute mile is a "test" for them, and then kids feel bad about themselves that they can't reach it. Some just walk it, knowing they’re going to fail it anyway.

This is all really bad PE teaching. The reward for good exercise shouldn’t be a pass on doing more exercise next week. Fitness tests shouldn’t be actual tests, they should be diagnostics for goal-setting, the point is for the class to try and get fit. I feel like if you're 12, 13, 14 and not physically challenged, a 10 minute mile daily isn't that high of a fitness goal. Its a warm up. And I’m not a fitness buff or anything. A ten minute mile is probably my level of fitness. I don’t think I could have done a ten minute mile in middle school, but that’s also because I had really crappy PE too.

The PE class my daughter describes is very similar to the ones I had in middle school. Hers are even less structured on a day-to-day basis. We at least had daily warm up exercises like jumping jacks and burpees. Then the P.E. teacher gave us a ball for whatever sport we were playing for the week, and said “go play” and then she would stand there monitoring for fights. Occasionally there would be some lesson about the sport, like every couple monthss there was instruction about why you don’t put the flag in flag football on your crotch, or how to serve in volleyball, but there were definitely no daily lessons. I hated PE, my wife hated PE, my child hates PE, and this hatred of PE led to a good decade where my self-conception was that I was not the exercise-type, I was not the sports type. My wife carries that attitude to this day, and that is my child’s self-conception. She already has a natural inclination to say no to physical activities. PE is making it worse.

All of this is to say that physical education in Southern California public schools is simply unforgivable. If education is supposed to inspire a lifelong love of learning, PE should at least do that for learning about and regularly working toward physical fitness. It does the opposite. It is unforgivable even if you have a sporty kid. I have friends whose kids are in soccer, water polo, martial arts, baseball, and others. Organized youth sports is on the other end of spectrum of bad, as my former colleagues Chris Bjork and Bill Hoynes at Vassar have written about, taking a love of play and exercise and transforming it into a time-sucking, joy-zapping business of over-scheduling and combative parenting. But even the sporty kids get next to nothing out of their school P.E class, at least if they’re in public schools. P.E. seems to have done the impossible in making physical play something children both dread and want to avoid.

That we don’t have better physical education is even more unforgivable given that we live in the era of the influencer. Say what you want about the values displayed in the proliferation of fitness-influencing. At least it is educational and motivational. We can get the basic differences between aerobic and anaerobic exercises, the different kinds of resistance training from weights to machines to calisthenics, how to scale up, plateauing, injury-prevention, the difference between concentric, eccentric, and isometric strength, and so forth. A P.E. teacher has a student for 50 minutes every day for the entire school year, for at least five years. Why is it that children don’t know these basics including the varieties of ways bodies can be fit and unfit, like balance, flexibility, range of motion, strength, and cardiovascular endurance? People very naturally like to self-assess their fitness if they knew the relevant metrics. Its really easy to become over-obsessed with metrics, rather than dismissive of them.

God I hope I’m wrong in generalizing, and please tell me its better in your state or locale, but there is such a big gap between what we are preaching in public policy about the health of children and the way physical education is taught in public schools. “Too many children are obese!” “We’re bringing back the Presidential fitness test!”, I keep hearing in the media. I remember the Presidential fitness test, I didn’t do all that well, couldn’t do a single pull-up. My sit and reach was, and still is, abysmal. I could do maybe 25 sit-ups in a minute. But what I don’t remember at all was training for the Presidential fitness test. I didn’t get a teacher who started out recording each student’s baseline of mile-run, push-ups, sit-and-reach, pull-ups, and sit-ups, and worked on our fitness every day so that by the time the test came around, we were fitter than when we started. A generation above mine talks about climbing the rope. I was 44 years old until I learned that there is actually a proper technique to learning the rope climb, and ways to train your grip strength and legs to do it better. I had to learn it by watching Chris Hemsworth do it on his National Geographic series Limitless. It wasn’t until I was 30 that I learned that one way to increase your running endurance and speed was to do high intensity interval running, rather than just trying to go faster each time you run the mile. Sprinting 200m then walking 200m for a mile turned out to significantly increase my endurance fitness in long distance running. I never got so much as a hint about ways to be fitter from any of my P.E. teachers. Did you boomers get instruction and practice on the rope climb or was it sink or swim?

In the philosophy of education, there are all matters of debate over the purpose of schooling; is it to prepare a democratic citizenry, prepare kids for their future vocations, childcare and surrogate parenting? These are all good questions. I don’t know the answers. No one ever questions that there is a point to physical education, because it is just so obvious that physical fitness is valuable. But none of this seems to have translated in enough public middle school P.E. teachers having a purposive curriculum for physical fitness. The mind learns, and the body learns, why aren’t P.E. classes foundations for a lifetime of physical fitness learning and development?

Just off the top of my head, here’s what I’d like to see if I were designing a physical education curriculum for my child. Daily: basic warm-up and aerobic movement, isometric and calisthenic concentric training, sport-movement skills like short distance sprinting, overhand and underhand throwing for distance and accuracy, catching and ball anticipation. Kicking balls on the ground, in the air, straight, with bends, and spin more generally. Flexibility, dynamic and static stretching and yoga. Dance and rhythmic movement. Distance running, interval training. And, absolutely without a doubt, how to safely fall while minimizing injury (break falling). I’d like my child to know the basics of physical fitness as maximizing your range of possibilities in bodily movement over time. And I don’t want kids being forced to just do things. I want them to understand the basic theory of this stuff, the uncontroversial stuff, like how muscles grow in strength and endurance, muscle memory, cardiovascular fitness, oxygen and water, electrolytes, cooling down. I’d imagine this is all a part of P.E. teacher education 101, why isn’t it part of of P.E. also?

I’m no gym rat or fitness buff. People who seem to know all kinds of arcane details about optimizing training and performance for various purposes and contexts should chime in and talk about the best ways to run a curriculum for kids with a variety of fitness levels, especially a curriculum that doesn’t ostracize and make kids feel worse about themselves, removing their motivation. There are fat kids, fit kids, small kids, tall kids. Some excel at physical team play like basketball, some need non-contact or individualized sport like track and field. And student athletes and otherwise athletic students will have a lot of differing needs. But just like with other kinds of education, can we talk about a good baseline curriculum and training regiment that apply to all 5th-11th graders? We have no problem coming up with these things for math, history, and literature. If I was paying for a daily physical education class for 50 minutes for years as an adult, you’d better believe I’d expect more than just a ball and being told to go play with my friends.

Generalizing from physical education to overall philosophy of education, I think we have one answer to what a central goal of education ought to be whether it is physical, intellectual, or manual. Education may be about citizenship, vocation, and socialization, but it is also about fitness. Fitness doesn’t just apply to the body. Intellectual health and fitness is a real thing, so is manual health. People who are incapable of reasoning their way to figuring out the length of a ramp they need to build to go up an incline, or how they would test an hypothesis about whether a drug treatment has an effect or side effect on a disease, or who are simply incapable of cutting a piece of wood, tree branch, or drive a nail or screw straight to join two pieces of material are lacking in fitness. It is not an just intellectual or manual deficit. Physical health and fitness are about a body’s disposition to operate in a certain way under familiar, novel, and variably challenging circumstances. It is about adaptive dispositions. I am horribly unfit to perform an American Ninja Warrior obstacle course, and very somewhat but not optimally fit to run a 5K at the moment. So I know I’m not as fit as I can be, but part of my life is about knowing and understanding where my fitness levels are relative to other things and to be able to know what it would take to be fitter on various dimensions. I don’t train American Ninja Warrior because I can’t fit that into my work and family life. People probably don’t remember their Calculus I for analogous reasons. But any training and knowledge your body has in upper body concentric strength means you are fitter for some tasks, or know how to act and your bodily limits when confronted with a circumstance requiring such a task, like pulling yourself up and over a wall. Having taken Calculus 1, you are disposed to encounter a situation in which those concepts are needed better than someone who never took it. For instance, you are likelier the understand the difference between the rising prices of eggs and the falling inflation rate on eggs.

Intellectual fitness is about the same thing as physical fitness. Intellectual specialists, whether it is in medical billing, logistic chains in agricultural exports, or Victorian British literature are like specialized athletes. Education in the public schools should be the foundation of all of that, physical or otherwise. Every sport requires specialized fitness, but what every athlete has is a strong foundation in the basics.

State departments of education who write out required curriculum, and university systems that write requirements for high school students by having acceptance criteria, make very conscious efforts at determining what makes for their basics of intellectual fitness. We all have opinions about how well we think our public schools are teaching to those things. I think we should hold our physical education in those schools to at least these standards. I’m not talking about the necessity of competitive, rough and tumble sports toughening up our kids. For all I care, all of this could be done with universal dance instruction. In fact, if push came to shove, I’d say that dance is probably the one form of physical education that is most comprehensive, but the nerds and jocks would protest too much. I’m talking about the physical educational equivalent of mathematical, scientific, verbal, and linguistic literacy.

So there’s my polemic about physical education. Its probably too late for my own child. Like many other bourgeois people, she’ll probably end up finding her path through extra-curriculars and eventually, gym memberships and trainers. But it is a shame because one teacher has them daily for five years and its a huge waste if something doesn’t come out of such a class.

Bernie Lee is the chair of an academic department. Chairs are in charge of course scheduling. The following is a department meeting in which a problem with course scheduling must be solved.

Kidwell is a faculty member with young children.

Nyer is a senior faculty member who has spent over 30 years in the department.

Singleton is a faculty member who lives local to the university.

(The following work is a piece of fiction. Any resemblance to real events or people is entirely coincidental. Entirely.)

Bernie: All right, next on the agenda, once again we are not in compliance with the college rules on scheduling. Let me again remind all of you about our constraints. Twenty percent of our courses have to be outside of the prime teaching spots, between 9:30am and 4:50pm, because if all the courses at the university are crammed into those slots, there are too many conflicts and our students won’t be able to fulfill their requirements. And of course, all of you know that Wednesdays 3pm-5pm is restricted, because that is when student athletes schedule their practices and competitions. So we reserve that afternoon and evening for department meetings, talks, and other administrative duties. Not enough of you are opting for the non-prime times, which is 8am and 9am, and after 5pm. And, not enough of you are teaching three days a week MWF rather than opting for a MW, or Tu Thu teaching schedule. I need volunteers to in these nonprime slots, to bring us to compliance.

Nyer: Listen, you know that I commute in from New York City now, so its two hours one way. If I have to come in for our meetings also on Wednesdays, I need a MW schedule, and its just way too hard to teach outside of the prime hours for me. I have to make the morning commute, that rules out 8am, otherwise I leave the city at 5am. And I’m not going to get back in at 10 or 11 at night. And no way I’m coming in more than twice a week.

Kidwell: I have a young child, morning school dropoff for me is 8:30am, the earliest I can get into the office is 9:30am. And I’m charged with pick-up at 3:30pm as well. There’s also things to drive her to twice a week, so if I don’t cram all of my teaching within 9:30pm-3:30pm, it is incredibly burdensome for the family. But I’m in every day so I more than make up for it in the time spent working on campus.

Singleton: Is there some way you can arrange a ride with other people for your child? We’re talking only about a couple of days a week.

Kidwell: Its not that easy. A lot of students take the bus, others don’t live on the same side of town. And in any case, it’s not that it’s impossible for me to teach nonprime, it’s just that if I do this, I’ll have to put her in five days a week of aftercare that runs over $500 a week, and she doesn’t really respond well to the after school care.

Singleton: I’ve had to accommodate the commuters and parents in this department for the past ten years. I did not chose to live two hours away, and I did not chose to have children. Those were my choices and I’m very happy with them. But that also means that I have been the go-to person who has had to take up the slack in the schedule. I’ve had to teach at 6:30pm and 8pm for many semesters, and I’ve been scheduled on MWF for fifty minutes at 9am many times. My enrollments suffer for it. My own social schedule suffers for it. I don’t know why I have to be the one who can’t work an ordinary teaching schedule just because the rest of you have made different life choices. Its unfair to me.

Nyer: I paid my dues. I lived locally for half my career before I moved to NYC. We didn’t have these stupid rules then but I did my share of accommodating the schedule of young parents, and with accommodating commuters. I did it for more than 20 years and now I finally have a schedule that works for me. Someone has to teach the non-prime spots and its got to be the people who it is easiest for them to do so. But one benefit for you is that during our normal working hours you have more freedom than we do. You can take the car into the shop or do your medical appointments. This is a kind of freedom that we give up. Why is it a sacrifice?

Singleton: It is not for you to tell me what is good or better for my schedule. I am saying that I have had to teach at hours that are not conducive to my personal life schedule, and it is not conducive to enrollments, and students just don’t like taking courses at that time, especially the ones who are also commuters. So I get the worst and most irritated students. I am just saying we should more equitably distribute who has to teach those times. It can’t always be the people who decide they will be childless and live locally.

Kidwell: It is going to be at least another 15 years before I can reasonably foresee it not being a burden for me to have to teach outside of the prime teaching hours. Having children isn’t just about picking up and dropping off. You have to spend evenings with your family and attend activities. I don’t think it is unreasonable for parents to expect a daytime work schedule that is conducive to good parenting. This is academia; we all know we work while we’re at home anyhow. It is best for my child and my family that I teach a schedule when they are also in school.

Nyer: Just put the kid in daycare, what’s the big deal? We did that when our son was young, it was fine, he turned out all right. This generation of parents are so precious about their parenting.

Kidwell: That’s a very obnoxious thing to say, Nyer. If anyone should be doing some accommodating its the more senior people who make more money and live in their fancier places two hours away from work. What are you doing, going to musicals and gastropub tastings? Empty nesters who have no concerns about tenure, promotion, or salary should be the first people we ask to make sacrifices in scheduling. Since when did seniority mean that you get first dibs on the ideal scheduling for your life?

Nyer: Its called paying your dues. That’s what it means to be in this career. A lot of things suck when you’re young. Having young children sucks for your career, that’s why some people don’t have them. Singleton is right about that. Singleton should not have to be punished because you decided to do something that is burdensome on your schedule. This is true no matter what career you’re in.

Kidwell: I thought we were all progressives here who believe that child-rearing is a value that we need society as a whole to value. Everyone in here advocates higher taxation that pays for paid family leave and affordable childcare at the state or national level. I see progressives sitting right at this table who won’t even make the one little sacrifice of teaching on a Friday or teaching at 7pm. What kind of hypocrisy is this? Progressive family policy for the country, but if I have to commute back to the city for a semester at 9pm, it’s over?

Singleton: I don’t think it is progressive to expect single and childless people to be constantly making sacrifices on behalf of people who have children. I know it sucks, and is more expensive to have children. But that’s the cost of having children, its unavoidable. You know that when you have children you aren’t going to be able to do the same things as single people. Yes, I can work on my research projects 10 hours a day outside of my teaching. You can’t. That is why I am more productive in my research. Do we have to make a parenting accommodation in your personnel review? Do you get points added to your research productivity, or I get points taken off for mine? No, because taking a hit in your productivity is something you expect will happen when you have many fewer hours to work on your research once you have children. This is the same thing. We should have a fairer way of distributing teaching times as though we are all equal, not make special accommodations for people with children.

Kidwell: I think the way things are is fair. My children and the children of everyone else are the very reason why you and a lot of people are going to have a retirement. Younger people need to be around and working when you’re 65 and ready to collect social security. The very existence of this institution and many others requires there to be young people who exist in the future. Philosopher Sam Scheffler even argued that the very meaningfulness of anything you do Singleton, all that research you work so hard at publishing, depends on my child and many other people’s children existing in the future to read it. So who is free-riding off of whom when all we parents ask is to have normal teaching hours while our children need us when they’re young?

Nyer: Those sound like attacks on Singleton’s life choices Kidwell. I agree with Singleton that maybe I should be more accommodating in scheduling. There really is no difference between me deciding to live in New York City and Singleton deciding that they would like a bi weekly trip to New York City to have fun in the middle of the workweek. There’s really no reason we need to preclude that from Singleton’s schedule just because they have decided not to procreate. That is not a moral failing of Singleton’s. They are not free-riding on society, and owe no one else anything, including you and your children for those wholly morally permissible choices. As far as I see, if it’s morally okay and completely blameless not to have children, and morally okay and completely blameless to have children, then both of you are on equal moral grounds. And so if teaching in non-prime hours is an equal burden, why should it always fall on Singleton? It sounds like we should find some way to equitably distribute this burden.

Bernie: Okay here is my proposal. We all take turns over the course of the semesters within our three year plan to teach in non-prime hours equally. Any accommodations we have to make in our lives to make this happen, we do for the semesters we are asked to take on this burden. No one has any special claim to make exceptions.

Kidwell: I think this is an improvement over what we have been doing, which is making Singleton bear the burden alone. But I do not agree that this is the fairest way to do things. I think being a parent is something others have a moral obligation to accommodate. We all know that primary caregivers suffer greatly in their career and lifetime earnings. Everyone acknowledges that it is absolutely essential work for the rest of society that children get the best care their caregivers can give. People without kids in local schools pay school taxes because that is what it means to have communal values. We all bear a burden for the well-being of future generations. All I am asking from my colleagues is to make a sacrifice that isn’t even close to comparable with our school taxes, and bear the burden of teaching in non-prime hours while I raise my kid. I don’t see how this is controversial given the values we all espouse?

Bernie: There is ethics, then there is politics and policy. Even if you’re right about the issue on moral grounds, this is the best compromise we can come up with, especially because we need to turn in a schedule to the registrar by 5pm today and we need to resolve this issue now.

Singleton: I’ll make the accommodation. For one last academic year I’ll be the one who takes up the non-prime time. I’ll teach at 7pm MWF. But this is the last time because it is unfair to me. We need to come up with a better system.

Bernie: Yes, let us go back to the drawing board in our next meeting and try to figure out other ways we might address this problem. Maybe we can look for other burdensome activities in the department that we can redistribute in light of the fact that Singleton is always teaching at the non-prime hours.

If you are lucky enough to be regularly invited to do things, you will soon learn there are no uniform practices about how to invite and how to manage invitations. Because I am a few years into a high-invitation segment of my career, I’ve noticed that few people know how varied practices are in terms of invitations and expectations. This is an informational and best practices guide for people who are inviting and people who are being invited.

The Most Important Difference

The most important difference in invitations is between the kind that pay, and the kind that requires the invited person to pay.

Invitations that pay will cover your airfare, lodging, and provide you with some kind of honorarium or speaking/appearance fee. Different institutions may differ on what they can provide. Maybe some places pay a very low honorarium, or can’t pay for airfare but can pay for lodging. Some places pay for everything. What is important is that this kind of invitation has a budget for your visit.

Invitations that require the invited person to pay are things like being on a panel at a conference or being chair or commentator, or something like that, which does not include travel, lodging, and most definitely no honorarium. But there are other kinds of invitations like this. Perhaps they are more local or regional, like speaking to a high school or representing your institution in some kind of event or venue.

For people who have very little resources, or on the opposite end of the spectrum, for people who are invited to too many things and have to prioritize, this is one kind of information that is really important to know. It can be a real blow to someone after saying yes to what looks like a good opportunity to know that all of a sudden, they owe a $500 conference registration fee, two nights at a hotel that might run many hundreds of dollars, and airfare and transportation that runs in the hundreds. Maybe some people have a healthy research/travel budget they use for this stuff, but many of you don’t. It is amazing that people who do the inviting don’t realize this information is important; they simply assume people being invited know.

My most important best-practices advice is for inviting institutions to say up front in your invitation which one of these invitations it happens to be. For people on the invited side, please request this information as soon as you get an invitation, and know it before saying yes or no. You’d be surprised that something that sounds like it is clearly an invitation that pays is actually one requiring you to pay, or vice versa.

Amongst invitations that pay something, there are very different practices about how you get paid and reimbursed. Some institutions want you to book all travel and hotel yourself and submit receipts for reimbursement. Others want, even need, to do all of this stuff for you through the company travel agent, and do not want any receipts for reimbursement. Still others will do one of these for travel but not for lodging, or vice versa. Inviting institutions and individuals should recognize this wide variety of practices across the entire field and inform invitees as early as possible what their practices are. Invited people, ask this information as soon as you are clear that this is an invitation with a budget, so that you are not caught off guard and will be on the hook for any costs. Also, keep a filled out W9 all the time with you electronically (you can easily find this at the IRS website as a PDF). Print this out on your trip and hand it to the relevant administrative assistant in charge of your reimbursement (this is if you don’t want to send these over email for security reasons).

Big Shots and Speaking Fees

Some institutions take for granted that if you invite someone, you must pay them some kind of speaking/appearance fee. Other units, maybe centers, research groups, professional organizations, are absolutely shocked that people get paid for speaking. Still others know there are people who require speaking fees and would like to invite them, but have anxiety that their little budget wouldn’t be enough for some imagined exorbitant fee.

Yes, there are people who require speaking fees. There are also people who speak for nothing so long as you cover travel and lodging. There are also people who pay out of their own travel budget or pocket to go to something to speak to people. Sometimes the same person is in all three categories depending on the invitation. Sometimes a person will never do something if their speaking fee is not met. But you do not know ahead of time who is whom. So don’t make assumptions.

Some departments and universities have standard speaking fees, as may some conferences or corporate gigs. It might be a departmental policy, or a directive handed down by higher level administrators that, say, an assistant professor gets $1000, while a distinguished professor gets $2000, something like that. Still others have very loose rules about speaking fees. Maybe there is a high and low end in the budget for a particular speaker or speaker series, or just one budget for all speakers, and people negotiate to try and get who they want. Some centers are very well-endowed and can afford heftier speaking fees, but know very well that academics tend to require smaller ones while industry people demand higher ones. But, as a general rule, if you are an academic, you will tend to get smaller fees. If you plan to invite someone in industry, they may find your offer of academic-level fees to be laughable. Academics are typically on salary and find invitations to speak as career advancement. People in industry need to take days off from work which creeps into vacation time, and thus a grand does not make up for it.

On the other side of things, some academics have speaking agents, and set their speaking fees according to scales worked out between the agent and agency. This is the cost of getting this person to speak if you do it through the agent. Doing it through the agency means there is a formal contact number; you talk to the agent, not the speaker. The agent may try then and there to negotiate with you, and has the discretion never to take the offer to the speaker if they deem it not worth their time to consider. Probably they will take the offer to the speaker, even if it is under their usual price, but there is a chance they may not. Agents get a commission on speaking engagements, and so too low a fee and it isn’t worth their effort to pick up the phone and call their client.

If you are an inviting institution with a standard honorarium, please indicate that in your invitation. If you are an academic who needs to juggle all kinds of invitations, money is one way to prioritize, but not the only way. If you are being asked to travel across the country and stay two nights for a one hour talk that lands you $300, and you simply can’t justify leaving your family for childcare arrangements that far exceed that amount, you at least have a way to set your boundary. On the other end of the invitation, if you are not a wealthy institution but you really want big shot public intellectual so-and-so who lists a speaking agent, but you suspect some exorbitant speaking fee you can’t afford, it does not hurt to privately email the individual (not the agent) to see if they are willing to do your event at a discount. Some big shots hold firm on their speaking fees because they really need to prioritize all of their invitations, and that is how they have decided to do it. They will not respond, simply directing you to their agent. In that case, you pitch the agent, you tell them about the engagement, the fee you are able to pay, and have them work it out with their client. If you can’t afford them, then you can’t afford them.

But I will say that some big shots make exceptions for events and people. In fact they may make exceptions more often than you think. It is okay to ask. If you want to get big shot to do your conference, and their usual fee is $10,000, but you can only offer $2000, but you went to grad school with this big shot, they might just say yes, bypassing their agent (who then will not get 15% of the fee). Even if you have no special connection, some big shots are Rawlsian, they ask exorbitant amounts of Harvard but will do something for $1000 for your regional research center.

Asking is also okay for if you are invited, but hesitate at the low speaking fee. If you are invited and offered a $200 honorarium, but $500 would really help make the math work out for childcare back at home to allow you to do this, just ask. If the institution can do it, they will, and if they cannot, it is not insulting that you asked. Institutions are well aware that asking someone to travel across the country or the Atlantic ocean for three total days is a lot.

If you are some kind of corporate or otherwise well-endowed group outside of the university ecosystem, or are being invited by one, you should have an expectation that the speaking fee will be significantly higher than what you might expect from a little philosophy department at a Catholic liberal arts college. These kinds of places pay thousands and thousands for other kinds of speakers, and it is not a particularly good look for academic philosophers to accept significantly less to do the same work, nor is it a good look for such institutions to offer academic philosophers significantly less. Maybe you’re flattered that someone is offering you $2000 to give a talk at the Society of Swiss Entrepreneurs, and I wouldn’t judge anyone negatively for taking it, but if their standard speaking fee is $10,000, and that’s what they gave last week to that weirdo on Twitter that you really hate, and they would have gladly given you the $10,000 had you asked, you’d probably end up feeling kind of rotten about it all. Lowballing academics is a thing.

Finally, some invitations have rigorously scheduled events with someone picking you up at the airport, a breakfast with such-and-such group, a lunch with the graduate students, a talk, meeting with some donors, and so forth, while others just expect you to show up at a certain place at a certain time, where how you get there is your responsibility. More often than you would think, no one communicates ahead of time which one it is. Okay, that’s false. If you’re rigorously scheduled, you’re getting an itinerary in advance. This is really about the other kind of people, the kind who do the inviting and then you hear nothing from them. If you’re the kind of place that doesn’t have a practice of transportation and hosting, do let the person know that ahead of time, so they can be prepared to Uber or taxi or whatever.

I guess the big lesson I would draw for everyone is that it isn’t safe to take for granted that there is a norm for how things are done when it comes to invitations, and hosting, and payment, and reimbursement and everything surrounding travel to a location to do something. The way you do things at your institutions, the way your invitations have gone in the past just aren’t universal. But everyone seems to assume that their way of doing it is the norm, which is a cause of a lot of misunderstanding.

Advice on Saying Yes or No

Okay, so you are incredibly privileged and happen to enter a stage in your career where you are in high demand. You are getting invitations to do things that require travel to places and talking to people. But you also have a lot of responsibilities at home. There are classes to teach, committees to sit through, children to pick up and drop off, dinners you’re responsible for making for the family. Do I have any advice about how to prioritize?

I am the absolute worst person to ask about this, because I say yes to pretty much everything. But in my circles there are plenty of people who have very similar, very privileged problems, and these are some of the ways they have prioritized.

1. Money-Some people do a calculation based on their salary and workload and things like that and come up with a certain number that they have determined their time is worth, and if some invitation does not meet that threshold, they do not say yes.

2. Friends and Favors-Some people do things when asked by people they are close to or people in the profession they have collaborated with, people who have done favors for them, or people they expect they will need help from in the future. For example, if the President of the American Philosophical Association personally invites someone to be on some kind of panel, and this is the kind of event that the invitee has to pay, upwards of a thousand dollars, to do, they may say yes just because of the person who asked.

3. Moral Considerations-Some people have moral or ecological reasons against too much air travel, and will only do things within driving or train distance. Others will say yes to academia but no to corporate speaking gigs on moral grounds. Still others have a thing against certain funders or institutions, so they boycott. Someone once said to me online that, had they known some program I was running was funded by Princeton, they wouldn’t have applied because they didn’t want to give Princeton more prestige. If that is your stance, more power to you, I’m sure Princeton is really missing out.

4. Career Advancement-Some people are incredibly strategic about prioritizing. They will do events whereby the people who attend are the kind of people who might hire them, or help promote them (like write them a tenure or promotion letter), or advance their career in some other way (like invite them to contribute to a volume). They will turn down events if they think the people in attendance will not help them in their career (like an event talking to a bunch of high school students about the value of philosophy.)

5. Fixed numbers-Some people look at their schedule and decide they will do no more than one travel event a month, or one a semester, or three a year, or whatever. Within that range, they will then prioritize by the other methods.

Maybe it’s because I’m a first-gen college grad, but I didn’t really develop the habit of asking questions in advance about any of these things when I first started getting invitations. I just said yes and let everything play out. I just figured there’s this hidden world that works a certain way, and its my job to figure out on my own how it works. That’s why I’ve ended up at airports waiting for a host to pick me up but realized, I guess I’m on my own, or I’ve booked travel but it turns out I needed to go through some travel agent so I wasn’t given a reimbursement. Explicit instruction would have helped, so hopefully this will be helpful to the next generation of first-gen professionals, or anyone else, whose advisor or professors never told them about this side of the academic life.

When I was in my 30s, I became convinced that the best time to peak was in your mid-late fifties. Bryan Cranston, during the Breaking Bad era, was the inspiration. Up to that point, I knew Cranston as a character actor on sitcoms. He was Watley on Seinfeld, and the dad on Malcolm in the Middle. He was known and recognized, but not universally acclaimed to be one of the greats of his generation. Then came Breaking Bad, Oscar-nominated films, Emmys, Tonys, Screen Actor Guild awards, all in his mid to late 50s. Now he’s widely accepted to be a generational talent, and an all around great human being. ChatGPT was kind enough to graph Cranston’s career arc, making some guesses about the tail end because Cranston is not that old (sorry Bryan, I wouldn’t have drawn the downward slope!).

At the time, I took Cranston’s career arc to be normative; it was something to strive for. The best time to peak was in your mid to late fifties. The other person I remember admiring a lot was Marc Maron, whose earlier career and life failures were a theme in the early days of WTF, a podcast which ended up driving his career renaissance in his mid to late 50s. Recently, Maron, now in his early 60s, announced the end of the show, capping a peak that came with many comedy specials, a few television series, film roles, books, and critical acclaim for his interviewing prowess.

As soon as I was convinced that the best time to peak was in the mid fifties, I started structuring my life to achieve it. It is an ongoing project, and we’ll see in about a decade if it pays off. It is a gamble because there are two ways I can fail. The 20-year-plan might not pay off. To state the obvious, “succeeding” is a success term; it is possible to take all the steps and still fail; the world still need to cooperate. But the other way to fail is that I am wrong about the best time to peak. Maybe I reach my mid 50s and realize it was far better to have peaked in my 30s, or wait until my 70s. There wasn’t any rigor to my thinking. I just found people I identified with who were peaking and wanted to peak at the same time they did. Not everything you believe and act upon has to survive philosophical scrutiny. But now that I am halfway through the project, maybe it is time to build an argument. Maybe it will keep me motivated for the next 10 years.

Principle 1: If you peak in middle or high school, you’ve lost.

I think most people will accept this as axiomatic. But there is also empirical evidence. The coolest kids in adolescence turn out to be losers by their 20s. It makes sense; think of what it means to peak at 14; it probably means you smoke cigarettes, have sex, drink alcohol, and act like an adult amongst a group of insecure children, all acts we at middle-age recognize to be reckless and destructive behavior. But even if you aren’t a juvenile delinquent, but rather the star receiver who scores four touchdowns in a single game and insist the world recognize it for years afterward, you still don’t want adolescence to be your highest point. Peak too young and the rest of your life is in the shadow of your youth.

Principle 2: If you peak in your 80s, you’re going to die at your peak, which is a tragedy.

Peak too old and you’ve lived most of your life aspiring without reaching. Peaking at the end of life makes for a redemptive life, but if I had to pick, I’d want a period of life when one is not striving, but reflecting, enjoying success and making sense of it rather than trying to top it. In recent years, I’ve also developed a healthy dose of bitterness about the choice of many octogenarians in American life not to step aside but rather continue to ride their wave of power for a third or fourth act. I’m not going to name names, but suffice it to say the younger among us attribute some rather awful consequences when already successful people refuse to slide down from their peak in old age. Peaking old may seem like something to strive for when you’re living inside your timeline. Who wants to think that their best days are behind them? But outside of the time line, it looks more like a curse, and a way to impose yourself on younger generations in an attempt to cheat mortality.

Take these general principles together and it follows that some time in mid-life is the ideal time to peak. But I don’t think its in your 40s, because other research suggests that that’s the time in which people are most unhappy. Peaking is not the same as being most happy. To the contrary, happiness and peaking have a loose and sometimes antagonistic relationship. Just ask 90s techno artist Moby, who told Jonathan Goldstein on one of the first episodes of Heavyweight,

“Literally the most depressed I've ever been in my entire life was the height of my professional success.”

This is not unusual for people who peak in their earlier adulthood. Peaking means the height of accomplishment. The ideal time to peak should be a time when you’ll be happy and content with your peak, not a time when peaking comes with misery, insecurity, and a constant dissatisfaction associated with wanting more. There are very good reasons not to want to peak in your 20s and 30s; there’s too much life ahead of you, too much competition with yourself. Later life peaks are likelier to be earned, not gifted. As a result, they are likelier to be experienced with maturity and perspective rather than the chaos that plagues young peakers; phenoms, prodigies, the precocious, the beautiful. I’ve seen too many young peakers drown in their own early greatness, unsure whether their success was earned or gifted. There was the tennis player Donald Young who was the youngest ever #1 junior and the future of American tennis, but who retired last year after a completely unremarkable career. And of course, there are many 80s actors like Corey Feldman. Molly Ringwald, and MacCauley Culkin, and even academic peers who were stars out of graduate school but faded since. People who peak older seem to experience success with wisdom, and Socrates was right in his speech to Athens more than two thousand years ago. Wisdom, not wealth, fame, and acclaim, is what makes success good.

The case against the 40s, 30s, and 20s makes late midlife seems like the sweet spot for peaking. Ergo, the ideal time to peak is the mid to late fifties.

Some careers have multiple peaks. Ke Huy Quan has had quite the renaissance after being one of the most recognizable child actors of the 80s. Without such a revival, Quan would have peaked at age 10. Given that particular peak, it wasn’t a tragedy, but it is not something any of us want for ourselves or our children. But instead, Quan second peak has become the Hollywood comeback story of the 2020s.

Other actors have wide peaks. Their careers hit a peak and they continue to ride the peak well into their 60s or 70s. Tom Cruise comes to mind, and so does Meryl Streep. This graph of Streep’s career arc actually undersells it. If I had to draw the graph, I’d say it shot up in her late 20s and stayed just as high ever since, with no sign it is falling.

For most actors, however, the more typical peak is some time in their 30s. I remember watching television in the 2010s and there was a period when Joel McHale, Olivia Munn, Chelsea Handler, and Zooey Deschanel were everywhere. I saw Joel McHale hosting a game show the other day, but haven’t seen the others much recently. Still other figures are late bloomers, like Julia Child, Anthony Bourdain, or Laura Ingalls Wilder, who rode late career peaks right to their deaths.

In a graph of someone’s arc of accomplishments, the area under the curve is the total amount someone has accomplished, whereas the shape of the curve is the change in accomplishment over time. You can do the same with someone’s happiness, or someone’s beauty, or physical fitness, pretty much anything we want to measure about a person’s life. Once someone’s life is complete, you can look back at the person’s entire lifespan and measure both the totality of their accomplishments as well as the arc. The totality of accomplishment, the area under the curve, tells you how rich their life was. The arc tells the story.

A question worth asking is how much the arc matters. Whose career was better once it is all over, Bryan Cranston or Woody Harrelson, who never really peaked but has had a steady list of accomplishments? From within the life timeline, these are the same questions as what we wish we had done differently, what we regret, what we’re happy with, what we value, and how we plan.

People who advocate “additive” views of value think the arc does not matter, only the area under the arc. If you are measuring someone’s life happiness, you measure the total amount of happiness, not whether it peaks or dips at various times. If you’re measuring professional success, having three platinum albums in the 90s and then disappearing until the nostalgia tour 30 years later is equivalent to having one platinum album in the 90s, one in the 2000s, and one in the 2010s, so long as everything else, like record sales, Spotify plays, and ticket sales are comparable. You compare Oasis and Weezer, to use a slightly imperfect example, and say both had equally good careers. According to Additivists, I am making a big mistake in aiming to peak in my late fifties; I should aim to maximize my accomplishments more generally, irrespective of when they happen.

“Narrativist” on the other hand believe the shape of the arc matters. The intuition is that arcs tell a story, and the quality of your life story contributes to a well-lived life. If you take Ke Huy Quan and flatten out his career arc, let’s say he was the neighbor kid on Mr. Belvedere in the 80s, was a computer nerd on some WB show in the 90s, played the annoying friend in Judd Apatow movies in the 2000s, and shows up in cameos in various streaming series today, that the totality of Quan’s accomplishments can sum up to to what the actual Ke Huy Quan has accomplished. He would have an equally good career and life according to Additivists. But according to Narrativists, that career is nowhere near as interesting as being the kid from Temple of Doom and Goonies, disappearing for 40 years, then coming out of nowhere in his 50s to win an Oscar. There is a reason comeback stories are repeatedly told for generations, while stories of persistent mediocrity are not. For Narrativists, having an interesting arc makes a life better.

Narrativists get a bad rap from philosophers these days. They point to examples of boring but otherwise virtuous lives, like a person who takes care of moderately infirm people in a kind of Sisyphean, repetitive life who has no particular accomplishment. They then dare Narrativists to claim that these people lead less good lives than people who are comparatively vicious but have interesting stories (like Breaking Bad’s Walter White).

Other counterexamples to Narrativism include lives that are not particularly good stories, like people who go from one hobby to another, but fail to turn anything into a coherent life project. People who find momentary fulfillment in fleeting interests have boring arcs. But, Additivists say, these people lead good lives, better than a lot of people who have good life stories. The obsession with good stories is just a symptom of imposing the pleasures of gossip on the value of lives.

Most of these counterexamples, in my view, overplay the hand about what makes for a good story. Stories can be interesting even if they are not particularly cinematic. Stories can be interesting episodically even if they are not particularly coherent over a lifetime. And anyway, Narrativism should be thought of as an “all things being equal” claim. Only when all else is equal does the arc make a difference to the overall quality of life. Yes, very good people who lead uninteresting lives are still much better people than very interesting people who lead very bad lives. The arc is only one thing that makes your life good.

But it can still be true that, all things being equal, with the area under the curve remaining the same, the arc of the curve contribute to the overall quality of a person’s life.

Interestingness is one amongst many things that make a life valuable. Interestingness is a value that we can graph just like we can other features of a life. My adolescent years and my 30s were far more interesting than my 20s. At 13, I got caught up in petty street crime, at 14 I developed a drug and alcohol problem, at 15-18 I alternated hair and fashion styles annually, tried my hand at House music DJing, break dancing, grunge rocking, and then swing dancing (I know, very 90s right?). But in my 20s I was pretty one dimensional, pursuing the study of humanities and then philosophy.

My 30s were far more interesting than my 20s, and my 40s even more so, in ways that I prefer not to relive (who would want to relive the 2020s?). But interestingness is not just a property of lives with their own arcs, they are properties of arcs themselves. Ke Huy Quan’s arc is more interesting that Bryan Cranston’s, even though I prefer to live Cranston’s and not Quan’s. Quan’s arc is intrinsically more interesting than even Meryl Streep’s, even though every actor, and most people really, would probably trade their accomplishments for Streep’s simply by the sheet size of the area under her arc.

To accept that arcs matter is to accept that interestingness, beauty, and other story-driven properties like redemption and tragedy make lives good. We can accept this without thereby devaluing aspects of life that are supposed to be more valuable than these story-driven aesthetic properties, like leading a morally good life. It is not a supreme value to aim for an interesting arc, but it is still a value worth having. The Ancient Greeks understood that beauty, in all of its complexity, can be a pursuit in life as much as any other virtue.

The final consideration in favor of some kind of Narrativism is that what makes for a good story isn’t just some kind of sui generis artifact of free floating values. We like comeback stories, Cinderella stories, redemption stories, and underdog stories because these are the kinds of lives from which we draw the most meaning.

Critics of Narrativism have it backwards. They think it is a mistake to impose on lives the things we value in stories. But I think we value particular story arcs because lives lived according to those arcs have a particular kind of unique value to us; they’re lives that are particularly interesting, meaningful, inspirational, worth learning from, and add both knowledge and beauty to the lives of others. It is precisely because certain life arcs have a distinctive kind of value that we think stories that have those arcs are particularly worth our attention. Interesting lives make good stories, not the other way around.

So not only do I think some kind of Narrativism is true, I think it has to be. Stories are just schemas of life arcs of particular importance to us. Peaks matter, even if I’m wrong that they ought to happen in your 50s.

Once a year for the past few years, I’ve booked an event at a conference venue in the Hudson Valley for ten days. The event brings together forty five philosophers, and leaders in the media business such as editors for the New Yorker and New York Times, the major trade presses, prominent radio/podcast people, and the philosophers learn about what is involved in starting to do more public-facing work.

The event is sponsored by nonprofit granting agencies, and the cost is not insigificant. I’d say the entire venue, lodging, room and board, conference facilities and A/V, run about $70,000 for the ten days. We book almost a year ahead of time, but we love the venue because the premises have a bar, pool, exercise facilities, and a really nice outdoor hang-out lawn were people can talk, network, and have drinks. Past fellows love this part of the night the best, and stay out until past midnight just talking amidst the fireflies.

About four months before we were scheduled to arrive, well after we signed the contract with the facility, we were informed that another group, a private company that does financial services in NYC, was going to overlap with our group for a day and a half. This is something we’re used to. It is a very large facility. We’ve overlapped with day campers, entertainment networks, weddings, large corporations, vacationers, and memorably one year, a men’s bonding group.

But this NYC financial group did not seem happy sharing the facilities with us. They were asking everyone in our group to sign an NDA, a nondisclosure agreement, for simply being at the venue at the same time they were. I didn’t know this company from a hole in the wall. I didn’t plan to interact with them at all, nor did I think a group of academic philosophers would be interested in what they were doing. Even if they were, we wouldn’t have time. So my first reaction was; no. Why would we? There was nothing we were getting in exchange for the NDA. We already signed a contract with the facility, our work there had absolutely no connection with anything this group was doing. Besides, signing an NDA puts you at risk for legal liability. Who knows who these people are; anyone who asks twenty strangers to sign a legal document just because you happen to be staying at the same hotel as they are might just be crazy enough to sue you on the basis of that document in the future. Hard no.

We went about our business. I even forgot about it by the time we showed up to the venue.

Three days into our conference, I see a woman with a walkie-talkie and name tag quietly walk into our session and take our program director aside. Apparently, the same company was scheduled to arrive the next night, and because no one in our group signed the NDA, the company asked the facility to do the following: (1) Prohibit our group from using the dining facilities that they were using for breakfast the next day. (2) Sequester us at the conference hall in which we were holding our sessions, including for lunch, dinner, and breaks, and (3) prohibit us from hanging out on the lawn in the evening, especially between 8:30pm-9pm when they planned to hold an event elsewhere at the facility, but that might be visible from the lawn. We were to be sequestered for one and a half days, after which our group would once again be allowed free access to the rest of the facility.

In exchange for our cooperation, the facility offered us an open bar of wine and beer for the one night we were inconvenienced. We agreed, to be cooperative with the facility, and because it just didn’t seem worth fighting about since I was so busy with the actual event.

What this ended up consisting in was, the next morning we were ushered away from the dining hall for breakfast into our own separate dining room, which was neither bussed nor serviced while we were there. Half of the fellows couldn’t find the food, which was served in a separate room with the door closed. Then the venue catered our lunch and dinner at our conference room. That night, after dinner for the social hang out, we had to take benches from the lawn down to our conference room so we could enjoy the open bar sequestered from the rest of the facility. No else at the venue ended up on the lawn that night. An employee of the venue, a server, told us the super secret group probably just didn’t want to see us there. There was no risk of us finding out who they were, because they actually held their event in a separate area of the venue. He told us to just go hang out there as we would like, but I already agreed not to. The event we supposedly weren’t allow to see? A drone light show that lasted about 15-20 minutes.

I’m perfectly within my rights to name both the facility and the company involved, and if I were the angry trouble-making type, I would, since I signed no NDA. But I’m not going to do that, because I’m interested in whether there is a lesson in this story, or some kind of social commentary worth communicating. Or maybe its just a good story to tell.

While it was happening, I thought about a Cantonese saying my mom always shouted any time someone rich made some kind of flex. Mom was a bank teller; an immigrant with an 8th grade education who fled Mao’s communist China. She had a very strong moral compass. Some big shot might storm into the bank demanding special treatment because they had a large deposit or withdrawal, or someone in a Mercedes might be driving or parking like an asshole. She’d say, and the translation is something like, “Does being rich make you the biggest in the room?”

As I see it, there are three players in this little saga, each with some blame. The NYC financial services company, the venue, and us. The company was trying to use money and an NDA, which is a legal threat, to do a little flex on us. They were trying to impose burdens on strangers to which they were not entitled by simply flashing money. I’m sure the only reason the venue would even ask us to sign an NDA, after we already signed a contract with them, is because this company had a little extra money to ask the venue to make requests they never would have done otherwise. The company had very minor interests that conflicted with our very existence at the venue, and they are used to flexing their wealth in a way to get what they want. The moral failure of the company is that they are rich assholes, who do not see other people’s interests as constraints on any of their own behavior. Any problem, no matter how minor, can be bought, threatened, or sued away.

Then there is the venue, who made a decision to issue two unreasonable requests of an agreeable client on behalf of an asshole client. From their perspective, the agreeable client is likelier to compromise and cooperate, and if that happens, then the asshole client gets what they want, and the venue gets to keep both clients, and are out only about $200 in alcohol costs. On the other hand, if they do not make the unreasonable request, the asshole client is likelier to bail, and you have only an agreeable client, who would likely have cooperated anyway.

But that’s not how I would have handled it. If I were the venue owner, I would have told the asshole to fuck off. I’m not asking another client to sign an NDA, nor asking them to sequester themselves even for a day. These are unreasonable demands given the contract, unreasonable demands given that we care about all of our clients. There are some kinds of special treatments you simply aren’t entitled to at a venue no matter how much money you flex. I’d bet there is an amount of money I could give to the manager of a McDonalds to kick out a family that I don’t want sitting in the same room as me. If I made the offer, the manager has a decision to make, the family has a decision to make, and everyone is free to decline it. Is libertarianism and business transactionality so endemic to American thinking that we think this kind of offer should be a normal course of interaction with other people in the world?

And finally, there is us, or me really, who ended up deciding to comply with the second request. The whole event ended up going smoothly despite some hiccups like this, thanks so much to my program director who had to do all the dealing on site. For that, I’m grateful. But this episode still nags me. One thing I could have done was demand that to which we were entitled, namely, free use of the grounds and facilities as determined by our contract. The rich assholes flexed their wealth on us and they benefited, the venue benefited, but our group did not; we were only burdened. These were minor burdens; if they were imposed on us because of a busted water pipe or construction, I would have thought nothing of it. But the fact that they were burdens imposed, against our contractual rights with the venue, as a result of a flex, should have been a sign to me. I probably should have put on my own libertarian-business-lawyer, homo-economicus hat, and asked exactly how much extra the venue was getting for imposing such a burden on us on behalf of the asshole client. I then should have asked for half of it. I know many people, very nice people, who would be the kind of people who, while running the same program I was running, do exactly that. But I’ve never built the stomach for it.

So my mistake is that I could have asked for a generous amount of compensation for the foundation for signing the NDA, or for the burdens imposed on us. I cooperated for prosocial purposes, while everyone else defected. We had minor burdens placed on us, everyone else got what they wanted, we all moved on.

I don’t know what the lesson of this little episode is. Is playing nice in a world of flexers noble—or just naive?

There was a time when effective altruists were very concerned with kidney donation. There were long debates about it in effective altruist forums and a consensus was reached that most people ought to donate one of their kidneys to a stranger. The arguments were decisive, many effective altruists did donate. I even did an episode about it on Hi-Phi Nation.

Some years later in 2023, Michael Lewis was writing about Sam Bankman-Fried and in the process, wanted to learn about effective altruism by talking to young Harvard effective altruists. Asked about the most morally urgent problems in their lives, most of them said they thought working in tech on AI safety issues or making a lot of money on Wall Street to give away was the path to take. Then Lewis asked them about kidneys. Two of the Harvard kids replied this way:

• Student 1: A lot of people were thinking about this and it seems like there is like quite a compelling case. Maybe like a lot of people just die from being on the kidney wait list, and like there aren't enough kidneys, and uh, seems like generally it's somewhat safe to survive on one kidney for a lot of people. Maybe this just like is a very direct way to mostly kind of factually save someone's life…I've not thought about this a lot. I've not given a kidney. I don't know anyone else my EA friends who has. It seems like for various reasons, this is like falling out of favor in the conversations. It's also just like a very extreme kind of commitment, like it's a very bad recruiting strategy to be like, hey have you heard of effective altruism? By the way, can we have your kidney? This is this is like I don't know, it's not the best way to like approach people, I think.

• Student 2: I've had some friends bring up the discussion of kidneys. It still seems mostly like a throw away philosophical argument than necessarily a direct moral imperative. I don't think there's ever been a instance where someone who's like, “I'm going to donate my kidney unless someone gives me a good argument to stop me.”

What is striking to me about these responses is just how dismissive these effective altruist 2.0 kids are about extensively researched and argued moral questions that many of their EA 1.0 predecessors worked very hard at formulating, steel-manning, and then anticipating every last objection and response to. Moral urgency does not just “fall out of favor” unless the moral problem is solved, but of course it has not been.

You can’t blame these kids, though. There was another extensively researched and argued for set of questions that they did read and debate, about extinction-level AI and the need to earn a lot of wealth to give away to effective altruist causes (earning to give). So you can’t blame them for not knowing the significance of every debate their predecessors had.

Academic cycles are not like cycles in the real world. Most people don’t “leave for summer.” Most people don’t need to have some project that gets them tenure, then some other projects that gets them to full professor, and then some other project that gets them public fame. Most people don’t have a constantly recycling class of young people to spread ideas to, old and new. And most people don’t have to teach the same classes for years on end, get bored and feel they have to change it up, or write and defend ideas for years or decades on end, and feel bored and have to change it up. There’s a particular rhythm to academic cycles that academics know well, but mis-align with other cycles you’ll find in nature and society.

One thing I like about effective altruism is the idea that in your moral life, you need to prioritize. The way effective altruists prioritize is to rank the most morally urgent issues together with the power you have to affect them, and the costs you incur in affecting them. There is supposed to be some kind of moral reality to this. If by snapping a finger you can immediately save the lives of millions at no cost to you or anyone else, that’s the highest priority. If you have a very small chance of saving just one ant from a millisecond of minor pain, that’s low priority. People who aren’t effective altruists also prioritize but they prioritize in very different ways. But everyone should accept that there is a moral reality to priorities, whatever you think the right ones are.

One of the things about the whole transition from the effective altruist question of “should I give one of my kidneys” to “should I go into tech and work on AI safety alignment” is that I don’t think it tracks moral reality very much. If EA 1.0 was correct, then the right thing to happen is that most effective altruists of any generation should have lined up to donate their kidneys, spread the gospel of kidney donation, until the kidney problem went away. If EA 1.0 was wrong, and it turns out that kidney donation is very low on the list of priorities relative to all of these existential risks we face, then the kids are right not to seriously consider giving one of their kidneys. Either giving a kidney is a high priority or it isn’t, whether you happened to be young and at Harvard during EA 1.0 or EA 2.0 shouldn’t matter.

Instead, what we see looks very much like young effective altruists have moral motivations that closely track the academic publishing cycle, i.e., the need for a new generation philosophers to say something new and interesting rather than recycle old debates about things their predecessors were talking about. It makes the moral priorities of effective altruism track the cycle of academic debating than moral reality. It makes moral priorities look like a fad. And moral frameworks being based on fads really does make particular activist communities look like they’re not rationally tracking the true moral priorities, but rather the highly contingent sociological and psychological factors that effective altruists have long criticized (like the priority of being a neighbor or in the same nation-state.)

It is possible that the world happened to changed significantly enough between 2010 and 2023 that moral urgency changed. After all, AI was hardly an issue in the world in 2010 in the way it was starting in 2022. And if kidney donation was discovered to be highly risky to donors, or the number in need plummets, or malaria gets cured, priorities have to go elsewhere. But what is interesting about the kidney case and the malaria case is that none of this happened. Instead, what closely tracks the change in priorities among young people was simply the ordinary academic cycle; new students every few generations, philosophers bored of the already hashed out issues, their need to write new articles and books that demand new arguments and priorities in order to meet hiring, tenure, and promotion deadlines.

I don’t want to sound like I’m picking on Effective Altruism because I don’t think it is particularly problematic, nor is the problem unique to this particular activist movement. If anything, effective altruism has stayed remarkably consistent for years on many of its issues, prioritizing animal welfare and opposing factory farming, for instance. Probably an even worse offender than EA are causes associated with traditional left-academic culture war debates like the drive to change the spelling of “Women” to “Womyn,” (remember that?) or generally the activism behind the ever-changing nomenclature used to refer to repressed groups or mental health conditions (I’m still not sure whether “addiction” and “addicts” is permissible or not these days.) And there is an alternative explanation about this kind of problem that Richard Yetter Chappell recently wrote here about in Good Thoughts that maybe all that is going on is that moral movements are recognizing the need to conceal the true moral priorities if their audience will see them as so extreme that it will alienate people from all the other good the movement is doing.

But there is a certain kind of alienation you also risk if at one time you are emphasizing the overwhelming importance of one moral behavior, and then as soon as the next big idea comes around in the academic marketplace of ideas, you forget it and move on to the next moral behavior. It starts making moral movements look connected to the consumer economy of academic prestige or the sociological economy of fads.

In reality the most pressing moral demands on us have been with us for a long time, because they happen to be invisible, and often anti-thetical, to the strong forces that fuel global change like financial markets, technological advancement, tribal psychology, and wars. Within that space, what is a priority happens to depend a lot on what else is being done elsewhere in that space by governments and other organizations. There are a lot of moving parts to moral action (for example, suddenly providing basic AIDS drugs is a high priority!). There is a lot to be said for a group of people who steadily, predictably, and over a long term continue to focus on a single issue that remains unresolved until more people over generations join in the cause, as boring as that might be to the academic publishing market.

Your first-order views about a variety of economic, political, and social issues place you on a dimension of conservative, liberal, libertarian, authoritarian, and others. Academia is overrun with liberals and leftists, according to many complaints, while the military and police forces are overrun with conservatives, according to still other complaints. But where you are on the political and ideological spectrum does not predict what your views are about the Overton window. And most complaints about viewpoint diversity and ideological diversity in the academy should be about the size of our Overton windows, not our first-order views.

One way to understand an Overton window is to think about the boundaries of discourse that an editor will allow in the pages of their newspaper, television program, radio show, etc. In the realm of politics, policy, and social ethics, gay marriage is a classic example of an issue completely outside of the Overton window in media and politics most of the 20th century, then squarely inside it for about 20-30 years, and now basically outside of it again, marking its rise from radical issue, mainstream issue, to boring issue.

Supernaturalism is very much outside of the mainstream media Overton window. If you read the New York Times or watch NBC news, or read Time or the New Yorker today, whether a certain event happened because some kind of ghost, spirit, or poltergeist caused it to happen is outside their Overton window. No expert will be quoted offering this as an explanation of the war in Gaza, no opinion writer will entertain this hypothesis about floods or fires, and even readers who mention this kind of thing will probably be moderated out of the comments section. This is despite the fact that between 20%-41% of Americans believe in ghosts, or report some kind of supernatural ghost experience.

The “Woo Woo” Test

I have a good friend who is a long time public radio journalist where they follow the “no woo woo” test. When she interviews people, anything that enters into “woo woo” territory will never make it to air, even if it makes for a good story. I tried very hard years ago to interview a psychiatrist who taught at NYU, had a longtime private practice, and whom the Catholic Church hired on contract to investigate reports of demon possessions. It is important for the church not to send exorcists to every new report of a demon possession, when many such cases could easily be explained by mental illness. In the Eastern seaboard, they always went to this one guy. It sounded like a good story for my show. I talked to my reporter friend one day about the story, hoping to pitch it it to her for public radio, and she said there is only one way this story would ever make it on air; if every single one of his reports turns out to be a mental illness, using various established criteria for mental illness found in the DSM, and if there was something interesting about the pattern of mental illness in demon possession cases (like if it all happened to be low-grade carbon monoxide poisoning).

I talked to the guy and he said he did find many cases of actual mental illness. But he also said he came across many cases of actual demon possession. The tell-tail sign, he said, was levitation. Another sign is if the subject spoke ancient dead languages like Aramaic, which scholars could then translate into coherent statements. That made me really want to pursue the story because, well, how great right? But my friend said that the tape would not have passed the “woo woo” test, and it would never air on a legacy media outlet (probably rightly). I eventually killed the story even for my show, which has no such editorial constraint, but only because I couldn’t find a good philosophical angle. “Woo woo” to me is fine, but only if it is also philosophically interesting. I once profiled a woman who claimed to be the reincarnation of Anne Frank for an episode about personal identity and memory.)

Viewpoint Diversity, or Affirmative Action for Conservative Thinkers

Friend and philosopher Jennifer Morton recently published this New York Times Opinion piece arguing against the use of “viewpoint diversity” tests to hire conservative faculty to university positions, aimed at counteracting the “ideological bias” of universities. I know conservative people who have been pushing this for a while. I think it was very valuable for Morton to publish the piece; it challenged me, a very typical NY Times reader, who was curious and a little sympathetic to the idea of affirmative action for conservative faculty and students. But once you start going through the comments section, you see very quickly that Morton hit a nerve. Unsympathetic conservatives talk about just how heavy the ideological bias against them has been in academia for many generations; how the ideological divides in this country are the direct result of the college-educated indoctrination process. Unsympathetic liberals talked about why academia should purposely hire anthropogenic climate-change deniers, or divine creationists, into positions that are supposed to be for higher education. They see no educational value in hiring people who hold these positions, and no educational value in presenting these positions charitably and within the Overton window of discussion.

The Academic Overton Window is the research, viewpoints, and coursework/syllabi that are within the range of reasonable disagreement, and is educationally worthwhile to teach according to the judgment of the professor, department, and higher educational institution. It is not at all the same thing as the first-order views of the professors, departments, administrators, or higher educational institutions. Many of the things, in fact most of the things I teach, have nothing to do with my first-order views. I very rarely tell students my first-order views about, for instance, the ethics of industrial agriculture, when teaching about the issue. A person can have a very wide Overton windows but actually very narrow ideological views of their own, conservative or liberal, and vice versa.

For instance, a professor may themselves be pro-choice, for instance, but include many pro-life readings on their “Ethics of Abortion” syllabus to teach students the variety of ways pro-life advocates position their arguments. Ronald Reagan on abortion was on the syllabus in my college critical thinking class. Some of these pro-life arguments use religious premises about sanctity and innocence, others use scientific premises like the origins of pain or consciousness, others use secular moral principles like the wrongness of depriving something of a future. But there are plenty of pro-life positions that such a professor would also deems outside of the Overton window, because it is the professional judgment of such a professor that these views are “woo woo,” the same way my public radio reporter friend thinks about the psychiatrist who witnessed levitation. For example, I think some academics think any argument that rests on the premise “a woman’s only job is to have and raise babies, that’s why women exist” is outside of the Overton window. They wouldn’t assign an essay making that argument.

There are plenty of things outside of the Overton window in current academia that are within the sphere of discussion in the general public. Probably no better example is the variety of supernatural, paranormal, and astrological views held by almost half the population, and was indeed a significant part of academia a century ago. None of this stuff you will find in most academic spaces, except for the occasional student club (shout out, Vassar Supernatural Club!). In the sciences and history, lots of hypotheses about the distant past you hear on Joe Rogan and the History Channel are outside of the Overton window in academia. Biology departments do not teach divine creation any more, only evolution by natural selection or punctuated equilibirum. Archeologists don’t teach the evidence of aliens building the pyramids. There are no courses in cryptozoology, ancient civilization classes do not teach the hypothesis that the city of Atlantis was built with advanced technology. In others cases, hypotheses that used to be fringe make their way into the Overton window, like the Deccan Traps/volcanic eruption hypothesis for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Everyone has an Overton window, whether you are a liberal, conservative, anarchist, and even supernaturalist (paranormal believers who attribute activities to ghosts also laugh at me when I mentioned the possibilities of goblins.)

I’ve been sympathetic to the “there aren’t enough conservatives in academia” position because I’ve personally learned from conservative faculty when I was in college, in grad school, and in my social circles that include conservatives and libertarians. But it also came from teaching for 16 years at a very left-wing liberal arts college where, even though I agreed with my students on 99% of the first-order issues, I, and almost all of my colleagues, felt that their Overton windows were far too narrow. One example was their general stance on the military, or “murderers” as they would put it. There was no consideration for the idea of deference to civilian command, military service as public service, or the role of credible threats and credible offers in diplomacy. Western militaries were tools of colonial expansion, on their views, and few or no classes sufficiently challenged those views. We as faculty did our part to exhibit how much better their thinking, reasoning, and writing turned out if they widened their Overton windows, but there is only so much faculty can do. The narrow Overton window comes from their peers and social media, not from us.

After an exchange about Jen Morton’s piece with other philosophy colleagues, I’ve come to realize that, whatever you think about whether we should have affirmative action for people with conservative views in academia, we should distinguish between the problem of having too many liberal professors, and the problem of having too narrow an Overton window in what we teach, what we research, and the views we engage with in the classroom, at the university, and at our conferences. Maybe you think neither is a problem, or you think both are a problem; the point is that these are two distinct problems, and not seeing them as distinct is leading to very sloppy accusations.

A lot of conservatives and wide Overton window liberals see narrow Overton windows as a sign of ideological blindspots, or even worse, ideological bias. Narrow (or narrower) Overton window folks see wide Overton window people as sympathetic to unreasonable positions, positions that don’t deserve being in the Overton window because they don’t pass the “woo woo” test. Both might be right in particular cases! You risk a lot having too wide an Overton window; maybe fifty years from now teaching arguments about why its okay to eat factory farmed beef in a bioethics class will look just like teaching the theory of Young Earth Creationism in a geology class a hundred years ago. Right now the theory of divine creation and Young Earth Creationism in any class other than one in critical thinking or philosophy of science (to illustrate pseudo-science) is outside of the academic Overton window, and I think rightly so. If you wanted to insist that such views, held by many conservatives, are inside of the academic Overton windows, you will not be hired by most biology departments. And I don’t think this is an ideological bias or blindspot.

But on the other hand, I do think it is an ideological blindspot if the only teaching we do about the US military-industrial complex is one that highlights the role of the Western military as a colonial force. Its also an ideological blindspot if the only teaching we do about it highlights its role as “greatest force for good in human history,” as Trump and Hegseth recently ordered the military academies to teach. The Overton window should be very wide with respect to arguments about the role of the military as an institution in the US. Many of such arguments will be advocated by liberals, conservatives, authoritarians, and libertarians. But it most certainly is outside of the Overton window to discuss arguments that it is controlled by Jews or the New World order, or something like that.

Philosopher thinks there isn’t going to be a good general rule or principle about how wide or narrow Overton windows need to be in the particular courses we teach, or in the research profile of an individual, or a department. These things change over time, especially in the sciences. What happens when conservative or liberal ideologies run against empirical claims that are well supported or thoroughly falsified? It really depends on the course; should we teach about the role that Creationism and Darwinism played in the fight of educational curriculum mid 20th-century? Absolutely. Should there be a a unit on Creation science in Evolutionary Biology 101? No (though many conservatives have long disagreed).

Secondly, fields differ. Geology is different from bioethics; being a religious conservative about geology, like some kind of conspiracist about radioactive carbon-dating, may justifiably be outside the Overton window, but what about religious conservative tenets about whether the earth was gifted to humans from God for humans to use as they please, for the sole benefit of humans? I don’t think the latter should be within the Overton window of a bioethics class, but is that because I have an ideological blindspot? I’d like to think not. For me its mostly because this is an unarguable premise for which there can be no progress to be made in a philosophical discussion. Any arguments for it rest on particular literalist readings of one particular religious text, a text that is also outside of the Overton window in my philosophy classes. But this is not a particularly well thought-out view, just what is behind my judgment not to include it on a syllabus about ethics and the ecosystem. I’m open to an argument that I should include it, I just haven’t heard any.

I think most academics would welcome discussion of whether they have ideological blindspots or biases in their Overton windows. Call me too openly liberal, but I agree with an old paper by Jennifer Lackey that even a Young Earth Creationist can successfully teach a good Evolutionary Biology class in college, so long as those views don’t enter into what I take to be the legitimate Overton window of discussion in such a course. If I were on such a hiring committee, I’d look at the syllabus and ask her about how she would teach it. If I was satisfied with her answers, I’d might make her an offer. Whether she turned out not to believe a word she said in class and went to Young Earth Creationist conventions would be none of my business.

But Dan Greco is right that the second-order issue of what should be inside or outside of the Overton window can be as thorny as the first-order issue itself. Dan believes hiring more people with first-order conservatives views would have the effect of widening the Overton windows on a campus even if its not absolutely necessary that we hire conservative people to teach conservative thought . He’s probably right. I should admit I don’t know very much about conservative or Marxist political theory. Most of my formal education in political philosophy ended with Rousseau. If I had a choice today to learn about conservatism from Robbie George at Princeton, and Marxism from Corey Robin at CUNY, or I could get Marxism from George and conservatism from Robin, knowing the syllabi would be the same, I’d go for the former. A priori, I would expect George to give me the more forceful and charitable takes on conservative views, and defend them better from my challenges than Robin, and vice versa about Marxism.

It turns out to be hard, and much to quick, to draw a direct line from first-order ideological views to unreasonably narrow Overton windows, and hard, and much too quick, to claim that if a particular conservative view is outside of the Overton window, it is therefore an ideological blindspot of liberals. Many pro-choice liberals in academia teach the hell out of pro-life views. But also maybe some of the things conservatives want inside the Overton window are reasonable and of educational value, and not Young Earth Creationism in Geology. Before we start making accusations of ideological bias or blindspots based on people’s first-order views, we should ask people what their Overton windows are about various issues they are in a position to teach and research, so at least we know what those are. Maybe we can be more forgiving about each others' windows, wide or narrow, before we proceed to duke it out when it comes to whether we think someone is blind or biased. We all might have very good articulable reasons for our first-order views, but second-order views about whether other views are within or outside of the realm of the reasonable, that’s harder to have such good articulable reasons.

So here are some of mine: first-order views are what I think. “Overton window in” are positions I think are worthy of inclusion, charitable reconstruction, and discussion in a classroom and in scholarly debates. “Out” are positions I think are outside of such discussion, though are perfectly legitimate for discussion in other kinds of contexts.

First-order view: Only wars of self and other defense are morally justified, and then only when such wars are a last resort, with all diplomatic means and concessions exhausted.

Overton window: In; some kinds of pre-emptive wars are justified. Some forms of terrorism are justified. Some wars as a show of force to make threats credible can be justified.

Out: Wars of extermination of a degenerate population can be justified.

First-order view: The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, emerging out of a collapsing molecular cloud that formed the sun and the solar system about a hundred million years before that. No supernatural god was involved. Life evolves by speciation due to natural selection.

Overton window: In: various fine-tuning arguments that suggest design or a creator of the universe.

Out: Young Earth Creationism and Flood Geology. Divine Creationist theory of species.

First-order view: Some combination of civil libertarianism, well-regulated markets with strong anti-trust/anti-monopoly protections, strong social safety net, freedom of migration, the artificiality of nation-states, the need for stronger international integration on trade and security.

Overton window: In: Burkean conservatism, libertarian economics, Chinese legalism, socialism, anarchism, cultural preservationism.

Christian White Nationalism, out.

Jewish Israeli Nationalism, in.

First-order views: Atheism, secular ethics, naturalism.

Overton window: In Abrahamic Monotheism in Philosophy of Religion.

Out: Polytheistic Paganism or "Wiccans" in Philosophy of Religion.

First-order views: All people born deserve protection and medical care/accommodations, even at significant monetary cost to others, and some people should be allowed to autonomously and freely choose to end their own lives.

Overton window: In “Certain disabilities are severe enough at birth that parents choosing to euthanize such children is morally okay”

In: No one should be allowed to end their own lives, even if the choice is free and autonomous.

First-order views: Many animals and many ecosystems need to be protected from human use, human overuse, and human development.

Overton window in: A variety of animal and ecosystem extinctions are justified given the need for economic development to bring people out of poverty.

Out "God made earth and all under the sun for human to use at their will."

First-order views: The blinded randomized clinical trial with strong controls is the gold standard for medical science.

In: There are a variety of practices in folk medicine where one can find treatments for a variety of untreatable conditions.

Out: There are spells, incantations, crystals, and other such forces that have healing properties that are untestable by means of clinical trials.

First-order views: IQ, economic and educational achievement, moral character, does not pattern along categories that people have placed each other into, like race, gender, caste, ethnicity, or sexuality.

In: Many factors, including genetics and epigenetics, and also others, can explain some variance of these measures.

Out: Astrology, palm-reading, spirituality explains these things too.

First-order: Eating nonhuman animal meat is okay. Eating plants is okay.

Overton window, In: Eating meat is immoral. Eating plants is immoral, eating grains is immoral. Humans existing is immoral. Eating People is okay.

I was coming out of graduate school at the height of the “context-sensitivity” wars in the philosophy of language. I taught a few seminars on the topic at Vassar, started working on an epically long paper formulating my views about some issues in it, and then completely abandoned all of it to start Hi-Phi Nation. That paper may never see the light of day.

But since this is The Cutting Room, I might as well throw the idea out there. This little puzzle forms the backbone of that paper. It was inspired at the time by the work of John MacFarlane, philosopher of language and professor at Berkeley, a philosopher whose work I admire as much as I do any other philosopher.

“Room temperature” in English refers to some fixed range of temperatures, something like between 68-75 degrees Fahrenheit. If a guest asks for room temperature water, I’d just pour water from the Brita filer sitting on the counter into a cup and serve it. It doesn’t matter if for instance the kitchen is 80 degrees or so and the guest is sitting in a frigidly air-conditioned room at 50 degrees. The water she gets will always be about 68-75 degrees. Anything significantly warmer and it’d be “lukewarm” water, which she didn’t ask for. Anything significantly cooler, and I’d be giving her “cool” water, which she also didn’t ask for.

But there is another way to use the term, consistent with the meaning of the parts, which is that “room temperature” water is the temperature of whatever room the person asking for the water is in. This is what I thought the word meant the first time I heard it, as a kid. On this meaning, if my job was to be a room service attendant at a hotel, and everyone in the hotel liked to keep their rooms at different temperatures, I’d have to look at some kind of computer readout of the temperature of their rooms to know the temperature of the water I should deliver to them.

Now you can fight all you want about whether anyone ever uses the English words “room temperature” to mean the second thing. Dictionaries unequivocally claim it means the first thing (but dictionaries purport to describe practice, not prescribe it!). But what is important in the philosophy of language is that both kinds of meaning are perfectly coherent and usable. There can be a term that means the first thing, and there can be a term that means the second thing. You’re allowed to open up a hotel, and hire room service attendants, and you can train them both ways. You can always ask guests to clarify; “when you say you want room temperature water, do you want water between 68-75 degrees, or do you want it the temperature of whatever room you happen to be in?” Both are possible meanings of possible terms. (In fact, there is an expression in English that operates exactly like the second possible meaning of “room temperature.” It is “ambient temperature.”)

Once we recognize that there are these two possible meanings to “room temperature” consisted with the meaning of the parts, you might start wondering how many more there are. What if I open up a hotel and train my attendants this way: sometimes a guest wants water the temperature of whatever room I’m in. They might be a Barry-stalker, the kind of person who feels closer to me when drinking water the temperature of the room I’m in. And you know me, busy hotel owner, I’m hopping from one room to the next making sure all of my guests are doing okay. If you ever come across such a guest who asks for “room temperature water,” you’re going to have to call me, ask me the temperature of the room I’m in, then deliver water of that temperature to the guest. This is a possible meaning of a possible term too.

Now for the interesting case. You can imagine that as a hotel owner, I hire human resources job assessors to rate my employees, see if they are satisfying my guests. Whenever my attendants give the guest what they ask for, they get a 😊. Whenever they do not do what the guests ask for, they get a 😞. Guests also get to be de facto HR evaluators. Every guest gets to put a 😊 or 😞 on a screen in the room after an attendant visits the room to satisfy a request.

But here’s the rub. The human resources officers can be doing their job assessment in any of the hundreds of rooms in the hotel, and they can be doing them at any time of day. They have access to all of my surveillance equipment, they can hear what the guest requested, when, from where, and they know the temperature of the water the attendant delivers to the guest room. Guests can rate at any time they like. They don’t have to do it immediately after the attendant visits.

A big question circa mid 2000s was whether there was a sensible way where “room temperature” could mean this: when a guest asks for “room temperature water”, the attendant’s job is to give the guest water that is the temperature of whatever room a guest or human resources officer is in when they do their rating. MacFarlane was the one who came up with this problem.

It always took quite awhile to get my students to understand just how odd and diabolic such a meaning of “room temperature” would be. If the guest for example is in a 100 degree room, and makes the request, the attendant could deliver a 100 degree glass of water, the guest could then turn on the AC, wait for the room to get to 70 degrees, and mark the attendant 😞, because it would not be “room temperature water” by the time the room cooled. The attendant didn’t do what the guest asked, and the guest would rightly demand an apology. This is even though the attendant did do the right thing at the time the guest requested the water. I mean, look at it from the attendant’s perspective; what other temperature should she guess? The guest is in a 100 degree room!

Or, even more diabolical, the guest could rate 😊 right away, because the glass of water was 100 degrees after all, but the HR officer later sitting in a 70 degree room doing job evaluation would mark 😞. The guest would have judged that she got what she requested, the HR officer would have judged that the guest didn’t get what she requested, and they would both be right. In fact, the HR officer could then call the guest down to her room, and ask the guest to do the job evaluations again, then and there, and the guest would have to give a 😞 rather than the original 😊, because after all, she asked for a room temperature glass of water, and that means the temperature of the room she’s in at the moment she’s doing the job evaluation, which is now 70 degrees!

MacFarlane spent a lot of time convincing philosophers of language that there really could be a meaning of “room temperature” that worked this way. Sure it is diabolical, but the mere possibility that someone could invent a meaning like this was at least theoretically interesting.

My reading of the literature then was that MacFarlane largely succeeded on this front. It was a sensible meaning. The next part of his project was to show that there really were words in natural language that worked this way. Obviously not the words “room temperature”, but he thought “tasty” did. If a guest requested a “tasty burger” and happened to be a vegan, while the HR official had one of those manly carnivore palates, the guest very well could say that the attendant delivered a tasty burger when she requested a tasty burger, bur the HR official can claim the attendant didn’t deliver a tasty burger, they would both be right, the attendant gets a 😊 from the guest, and a 😞 from HR, and they would both be right. Most of the debates about MacFarlane’s views concern whether particular terms of English operated in this diabolical way. He says some do, his opponents say none do.

All of MacFarlane’s opponents would insist, in a variety of ways using a variety of data, that the HR professional was wrong and the vegan customer was right, that there is no sense to an HR employing his standards when it was the customer’s standards that mattered. I agreed, but was intent on arguing that it isn’t just a contingent, accidental fact that the diabolical sense of “room temperature” doesn’t exist in English for that or any other term. There is a deeper reason why natural language speakers don’t like these “diabolical” meanings, as much as they are theoretically possible.

Here was my argument. If we opened a huge hotel where there was no antecedent meaning to “room temperature,”and we introduced all three possible “room temperature” meanings with equal probability to every of hundreds of thousands of staff members, and we let all these possible meanings compete with each other to emerge as the conventionalized meaning of “room temperature”, which one would never emerge as the winner? This would be a situation where we would vary randomly the temperature of rooms and desires of guests.

Equivalently, we could open hundreds of thousands of hotels and distribute the meanings of “room temperature” with equal probability across all of them, and after each night of requests for water, guests and workers would do evaluations, and stay if they’re happy, or move to another hotel if they were not happy.

I believed that it would never make rational sense for a hotel manager, guests, and attendants to chose to work and stay at the diabolical hotel after a small number of generations of this. Insofar as guests want attendants to satisfy their needs, attendants aim to get paid for doing a good overall job, and hotel managers want satisfied guests, attendants, and repeat customers, the diabolical hotel would be out-competed by every non-diabolical hotel. The diabolical meaning of “room temperature” would never emerge as a meaning people used, and so diabolical meanings are out-competed by non-diabolical meanings in all contexts.

In academic jargon: linguistic meanings are meant to be solutions to coordination problems. Turning a possible meaning into an actual meaning requires that the possible meaning solves a coordination problem between the speakers, listeners, and even assessors. People have a vested interest that the sound “dog” means the same for all, and that everyone knows that everyone knows this, so that we aren’t misreading each other all the time. My thought was that if you had a fair and realistic competition between possible meanings of the word “room temperature” all trying to become the conventionalized meaning of “room temperature”, the diabolical meaning would never be adopted.

If I am right about this, and the details of the argument rests on some rather technical and formal models I never bothered to work out but still might one day, then it follows that we have a theoretical rather than empirical argument that diabolical versions of “room temperature” could not be conventionalized as meanings of natural language terms simply by being out-competed by alternative meanings that serve as solutions to coordination problems. It shows one way possible meanings cannot become actual meanings. The argument not only has implications for the particular debate between MacFarlane and his opponents, but provides a methodology to test other semantic theories of terms.

Okay I guess this was a post just for the super niche geeks of the area of specialization I once called home, so if anyone actually reads this, let me know if you think I should (finally) finish this paper from about 15 years ago.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker may not be the worst film in the franchise, but when it comes to the many ways a Star Wars film can go wrong, it is unrivaled. At least two very significant events that structure the meaning of Star Wars are simply undermined and contradicted, with no explanation. The redemption of Darth Vader rest on him killing the emperor. The significance of Rey’s journey rests on the fact that she is a nobody gaining power through mere faith and effort, not inheritance. Contradicting those plot points undermines the significance of the antecedent stories entirely. Important characters from the previous film are written out almost completely (Rose Tico), which turns out to be a common theme in the Star Wars cannon. Entire planets, concepts, and characters are introduced early as though they will have significance, but play no role in the story subsequently. Conflicts seem to be completely fabricated with very high stakes, requiring side-quests, only for those conflicts to be resolved and the stakes turning out to be only illusory (C3PO and his understanding of the inscription on the dagger, and needing his memory erased, but no matter, his memory can be restored). And don’t get me started on the Palpatine plotline.

The Rise of Skywalker is a particular kind of bad; it is bad in a myriad of completely ad hoc ways. The George Lucas prequels Episodes I-III, on the other hand, are bad in completely coherent and systematic ways. Whereas the George Lucas prequels are bad as a result of the particular vision of their creator, The Rise of Skywalker is bad because it is a kind of Frankensteined creation of two directors, four writers, an opinionated big studio exec, and the influence of millions of fans constantly criticizing, often rightly, particular choices in how the serialized narrative was unfolding. The Rise of Skywalker was a classic case of production by committee; too many cooks in the kitchen. It was “note soup” as they say in Hollywood.

There are interesting ways in which creative work goes awry when it is subject to too many cooks in the kitchen. Songs become overwritten, music becomes overproduced. McMansions become, well, this:

When something is bad because it is created by committee, it is bad in very distinctive ways. It is bad in very busy ways. It is very common for individual creations to be ingenious, atrocious, and everything in between, but committee-led creations lose out on this variety. If committee-led creative works succeed, they succeed at satisfying the right people without satisfying anyone particularly deeply. The typical McMansion is not the over-designed atrocity you see above, but is also never a work of timeless brilliance. Instead, it is more like the home you see below.

This house has brick, and stone, and shingled siding. It has sharp angle and wide angle rooflines, and wide windows and narrow windows and tall windows and short windows. It has every architectural feature to satisfy every possible taste. Creation by committee is neither McDonald’s, nor Le Bernadin, it is the Cheesecake Factory.

In analytic philosophy, the figure of Derek Parfit looms quite large. Parfit published two tomes, the first of which, Reasons and Persons, was written by and large monastically. Parfit was famously someone who locked himself in his small room at Oxford for hours on end thinking about philosophy, ate the exact same meals of cold raw vegetables and yogurt daily, partook in the occasional philosophical conversation, and only philosophical conversations, with other Oxford colleagues and students, but by and large spent his time alone working through what he considered the most important issues in philosophy. When my friend the writer Larissa Macfarquhur first read Reasons and Persons-and she was not an analytic philosopher or trained in analytic philosophy- it made her think, “what have I been doing with my life that such an incredible, thought-provoking piece of work could have escaped me all these years?” Larissa wrote a famous profile of Parfit for the New Yorker that is widely read to this day. The ideas in Reasons and Persons play a significant role in the most influential philanthropic movement of the 21st century coming out of secular ethics, effective altruism. Within philosophy, it created at least three fields entirely that has since sparked long debates, the metaphysics of personal identity, population ethics, and time-bias. All three have been major contributors to cognitive science, neuroscience, religious studies, demography, and economics.

The other tome Parfit wrote, On What Matters, was famously written, by and large, by committee. It makes up three volumes, each of which is about 500 pages. When I was a graduate student in the mid 2000s, Parfit sent a manuscript of what at the time was supposed to be the follow-up to Reasons and Persons, a reasonable-length piece entitled “Climbing the Mountain”, to influential philosophers around the world. Because I was at Princeton, many of the faculty there received a copy. It turns out almost every important figure in analytic philosophy around the world received one. Parfit asked all of them to critique his manuscript, which in analytic philosophy meant offering objections to any and all theses, to subject the manuscript to every possible attack it could face. Philosophers seldom ask other philosophers for critiques on style, readability, and prose. But finding omissions and weaknesses in arguments, that is our bread and butter.

Parfit’s ambitions were grand; he wanted to develop a moral philosophy that all possible moral philosophies would agree with. He was, like Einstein, attempting a grand unified theory of the universe, only it was the moral universe. What he got back from the most critical philosophical minds in the world was a list of objections and attacks so long and detailed that, in order to respond to them all, he needed more than five times as many pages as his original manuscript. He worked to finish his detailed responses right up to his death, in 2017.

Compared to Reasons and Persons, the reception to On What Matters within philosophy, and most definitely outside of philosophy, has been underwhelming. The book is not bad. It isn’t The Rise of Skywalker. Fifteen-hundred page tomes in philosophy are never bad in the sense that narrative fiction series or epics are bad. Philosophy books are not aesthetic but alethic objects, productions aimed at stating and defending true statements and claims, rather than trying to tell a story or inspire an emotional reaction. By the standards of philosophy being influential, On What Matters is certainly influential. Very important people read and respond to it; it is on graduate syllabi at the Harvards, Princetons, NYUs, and USCs of the world, at least it was for a year or two. If someone is writing a dissertation on whether morality is real or fictitious, they will need to cite it. It is hard for Parfit not to be influential in whatever he publishes; the fact that Parfit argued for something means many people take it seriously in the same way that Barry Lam saying something means no one will take it seriously. But as highly anticipated and epically ambitious as On What Matters was, it did not execute. Reasons and Persons was revolutionary. On What Matters was pedantic.

There are some in philosophy who take its goal of being alethic and not aesthetic very seriously. You can see it all over their writing, and you can see it in the kind of articles that journals publish. Most articles read as much more pedantic than revolutionary because the review process prior to publishing looks a lot more like what Parfit did with On What Matters than what he did with Reasons and Persons. What philosophy reviewers, commentators, and readers do, what we are trained and rewarded to do, what we are asked to do by journal editors, is try to find every last problem in a submission. What problem do we have with what you said, why you said it, and do we think someone else already said it, which is a big problem? The job for an author of a professional philosophy paper is to survive this deluge of problems, as only survivors get published. No one is ever worried about whether anyone gets any joy, inspiration from reading our work. Sparking curiosity is an afterthought. Like the most typical McMansion, what matters is that it is built, passes inspection, and sold at a high enough profit margin.

There is a good reason to treat alethic activity this way. The wisdom of crowds hypothesis is that the collective opinion of independent strangers about non-obvious matters is more reliable than that of individuals. Markets of millions trading on information are better predictors of the future than individuals. Think about medical science. Which one is likelier, that a single genius physician who comes up with treatment XYZ for COVID for his 20 patients, 19 of whom fully recovered, actually found the best treatment protocols for COVID, or that hundreds of thousands of independent physicians across many different countries using XYZ, ABC, and DEF randomly, all end up converging on treatment E and F, got the best treatment protocol? The reasonable go with E and F.

In philosophy, if the wisdom of crowds holds true, the more independent people read and object to your work, and the more you tailor your views in response to them, the likelier you are to have gotten closer to the truth. If philosophical work is primarily alethic rather than aesthetic, the truth about moral realism, or the mind, or the nature of knowledge, is likelier to come from the totality of what all people who have thought long and hard about it say about it, in response to each other, than from the mind of any one of those individuals. If you take the totality of philosophy written by everyone and use a large language model and then ask it “what is the truth about moral realism”, that answer is likelier to be true than all of the individual contributions. Without knowing the contents of the works whatsoever, On What Matters is likelier to say true things than Reasons and Persons.

But here is another fact about philosophers. We respond to peer-reviewed academic journal articles that read more like “note soup,” overly engineered to survive fussy reviewers, like we react to McMansions and the Rise of Skywalker. Why? Knowing the wisdom of crowds hypothesis, representative sampling in statistics, and the epistemic power of independent convergence, we should treat note soup as superior products, the result of the very procedure that produces superior alethic products. Why is On What Matters not celebrated more highly than Reasons and Persons?

It has to be that philosophy, at least some of it, has an irreducibly aesthetic aims connected with certain aesthetic emotions. These aims are at odds with creation by committee. Good philosophy inspires in the way good art does. Parfit inspired curiosity in Reasons and Persons with thought-experiments that people still teach and think about. They even make for important plot points in Dr. Who and many other science fiction stories. On What Matters on the other hand, sought to eliminate curiosity by seeking to settle every question the curious reader might raise. Good philosophy is supposed to offer insight into the inner life, the thought and mental procedures, of the individual producing it. When that inner life is significantly different, or significantly similar, to yours there is a pleasure in your confrontation and engagement with such a mind, such an “other,” as humanities people love to put it.

The view of philosopher as auteur explains why individual philosophers have such a problem with reviewers who are too fussy. They, the philosophers, have a vision for the direction of their paper, how it unfolds over time, its epistemological arc if not its narrative ones. An auteur’s omissions are intentional, not accidental. They are necessities for the story being told, not problems to be rectified by stating more and more. But omissions are the most powerful weapon of fussy reviewers. An omission can be fatal to an entire project. If it is not fatal, it must be rectified in the next draft, on pain of never appearing in print. Fussy reviewers, we think, just want to rewrite our papers in their own image, to follow their own inner lives and senses of epistemic satisfaction, which are different from ours. The desire authors have to see through their own vision of a paper, against the recommendations of peer reviewers, makes less sense if the aim of writing were solely alethic. It makes perfect sense if it were partly an artistic act.

I’m a pluralist enough about aesthetics and philosophy to think there is no categorical rule saying that all committee-created work must be worse than individual, auteur-created work. This just has to be false. There have got to be examples of committee-created work that is great, on both aesthetic and alethic dimensions. In podcasting, my other job, the most collaborative/committee-created work is famously the best, hence your Radiolab and This American Life, compared to say, my show which is the work of one person, where I occasionally splurge and hire an editor to give me notes. I’ll put my best episodes up against many Radiolab and This American Life episodes, but on average, their work, with teams of 10-20, are far better. Their best episodes are far and away better than my best ones. Similarly, the rise in collaborations and co-authorship is a positive in academic philosophy. I’m not trying to defend individual genius against group work. Group work can be much better. Not all group work is creation by committee.

But on the other hand, consider this practice; philosophers who are aiming to find the right answer to their question simply write out their best attempt at answering the question, and then submit it into a system where a hundred other philosophers review and rewrite those ideas, culminating in a collectively written paper that no one in particular authors. Throw in a little ChatGPT in there, and you have a product that is likelier to be true than the original draft, by the wisdom of crowds. Why shouldn’t we just practice all philosophy this way? Let’s make every journal The Economist.

As far as I can tell, if there were an economically feasible way to do this with science, we would (and do actually. In some fields, science is just one big global collaboration aimed at finding the truth. A lot of discoveries have no heroes.) Instead, my guess is that not many philosophers would participate in such an endeavor. Whatever is of value to what philosophers do, it is not solely alethic. For many, it may not be alethic at all.

My friend and one of the philosophers I admire most, Kieran Setiya, had a podcast where he asked other philosophers about their greatest fears. In one episode, Kieran attributes a lot of paralysis, typically called “writer’s block” to the fear of being wrong. Some philosophers don’t produce because they’re afraid their ideas are wrong. For myself, being wrong isn't in the top five of my greatest fears. If I had to psychoanalyze myself and rank my most prominent fears, they are:

1. Being Basic/Uninteresting.

2. Being an unknowing rip-off of someone else.

3. Being ignored.

4. Being humiliated.

5. Having bad reasons for believing something.

If I had to characterize 1, I’d say it is an irreducibly aesthetic value. Interestingness is a property of a conscious experience of a particular piece of work, the manner in which the work holds the conscious attention and colors their experience of the propositions being entertained. Interestingness is not a property of the work itself. One of the biggest killers of interestingness is having a boring mind. But a close runner-up is too many cooks in the kitchen.

In the U.S. it is not only customary, but law, that when a person is ill and incapacitated, and you have to make a decision about treatment for them, you use the “substituted judgment” test. You ask: what would they want if they were conscious and clear-headed about this? For instance, if you have to decide whether your friend should get a blood transfusion, and she is a Jehovah’s Witness who opposes this, but you are not and you believe a transfusion will save her life, you go with what she would want, not what you want or even what you think is in her best interest. To decide on the transfusion would be wrong.

In China there is no such custom nor law. There the practice you might describe as a “best interest of the family” judgment. You make some decision on the basis of what is best for the family surrounding your friend or loved one. If you conclude that its a transfusion to keep your friend alive, then that’s what the doctor will administer, regardless of whether your friend happened to be a recent convert to Jehovah’s Witness. To decide against the transfusion would be wrong.

Moral relativists point to the outsized value of respecting autonomy in the U.S., and the outsized value of respecting family and community interests in China, and say that these differing values generate different moral norms in the same circumstances, and that both of these value sets are permissible, and thus, moral relativism is true.

I don’t think I was ever a moral relativist, even as a freshman in college. I find most arguments for moral relativism unconvincing. But I actually agree with the moral judgments here, i.e., it is right in the US to respect your friend’s Jehovah’s witness beliefs and refuse the transfusion, and it is right in China to decide to give the transfusion out of the best interest of the family. But I’m skeptical that the phenomena under description here is rightly called “moral relativism.”

But semantics aside, there is a very interesting question here about the relationship between sociological facts about the kind of values and norms held, and commonly known to be held, in a particular community, and the moral truths (what is permissible, impermissible) in that community. We all know some sociological facts do not determine moral truth. To use an Ethics 101 example, the widespread adoption and common knowledge assumption that chattel slavery is permissible, for example, does not make slave-owning in any community okay. However, I do think that in other situations, what everyone in a community values and the norms to which they have customarily adopted do have some role in determining moral facts, as in the case of US versus China practices on medical decision-making. But when do such sociological facts determine moral reality, and when don’t they?

I came to this question working on the first episode of the next season of Hi-Phi Nation (the episode is going to be so good!). In it, I look at a community that seems to be in the grips of what I’ll call a Legalistic mindset. Leaders and members consider whether their conduct was wrong as wholly a matter of what official rulebooks permit or restrict, like regulatory agencies, accreditation organizations, or the American Bar Association, things like that. Something bad happened in the community. But it turns out nobody was out of compliance with existing rule books. But as you know, these rulebooks are not comprehensive and leave open a lot of conduct that is pretty bad, but are officially not prohibited.

This happens all the time. For example, no book tells doctors how to prescribe drugs for off-label uses. Many doctors do, some don’t at all, and some push so many opioids or SSRIs that they leave a trail of addicted patients or very mentally unwell people that end up destroying whole communities. That’s morally objectionable, but were not prohibited by any rule-book (there are now more guidelines than there were about opioid prescribing for instance).

In any case, when there is such a community, a weird thing happens when someone within it decides to blow the whistle and say “hey, that doctor over there, he’s over-prescribing opioids and just a shill for industry, let’s collectively call him out and sanction him!” The rest of the community considers the whistleblower the trouble-maker. They shame, ostracize and sometimes even drum them out of the profession. These are all practices consistent with the community thinking that the whistleblower did something wrong, and must be punished.

My argument in the episode is that either the whistleblower is mistaken about the moral facts about their community, or the rest of the people are. The Legalists believe they are in fact in a moral universe of rule-compliance by official books, and since they were in compliance, the whistleblower is in the wrong here, seeking to sanction or punish something that was morally okay. One possibility is that the Legalists are mistaken. Moral reality is such that they’re actually in the wrong, even if its true that they were in minimal compliance with rules. The sociological facts about what everyone thought the rules of morality were don’t make something a moral truth in circumstances such as these.

The other possibility is that the Whistleblower believes they are in a moral universe where doctors are not morally allowed to make off-label prescription in the interest of making a little extra money from pharmaceutical companies, but he, the whistleblower, is mistaken. (Assume that the doctor does not consciously believe they are doing worse by their patients. They don’t take themselves to be violating the Hippocratic oath). It turns out that in reality, the Whistleblower is in a universe where morality consists in compliance with rule-books, and since this is not in the rules, the doctors were doing a permissible act. The Whistleblower, then, really is in the wrong. They are a self-righteous snitch, and the community is right to punish him.

Now I think this is a clear case where the Legalists are wrong, and the Whistleblower is right. This is more like the slavery case than the Chinese versus US practice of surrogate medical decision-making. No matter how much I try get into the Legalist mindset, or try to reconstruct their community where they value rules and procedures and compliance documents so much that it determines moral fact, it just doesn’t pass the Euthyphro test. Legalists are living in a moral illusion, just like slaveowners. But the Chinese versus US case does pass all the right tests for me. But why?

I don’t know how to square my judgments here. If I had to guess, I would say that in the US-China surrogate-decision-making case, it is morally indeterminate which of the two sets of values, personal autonomy or family best-interest, takes priority over the other. These are values where it is equally morally permissible to have one take precedence over the other, and ones where both have equally importance. And communities evolve to have customs and conventions around these three possibilities. Those customs and conventions then have prima facie moral weight that is not defeated by other factors, so they determine moral truth in those communities.

However, in the Legalist/Whistleblower case, there is no moral indeterminacy as to which of two sets of values, (1) minimal compliance to official rules, or (2) treating other human beings as ends in themselves, takes priority over the other. There is no intrinsic moral value to compliance with rules. (Of course I would say this, I just wrote a whole book arguing for it!). On the other hand, treating human beings as ends in themselves is an example of intrinsic moral value par excellence.

But that’s just a guess. I’m sure moral theorists have a lot more to say about this. But one thing I learned from making the episode is that I don’t think the Legalists are insincere or self-deluded when they try to make an argument that they’re morally in the clear as a result of minimally complying with rules. There is a mindset you get into where you are simply unable to see outside of your sociologically-determined moral universe. The preservation of that universe, and all the good you think it does, makes you blind to the fact that particular practices within it can be immoral. It’s an all-too-familiar feature of the human condition.

Maybe these people are a little less blameworthy for their blindness, on my view, because it turns out that sometimes the sociologically-determined moral universe is the moral universe. It happens in rare but very real cases, and its actually hard to figure out if you’re in one of those cases, or if you are one of the many sheep walking around thinking that chattel slavery is okay because everyone else does.

I’m old enough to remember when the drop shot in tennis was a taboo. For those who are not tennis fans, a drop shot is when you hit the ball unexpectedly slow, short, and with a lot of underspin, ideally when your opponent is looking for you to hit the ball deep or with pace. In recreational tennis, it can still be a taboo to hit a winning drop shot, at least in the sense that your opponents will get angry and think dirty thoughts about you for doing it, especially if they are elderly. That would not happen if you hit any other winner.

In professional tennis, a certain kind of shot is a taboo if it is legal, and even a winning or ideal shot in certain circumstances, but other players or fans resent you, even ostracize you, for performing the technique. It is considered dishonorable, something no respectful player does. It is considered “dirty” play. You lose face if you perform a taboo move.

In the last decade or so, the taboo surrounding the drop shot disappeared. All of the cool kids, meaning the top players, the most stylish players, the most popular players, started doing them. Like every other tennis shot, fans and players now rank drop shots, like they do forehands or backhands. Lorenzo Musetti for instance has a lethal one. The quality of a drop shot does not only depend on technique and placement, but also timing and strategic wisdom, so to count as having a good drop shot is as multi-faceted and nuanced as having any other shot. The taboo, in hindsight, looks silly. Players now win on the quality of their drop shot, and are applauded for it. Its not a face-losing shot, it is a face-enhancing shot.

The underarm serve in tennis is still taboo. Any time a server uses an underarm serve, the reaction is worse than the reactions to drop shots used to be. Players who are the victim of an underarm ace or winner will never congratulate their opponent on the shot. Some will not shake their opponent’s hand at the end of a match, and two players very recently almost came to blows over an underarm serve on a big point. The taboo is odd from a strategic perspective. Adding an underarm serve into regular rotation increases the degree of difficulty in returning, and can help a server win more often, especially on big points. Guarding against an underarm serve would mean standing closer to the baseline, but that also makes you vulnerable to fast-paced serves. To execute a good underarm serve does not require nearly the amount of skill as a good drop shot, but it does require good disguise and the element of surprise. It is a risky shot if executed at the wrong time, as it can allow a returner to take control of a point. Yet underarm serving is considered dishonorable, you lose face, and if you do it too much, you’re most likely going to be ostracized in the locker room. The underarm serve is very rarely used.

In cage-fighting, oblique kicks to the knees are taboo. It is considered dirty fighting, even though its legal and quite effective. For a long time, defensive shifts in baseball were taboo; they were so taboo that no team did it for almost a hundred years. Then every team did it as a matter of regular play. It was so effective it became outlawed, because somewhere along the way baseball fans, players, and rule-makers decided it was hindering competition (that rule change was a big mistake, in my opinion). I am told that in cricket there is a practice called Mankading that is taboo, but I’ve never learned cricket nor watched a single match to know how to describe this practice accurately. In soccer, hanging out with the ball in a corner just meandering around wasting time is taboo, even if it can be a winning strategy. And don’t get me started on video gaming, where gamers know with elaborate and pedantic detail just what kind of play constitutes dishonorable forms of winning, and what constitutes honorable ones, when all such winning is consistent with the rules and programming of the video game. (To take one example I do know about, because I’m a 90s kid, there were ways of winning against an opponent in Street Fighter II, called “pattern fighting,” that was hugely effective but elicited groans and anger and sometimes actual fist-fighting between arcade players for being dirty play.)

The existence of commonly known, but taboo strategies in sports puts to the lie the idea that the sole aim in a sporting competition is winning. Somehow, within the system of rules and the playing field that define a sport, certain norms emerge concerning honor and face that supersede even the norm of competing to win, which is the whole purpose of a game. Even players that philosopher Thi Nguyen call “striving players”, people who aim in game-playing not to win, but to strive, achieve, and enjoy, have to assume the aim of winning in order to strive, achieve, and win.

But what every game player learns very quickly is that there are unwritten norms that constitute honor and face, and that violating these can mean victory without respect. You will not gain respect for being a good game player if you employ taboo moves no matter how much you win. It takes a lot for a player to disregard norms of face and honor during competition, no matter how high-stakes. I would hazard to say that in most sports, well over 99% of players, would sooner lose than to win dishonorably by violating a taboo. I have never seen Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Murray, Wawrinka, Sinner, Alcaraz, the winners of pretty much every major in the past 20 years, use an underarm serve. It probably never occurred to any of them, and it would probably never occur to them to use it in a high-stakes moment like a set or match point.

Players in sports will sooner cheat, participate in gamesmanship, and even explicitly violate rules and be ejected as part of overall game play than they would use a taboo technique. Soccer and basketball players dive and flop, sometimes in very foolish-looking ways. Tennis players have been known to mock an opponent’s service motion or ticks to get in their heads, kick over their water bottles, and stall for time to get them out of a winning rhythm. Baseball players steal signs, cork their bats, hit batters with pitches, and even brawl. You would think that cheating or explicit rule violation would be more dishonorable than doing something that is both legal and helps you win, but it isn’t.

How deep do these taboos run? As far as I can tell, there are taboos that are solely aesthetic, that have nothing to do with the idea that you’re “playing dirty” against an opponent, but employing them is equally dishonorable or effacing. Famously, in basketball, the granny shot is mechanically and technically a far more accurate way to hit free throws. If low-percentage free throw shooters adopted the granny, they would contribute far more points to their team’s victory. They might even score decisive points in playoff games. Certain unconventional stances when putting a golf ball are like this too. There’s are ways of standing while hitting a golf ball with a putter that you’d only see in an Adam Sandler movie that, if you just looked at balance and control, the unconventional stance could prove more efficient and effective movement for some players. But golfers would never use them, not because of any sense of wronging opponents. The mere use of a non-standard motion would make someone lose face simply by being ugly. Aesthetic taboos are all over sports in any game that requires “proper form.”

So we know there is a kind of ugly whereby players would rather lose pretty than win ugly, and a kind of dishonor whereby players would rather lose honorably than win dishonorably. None of these are codified in sporting rules, and in fact many ways of winning ugly and dishonorably are done with far more frequency than the violation of sporting taboos.

What might we learn about life generally from the existence and persistence of sporting taboos? Here’s are a few speculations.

(1) There are unwritten rules of any activity, no matter how much that activity is rule-governed. The unwritten rules are generated by norms that are as strong if not even stronger that the norms generated by rules and competition to win. These are norms of honor and face. Honor and face are for a large part and in most contexts more important than rational self-interested pursuit of victory in a game.

One general lesson from this is that no matter how you structure someones’ practical choices by tailoring penalties and rewards, there may well be some actions they will not perform even if it is within their rational self-interest to perform. Honor and face norms generated in whatever way they are generated to produce taboos are incredibly powerful.

(2) At the same time that these extra-legal reason-generated norms are incredibly robust, they are also incredibly fragile, as evidenced by the drop shot, and the defensive shift. Once a sufficient number of defectors start using the strategy, the norm just melts away unless rules are imposed to prohibit it. It isn’t that the norm that honor and face are more important than winning disappears, its that it is incredibly fragile what counts as dishonorable or effacing. The underarm serve taboo survives even when the drop shot taboo went away. So there will always be honor and face norms, even if particular taboos are fragile.

One general lesson from this is that no matter how powerful a taboo appears to be, if it is indeed to everyone’s rational self-interest to violate it, everyone will violate it when there is common knowledge that a critical mass of others will violate it. Taboos are simultaneously robust and fragile.

(3) Its is an open question whether there is a “moral reality” to the particular taboos that exist in sport, or if they are entirely a matter of convention and only convention. The taboo against oblique kicking of the knees in cage-fighting arises from the idea that knee injuries can be career-threatening or ending. But it is controversial whether oblique kicks to the knees really are uniquely injurious, as compared to for instance head kicks, heel hooks, or neck cranks. It is incredibly hard to justify the underarm serve taboo in a way that does not also make the drop shot a taboo. The underarm serve is simply a drop shot done when serving. If anything, the underarm serve looks more like the granny shot and the nontraditional golf stance in being an aesthetic violation.

Why there are aesthetic violations is somewhat of a mystery. One hypothesis it that the use of a technique by a professional or skilled player that is typically used only by a beginner or amateur is dishonorable, because it shows that you are winning but in a way no more skilled than a beginner. Another hypothesis I like is that many taboos are generated by norms of masculinity. Male players actually say things that verify this hypothesis, saying that these kinds of techniques are “girly” or “sissy.” I like this hypothesis because it explains why brawling is not dishonorable but granny shots are. But it doesn’t explain why female players also abide by such taboos, nor does it explain what even in men’s soccer or basketball, flopping is so prevalent, which should be a “sissy” move par excellence.

The lesson here seems to be that, while it is possible that honor and face norms track something genuinely morally bad about particular sports taboos, it is also possible that what counts as an inviolable taboo so as to separate out honorable and dishonorable play is entirely conventional. If it is entirely conventional, it could just be that humans need some kind of taboo to play the role of honor and face constraints on our relentless pursuit of winning, and what that taboo happens to be can be anything. Once we establish the taboo, we might tell ourselves a story about why that taboo arises for moral reasons.

If there is anything to the ideas I’m exploring in this post, there have to be implications for how we think about higher-stakes activity and the relentless pursuit of victory we see people engaged in toward their goals of winning; in business, politics, and war. For the single-minded competitor, taboos represent a strategic weak point you are in a position to exploit for victory. For those who believe in the moral reality thesis, taboos represent holes in the rules that require informal enforcement because the taboo represents a real constraint on playing to win. There really needs to be regular social sanctioning and reprimanding of players who violate taboos in order to keep the taboos a robust constraint.

*The following dialogue is a fictionalized reconstruction of off-record conversations the author has had in the past five years with a variety of philosophers. The author, for the record, does not drink, and has spent the entirety of his adult life as the sober one in drunken academic discussions.

Jordan is a distinguished senior philosopher at a “top” analytic research department “Sterlington,” that has been competing for the best graduate students and faculty internationally for over fifty years.

Kerr is a junior philosopher at a PhD granting department, Prarieview State, which competes for students who are not competitive at internationally top-ranked programs.

Lin is a senior philosopher at a university that is trying to transform a small master’s program into a PhD program.

Blam is a faculty member who spent the entirety of his career at a liberal arts college, but who is just starting a job at a research institution with a PhD program.

The four are sitting at a casual dinner after having had a bit too much wine, and their inhibitions are gone, so that semi-joking but somewhat honest opinions are now being expressed.

Jordan: The graduate students aren’t any good these days. Thirty years ago we still had people on the brink of being Parfit, Lewis, Williamson, or Nussbaum, and they were solving very serious and ambitious problems. Now everyone is making a little move in a literature of 100 articles and they go to their little niche conferences thanking each other for their talks. What happened to systemic philosophy? What happened to the next great thinker? I think we need to end our graduate program, maybe permanently or at least until I see evidence that good people are coming back to philosophy. Its a waste of our time advising these kids. Its a waste of their time writing these papers about these trivial moves in their little games.

Blam: You think that Sterlington of all places shouldn’t have a PhD program? I can see the argument that there are too many PhD programs out there handing out too many PhDs, and that it is hurting the students because they can’t get jobs. But Sterlington has been and will continue to be churning out PhDs who are getting jobs. It’s still a big success comparatively, why the hell would you end that?

Jordan: We’re not a trade school for university employment, we’re here to find and cultivate true philosophers, people who are going to change the field and be read for 50 years, 100 years, 200 years. We’re looking for groundbreaking, agenda-setting thinking. If that’s not happening, what’s the point? Right now we’re about as good as every other PhD program churning out a bunch of technocrats who are trying to find a niche amongst a group of friends so they can collect a paycheck. These aren’t philosophers, these are people who teach and study philosophy. Go ahead and have programs for teachers of philosophy, that’s not Sterlington. We are a program for true philosophers, and if they’re not showing up, we don’t need to have a program. The faculty are doing enough real philosophy here.

Blam: I guess I have never thought of graduate programs in philosophy as having that goal. I mean, there are so few philosophers that are comparable to the likes of Nussbaum or Williamson even at Sterlington. If that’s your standard for having a graduate program, there really should only be three of them in the world, right? Who is going to be teaching all those philosophy majors and nonmajors at all of these other universities? Isn’t the goal of a graduate program to staff those universities, and as a side benefit, these teachers can also write for each other because they get enjoyment and fulfillment out of it? Isn’t the point of graduate programs to sustain the tradition of thinking, writing, and critique extending from Plato, Mencius, Nargarjuna and other world figures right up to Nussbaum or Williamson or those from the Continental tradition? Isn’t the purpose of a graduate program just to keep that alive, in the culture, for the next generation of people? You and I, in fact most professional philosophers, are just temporary custodians of that tradition. Some uniquely gifted people are going to be players in it, but that’s not most of us. PhD programs are for all of us, even the unremarkable ones.

Jordan: Wow, you’ve been spending way too much time at a liberal arts college. We never think about those issues, not when we schedule courses, not when we do PhD admissions, not when we hire, and not when we tenure and promote. We are looking to find the best philosophers, the smartest interlocutors, and people whose work is excellent on all dimensions. We’re looking for people who, when other people read them, think, this is it, this is philosophy worth thinking about, worth putting on a syllabus. That’s what we want in our graduate students, that’s who we want to advise our graduate students, and that’s what we think the purpose of our graduate program is.

Kerr: What Jordan says is to a large extent true Blam. We might not be Sterlington, but even here at Prarieview, we very seldom think about our graduate program, including the structure of it like how much coursework, when people have to write a prospectus, the kind of exams we require, and how long the dissertation ought to be, in terms of the best way to staff other universities with teachers that inspire and sustain a certain tradition. We definitely don’t think of training some custodian of a tradition. We’re looking to teach people to make an original, publishable contribution to a literature, so that their career as a researcher can be established. You can see this by how little pedagogical training we have, and why we don’t look for anything teaching-related in PhD admissions, and we put so little weight on that in whom we hire for advising our graduate students. Its not that that kind of thing isn’t important, its just not a priority and we kind of assume that kind of stuff will work itself out. Plus, no one ever gets hired or promoted on the basis of that stuff, so we structure our entire program on what will get our students hired and promoted.

Blam: So the purpose of a graduate program is to churn out the best possible researcher you can from a cohort, and “best possible researcher” means, what exactly? I doubt you think it means what Jordan says it means.

Kerr: It means the person gets published in the highest ranked journal they can possibly get published in. It means they publish regularly in a variety of other journals. It means other researchers will pay some attention to them so they can write them letters for promotion. It means the student will gain a reputation in the small niche in which they, are they become someone for whom to request peer-review, make contribution to edited volumes, and invite to conferences. The goal of our program is to admit the best students who will matriculate here, and to try and get as many of them as possible to become professional philosophers in the research sense. Even if its not going to be the agenda-setting students, it is going to be students who in some sense want it, and why shouldn’t there be programs like ours for the students who want to do what we do for a living?

Jordan: You’re wasting a lot of these kids’ time Kerr. They can get all the success they want along those dimensions, but that makes them only as good as any half-rate blogger who is talking to other bloggers back and forth on the internet. And good for them if they get to collect a paycheck doing it, but these are very smart kids and they would do better for themselves and the world if they turned their intellectual energy onto more impactful things. They can make a bigger contribution to biology, or ecology, or tech. They’re wasting their time playing this little game that this profession has turned into, as much as they’re wasting their time streaming video of themselves playing video games on the internet, even if they can monetize it.

Blam: This exchange is getting me pretty depressed, especially because I now have to advise in a PhD program. On the one hand, I think I really do value the kind of thing Jordan is talking about, in that I highly value and esteem the work of people like Parfit, Lewis, Nussbaum, and their students who are now my peers. How could I not? And I’m not so pluralistic and egalitarian that I think anyone who gets a PhD and publishes in one of our journals is as good or has contributed as much knowledge as Nussbaum. But I am a pluralist enough to think that far more people than just a handful a generation make significant contributions to philosophical knowledge than just those greats. On the other hand, I do find the careerist aspirations of a view like Kerr’s, while realistic and prudent, rather depressing, and probably for pluralist reasons also. I’ve been around long enough to have evaluated tenure-files from people at teaching institutions, who are happy there and have great jobs, but were forced to have three publications or so, and whose publications clearly show they are not interested in being an original contributor to a literature so as to be invited to conferences and what not. Those papers just go through the motions of looking and sounding like a piece of philosophy. These people are happy teaching and learning about and passing on all of this great work to another generation. They’re probably more excited about teaching philosophy than any of the research-errific friend’s I’ve had. Why is the only path for them to do that by way of the path of a typical researcher, publish or perish graduate school, when even successful people on that model sometimes make about as significant a contribution as some random blogger talking to friends on the internet? What value does the typical PhD program have for them? Shouldn’t there be graduate programs for these other people also?

Lin: Listen to all of this super elitist bullshit! Jordan, you think only the Roger Federers and Serena Williams of the world should get a shot at playing pro tennis? Even the most elitist assholes in philosophy doesn’t believe this! There are thousands of people who aspire for professional tennis, the same in professional philosophy. We have a small masters program, we barely get any students applying, most of them are people who liked philosophy in college but have no idea what to do with their lives. At the same time, we can’t get anything from the Dean’s office, no TAs for our courses of 300, no raises in two years, no money for traveling to conferences, no endowment for department talks. The fact is, at our university, you want to get any resources, you have to be a PhD granting department. And our faculty of seven, no one pays any attention to our work or our institution. If we can get our PhD program started, we might get two extra tenure-track lines, and then we might be able to hire someone that gets us ranked onto the Philosophical Gourmet Report. Do you know how much a game-changer that would be for us? The Dean would immediately give us a speaker series and we’d have three TAs for our courses, and we’d probably get $5000 in research funding each per year. That’s not a lot but its more than we have now. And maybe your little friends Nussbaum and Williamson would actually read and respond to our work instead of seeing us as rejects and losers.

Blam: Hold on, Lin, are you saying that the purpose of a graduate program is for the reputational and career benefits of the people who are teaching in it? What a bad reason for having a graduate program!

Lin: Spare me the posturing self-righteousness of the question Blam. Its sanctimonious coming from you, who TA’d at Princeton and taught Vassar students for 15 years. Go your entire career having thousands of students give less than half a shit about what you’ve spent your life studying and writing about, for crappy pay, having to read daily fifty essays by students who can’t reason their way out of a paper bag, and then admonish me for wanting just 10% of my job to be the kind of thing that you and Jordan and Kerr have taken for granted. Yes I want more prestige in my life. Yes, I want important people to think about me once in a while. Yes I want more money and resources for my department, and I want some minor budget so I can go to a conference a year, and I think I deserve it as much as any of you, and fuck you for judging me for wanting it.

Blam: Lin, are you sure starting an entirely new PhD program and chasing the rankings is the best way to get this money and prestige and labor you’re after? You’re talking about getting in the game of being reputationally ranked by your peers amongst a hundred programs around the world that sets metrics by which you will then need to evaluate yourselves and your junior colleagues on, all for the benefit of competing for three or four graduate students who show up for 6-8 years of struggle for a degree half of them will not get, and the other half will get but do nothing with because they won’t get secure academic employment afterward. Wouldn’t that subtract not add to your reputation, and also impose a lot of very dreadful features into your job and departmental life?

Jordan: And what possible prestige can come to you, Lin, having to advise these half-rate students writing some useless dissertation about the semantics of terms of epistemic violence on Twitter, or whatever it is young people like to write about these days? Even at Sterlington, you want to advise the best students, the ones going on to the other Sterlingtons of the world. Then at least you can say you were their advisor. You really want a reputation as advisor to the adjuncts and unemployable?

Blam: It sounds like Jordan thinks a PhD program and PhD advising is an ongoing “best philosopher in the world” contest. Its just like the pro tennis tour; there’s space for 128 players at any given grand slam, at most space for about 2000 total pro players, and prestige is only granted to the players and coaches of players in the top 100. First of all, you realize Lin that you’re not going to win that contest, and Jordan has a point about whether you really do want to create a space for the students who come in 600th in that contest at twenty-two years old, but hope to contend with the top 200 in the next contest eight years later. Is it really good for them to have all this false hope? But more importantly, do you see how prestige-chasing changes the values by which you work by Lin? Are you really going to get up in the morning every day and interact with young people, your colleagues, your peers, with the thought of whether a particular interaction increases your prestige? What happened to educating and inspiring young people?

Lin: You’ve been a big talker about the importance of perpetuating and sustaining a tradition of ideas, writing, and thinking of high value as the primary aim of what we do Blam. In what sense is adding a program that allows four more young people a year to educate themselves beyond their bachelors degree working against that? How can it not be a good for there to be even more PhD programs that provide this good, because it will provide this good to more people? Even by your lights, the more people in philosophy PhD programs, the better it is for philosophy!

Blam: So PhD programs are for the sake of students, and not for your own reputation after all? If that’s the ultimate goal, then you really need to think hard about how you structure the program.

You’re talking about a PhD program not all that different from any others, you have students take classes, demonstrate competence and specialized knowledge, then choose a topic to write 300-pages on, and insist they say something no one who has written on that topic has said yet.

One thing I’ve been noticing in this whole discussion is people are recreating the conditions of their own success, which is a PhD program just like the ones they went through. Jordan is a top philosopher in a top department and believes graduate programs need to be producing the top people. Kerr is a PhD from a top department, trying to recreate the same kind of students at a non-top department.

You folks ever hear of the Bollitieri academy? It was a top tennis academy in the 80s-2000s, producing lots of top 100 players and Grand Slam champions. If you asked them “What is the point of a top tennis academy”, they will clearly answer that it is charged with producing the Agassis or Sharapovas of the future. Their training curriculum was the same for all; there really is a kind of forehand, and backhand you teach future grand-slam champions. That’s why everyone at the top looked the same, and why one-handed backhands and continental forehands have disappeared in pro tennis.

Jordan has an interesting point: on the tennis analogy, a lot of kids who will never be competing on the professional tour, or even coaching on that tour, shouldn’t be spending their youth at a tennis academy. Its a lot of money and time, and the opportunity costs are immense. I take Jordan’s view to be that the same holds for PhD study in philosophy. I don’t think this is true, but its a coherent view of the purpose of graduate education, to train contenders and only contenders.

Kerr seems to think that everyone who wants a shot at going pro should have an academy fit for their level to give them a shot, to compete on the pro tour even if they get beat down and drummed out. That’s because the occasional dark horse really does make it on tour, and does very well, once in a while they even win a Grand Slam. That’s more true in philosophy than in tennis. So Kerr has a point too. Maybe the place to do this isn’t your Bollitieri academy or in this case the Sterlingtons of the world, but it speaks to the idea that there should be as many PhD spots as there are undergraduates who want to get into them, because they all could have a shot at being contenders. I think this is far too hopeful in philosophy, and in tennis.

Lin has ended on the view that more PhD programs is just better because being a coach at a tennis academy confers honors and resources on the coaches, and confers benefits on the students because, even on my own view, if we think tennis is valuable, then people who want to play tennis in their youth should have a spot at least somewhere, even if they will never even try to compete on tour. The perpetuation of people who value the sport is the central value, and that has been my view of PhD programs in philosophy.

But I think my biggest critique in all of this is that its funny just how little variation there is in how you are all conceiving of a PhD program. A program designed for the next great tennis players to me looks very different than one designed for careerists who will never compete at the highest levels, and very different than one designed for the people who are good enough tennis players that they are tasked with helping sustain and support the sport in all of the local clubs and community centers across the country. In philosophy this is just as true; why think that everyone has to be trained the way you would Williamson or Nussbaum, if the purpose of a PhD program is as different as the purpose of a tennis academy?

The research model PhD program is seeking to turn an undergraduate philosophy major into a specialist who talks to other specialists. To this I think Jordan is onto something. The tennis player who is never going to be playing on the tour and who is at best going to be director of the tennis community center, teach kids, adult clinics, needs to learn very different things than what the next Federer needs to learn. Its actually a disservice to tennis that we teach everyone, including those completely incapable of turning pro, how to hit and move like a pro.

I think I’ve come to the conclusion that either every PhD program should have different tracks, or there should be very different kinds of PhD programs, that are tailored around very different kinds of education. Maybe Sterlington should pack up if they don’t think they are producing any more Grand Slam champions, and Lin should consider designing a program that is nothing like Sterlington. Maybe there is a place for the kind of continuing philosophical education that develops erudite generalists who are good at teaching and inspiring kids to pass on what they love, even if they’re never a contender.

Jordan: Wow Blam, you really have been brainwashed by your liberal arts college. You talk like we’re all educators, like our primary purpose in our jobs and our careers is to educate, to be of pedagogical service to students. That’s just false. We are philosophers first, not educators. If we educate, that is a side benefit. We are not teaching or educating aspiring philosophers, we are being philosophers, people who aspire to the deepest knowledge in the universe. We surround ourselves with graduate students to model good philosophy, showing them what we do and how we do it, and engaging with them as philosophers, not students. And forgive me for wanting only the best possible philosophers around to engage with. That makes me and them better philosophers. And to the extent that that ends, then philosophy itself deserves to end.

Kerr: I usually disagree with almost everything Jordan says, but I agree that we don’t conceive of ourselves as educators. We’ve worked incredibly hard as philosophers to get noticed and read by all the important people, and part of maintaining that is to stay ranked as highly as possible in our PhD programs. Its why other philosophers from higher and lower ranked place keep tabs on our work. They won’t pay any attention otherwise. PhD students are just miniature versions of us who aspire to the same careers.

Lin: All I want in my life is just a little bit of that, when I haven’t had any. Call it prestige-seeking if you’d like its why I got into this in the first place.

Blam: Funny how different people who have the same job have such completely different conceptions of what that job is.