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- [00:03]
LSE Events Podcast Host
Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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Paul Kelly
So welcome to this morning's event. My name is Paul Kelly and I'm a professor in the Government department, political theorist. And it's my huge pleasure to introduce Cass Sunstein from Harvard University to talk about his book. Cass is the Robert Warsley University professor at Harvard, founder and Director of Programs Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. Many of you will know his work. He's an extraordinary, embarrassingly prolific author across a huge range of subjects. But he's most recently, very recently just published this book on liberalism. And I think it's a fascinating book. I'm not going to tell you why Cass is going to do that, but I think it's an appropriate book for the times. So with, with that, I'm going to hand over to Cass. He's going to speak for about half an hour. I think it's good for you all that he talks about the book. A lot of you will also be interested in nudgeonomics and all the other things that he's done. There will be an opportunity for questions. So I give yourselves time to think about that at the end. But we do need to finish abruptly and at 12:30. And then finally, if any of you are going to post about this on, well, don't use X blue sky hashtag lsevents. And with that, thank you very much.
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Cass Sunstein
It's a thrill and an honor to get to talk about this subject at this institution. I thank you for hosting me. I thank you for being here. I thank you for Hayek, who's in the vicinity. He wrote until he was 91. I'm sure he's still alive and writing another book about freedom. George Orwell's 1984 is a shattering account of anti liberalism. One of his villains, you might remember, offers this warning. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. And consider this less known but really good line. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. Who other than Orwell could write that sentence? Here are the novel's chilling last words. But it was all right. Everything was all right. The struggle was over. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. I recently reread 1984 and was staggered by its power and the source of its power. So the source of its power is that Orwell got tyranny and anti Liberalism, and part of his soul was profoundly attracted to it. The enduring authority of 1984 is Orwell's inner ambivalence about whether in the end the bad guys were on the right track. He was, of course, in the end, a chooser of liberalism. But his soul's ambivalence crashes through the book more than at any time since Orwell's own. Liberalism is under pressure, even siege. Have you noticed there's a lot of marching up and down. People are cheering. A lot of them are waving flags. Many of them love Big Brother and think that they've found him on the right. A lot of people have given up on liberalism. Have you noticed that? Also, they hold it responsible for the collapse of traditional values, Anglo American values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority, and rampant immorality, too. On the left, a lot of people despise liberalism. And I should say that the origins of this book, which lay in a little kind of memorandum to self on my laptop that I never thought I'd publish it, was Notes on Liberalism. And it was meant as a kind of homage to Hayek's great essay, why I'm Not a Conservative. It had numbered paragraphs. That essay was intended as a response originally to the left insisting, as many on the left have and do, that liberalism is really tired and elderly and dying. They think that it lacks the resources to handle the problems posed by racism, sexism, corporate power and environmental degradation. There are a lot of references to neoliberalism, which is identified, isn't it, with liberalism. It's not that. It's something different, and it's referred to with contempt. Fascists don't like liberalism. So do populists, who think that freedom is overrated in ways large and small. Anti liberalism is marching, and so is tyranny. Many of the marchers don't depict liberalism accurately. They offer a caricature. There's a line by two behavioral scientists, two of the originators who. Who say a refutation of a caricature can be no better than a caricature of a refutation, a good line. And we're seeing a great deal of refuting of a caricature in the form of liberalism, whose underlying philosophical core is neglected more than ever, I think with regret. There's an urgent need for a clear understanding of liberalism, of its evolving character, its promise of what it is and can be. If you don't believe in freedom of thought and freedom of speech, you are not a liberal. If you don't believe in freedom of religion, you are not a liberal. If you reject the legitimacy and the value of pluralism, guess what? You are not. If you reject the idea of experiments in living, you are not on the liberal team. If you reject the rule of law, you are not a liberal. All this suggests that liberals define themselves first and foremost by a commitment to freedom, prioritizing freedom of speech and freedom of religion. They don't just acknowledge pluralism and the freedom that it makes possible. They cherish those things. They're committed to the rule of law, and they welcome dissent. Liberalism as a thing can well be traced to Benjamin Constant's stunningly ambitious book in 1815. It's almost comical in its imperialism. It's called Principles of Politics, applicable to all governments. He was not cautious about liberalism. What did the book call for? A set of freedoms highlighting freedom of thought, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. The book called for popular sovereignty and hence a form of democracy. Constant insisted on the importance of separating church and state, something essential to the preservation of individual conscience and also to the protection of religion against the state's potentially overweening authority. One of Constant's central themes was the need to ensure that the state and the law would be respectful of the diversity of both thought and action. Drawing on older traditions, Constant emphasized the importance of self sacrifice, virtue, generosity, and dedication to the common good. You will have noticed that since 1815, liberalism has taken multiple twists and turns. Sometimes it's been fundamentally associated with free markets, private property and free trade. Hayek is leading theorists of that form of liberalism. And sometimes it's been identified with a government that determined to provide social services, help for those at the bottom of the economic ladder, and regulation of externalities. Broadly understood. And there's a confluence there between social democracy liberalism or New Deal liberalism and the form of economic liberalism associated with Pigou, who emphasized externalities. Some liberals emphasize negative rights and as they call them, the right to be protected from an overweening state intruding on anyone in this room. And we should say that freedom from fear, a large theme in the liberal tradition which has maybe new power today, is associated with getting the government to step back. Other liberals emphasize what are sometimes called positive rights, rights to receive government help. Sometimes liberalism leans technocratic, sometimes it leans more populist. And let's just notice that liberalism is a really big tent. I almost called the book Big Tent Liberalism. Maybe that would seem like a camping guide and so not be suitable for a university press to publish. The reason that was my preferred title is is. For decades I saw the Austrian economists and the libertarian philosophers, some of them represented in this room, I hope, certainly represented at LSC as frenemies, that is, people whom I greatly admired and learned from, but who weren't on the same team as mine. I now see them as teammates, as brothers and sisters under the same camp. And while the disagreements between, let's say, Rawlsian liberals and Hayekian liberals are fierce and important, it's equally important, or more so, to say that the commitments to pluralism, freedom and the rule of law are unifying. And these are inside the family disputes. What you've just heard is an extended preface, and now you're about to hear two chapters, one of which is an enumerated list, and the other is called, roughly the future Liberals are committed, as noted, to the rule of law, pluralism and freedom. They also highlight democracy, security, and human rights. Their own conception of democracy is a deliberative one, an approach that combines a commitment to reason giving in the public sphere with a commitment to accountability. Now, that might sound like abstractions that would induce sleep. Let's notice that the commitment to democracy that's deliberative says that even the people have to give an account to justify any course of action which is understood as a constraint on what any authority, even one that's fully democratic, is entitled to do so. Reason giving as built into the liberal tradition as a supplement to the commitment to accountability. Second Sorry, President Orban, but illiberal democracy is illiberal, and liberals oppose it for that reason.
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Paul Kelly
Because.
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Cass Sunstein
Because liberals believe in freedom, personal security and pluralism. They reject authoritarianism in all its forms. And see, liberal authoritarianism is not a thing. It's a little like a feline dog. As a dog lover who's kind of ambivalent about cats, no, dogs are feline by definition. 3. Liberals are keenly aware that reasonable people disagree about a lot of things, including the nature of a good life and which God to worship. They seek to make space for those disagreements. 4. Liberals want people who disagree with each other to find a way to live together and to smile, or at least to nod respectfully at their differences. That is the core of the liberal commitment to pluralism, which is under challenge in Europe and the United States these days. 5. Liberals really like these words from John Stuart Mill. He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are. He has no ground for preferring either opinion. That's a kind of delicate way of capturing the sentiment in the greatest sentence ever written by a justice on any high court in the history of humanity, which is compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. That's a liberal rally cry. 6. The liberal emphasis on pluralism in even nations that have a dominant religious tradition is closely committed to freedom and security. Those who reject pluralism render people unfree and insecure and sometimes imprison or kill them. In free nations, that's usually something directed at other places. But in some free nations these days, it's a living necessity to assert that. I might say that Roosevelt's four freedoms, which included freedom from fear, was born out of alertness to the risk that persons might be vulnerable in their body and in their property to a government committed to something. And the word freedom from fear. The term partakes of old style political philosophy which incarnated the liberal tradition. 7. In North America, Europe and elsewhere, those who consider themselves to be conservatives may or may not embrace liberal commitments. Those who consider themselves to be leftists may or may not count as liberals. You can be at once a liberal as understood here and very right of center. You can be a leftist and illiberal. Plenty are in politics. Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy and Angela Merkel all count as part of the liberal tradition, notwithstanding the sharp disagreements among them. 8. I used to think that the greatest American president and the greatest American liberal political actor was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Not least because encountered in the bathroom by Winston Churchill who walked in on him. Churchill was very embarrassed and Roosevelt responded. Winston, the President of the United States has no secrets from the prime minister. I now think that Abraham Lincoln was his equal in part by immersion in his conception of liberalism that is Lincoln's. Lincoln said this in 1854. If the Negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self government to say that he shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself, that is self government. But when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self government. That is despotism. No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent. I say that is the leading principle, the sheet anchor of American republicanism. Pause over that. If you would see what he did there. He links the notion of self government in the political domain to the notion of self government in individual life. He's saying for each of us, if we are governed by another without our consent, then we are being annihilated in some sense. And, and that's the same thing that led to the commitment to self government. People can embrace Lincoln's thesis while having disparate views about abortion, immigration, climate change and artificial intelligence. 9. While liberals have not always been committed to democracy, and that's important to acknowledge, they have always been committed to freedom. Some liberals have thought there's a right to immunity from the state without agreeing. There's a right to popular control over the state's apparatus. But Lincoln had it right. He captured the underlying logic of liberalism in linking freedom in individual life with self government. 10. Liberals are committed to dignity. They see people as subjects, not objects. And and they prize the idea of agency. They agree with Lincoln, saying if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. They regard Mill's astonishing book the Subjection of Women as helping to define liberalism essence. Thus, Mill wrote, the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself and is now one of the chief hindrances to to human improvement. Liberals are committed to the rule of law. They have a beef with Hayek here, who identified the rule of law with free markets. And no government commands the liberal conception of rule. Rule of law is narrower than that involves fair notice, no retroactivity, no rapid shifts operating on the books as it does in the world. A set of precepts that's compatible with a lot of different economic and social orders. But liberals agree with Hayek that the rule of law is defining of a well functioning social order. 12 A Supreme Court justice named Felix Frankfurter wrote a sentence that is really tedious and let's see if it can bring you to sleep and also raise your eyebrows at the same time. He said the history of freedom for English speaking peoples is in large part the freedom of procedural safeguards. That doesn't resonate like compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. And I remember reading the sentence the history of freedom is a large part of freedom's history of procedural safeguards. As a law student and thinking that guy has to be very old, it can't be that that's the history of freedom. That's too downbeat a notation. And yet Frankfurter had a lot of wisdom in his sentence. Everyone in this room, if it looks like you do, if you enjoy freedom, one reason is procedural safeguards. And in some countries, including English speaking countries today, abridgments of freedom are occurring because procedural safeguards are not being obeyed. 13 the Liberal commitment to Reason giving noted above means that power cannot be exercised only on the ground that the king says so, the Prime Minister says so, or even God says so, or even the people say so. That's not enough. 14 liberals do not believe that their own approach is frozen in time. In their view, liberalism is not like a rock, it is constantly growing like a tree. What John Dewey said of English speaking nations is true of liberalism. Be the evils what they may, the experiment is not yet played out, the nation is not yet made. It is not a finished fact to be categorically assessed. The most important anti liberal polemicist of the last 50 years in the United States is William F. Buckley Jr. Who as a young student at Yale produced a book called God and Man at Yale that was like a bolt of electricity through the nation and it's still very, very energetic. What Uckley argued was that Yale was liberal capital L in the sense that it was anti market and socialist. So poor Hayek and in the sense that was anti God and pro atheism, poor religious freedom. Buckley was against liberalism with a capital L and he was meeting the left. He was ambivalent about liberalism, small l the liberal political tradition. He wrote a very urgent call to conservatism with some anti liberal features in the first issue of his new journal, the National Review, which has had massive impact on American history. And his most famous line was that his preferred form of conservatism quote stands athwart history yelling stop liberals by contrast and ask history to explain its plans. And if the explanation is good enough, they are prepared to whisper. Go next chapter. Last chapter shorter. Some people insist that freedom is incompatible with order. They think that people will not choose well. They see freedom as a threat when freedom of speech is shut down. That is a standard reason. Many people, including elected leaders, believe that the rule of law is incompatible with security and they suspend it in its name. Of course, many people despise liberal liberty because they seek to retain their own power. The rights that liberals prize are an outgrowth of the commitment to freedom. The right to vote, the right to free speech, the right to religious liberty, and emphatically the right to due process of law. Let's celebrate, shall we? The right to private property associated with Lincoln's sheet anchor. If you can't own things, you're vulnerable to the power of others. Above all government. No ism that was that's intentional, that noise. Paul and I decided to introduce it because that produces a little tension as the marks cascade. You can agree with John Stuart Mill or John Rawls without having clarity about proposed increases in the minimum wage. You can be a liberal without knowing what to think about commercial advertising, child pornography and how to handle libel. You can believe in freedom of religion without knowing whether it's permissible to apply prohibitions on race and sex discrimination to religious schools. Now I'm going to disclose the kind of emotional foundation of this book, why it exists. In its early days, liberalism is full of fire. If you read liberal texts, the sense of energy and discovery is bursting from the page. Here's mills on Liberty, 1859. If all mankind minus one were of one opinion and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person. That he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing all mankind. That's a sunburst. The same is true of Mill's subjection of women. Recall, the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself and is one of the chief hindrances to human improvement. My gosh. Conson's principles of politics applicable to all governments in 1815. Political freedom would be a thing of no value if the rights of individuals were not sheltered from all violation. Any country where these rights are not respected is a country subjected to despotism. Modern liberalism is quieter and gentler. Consider Rawls final line, which has a kind of softness. It's made out of. What's the right word? It's made out of clay, molded rather than out of fire. Purity of heart. Rawls writes, if one could attain it would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self command. From this meaning, the liberal point of view, it would be extreme and false to say that now the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Sometimes it feels that way, doesn't it? It's not right. The best do not lack conviction. But it would not be extreme or false to say that many current accounts of liberalism by practitioners and by theorists have a defensive quality. They seem tired, backward looking, nostalgic. Call it defensive crouch. Liberalism in law and politics, as in sports, the best offense is often a good defense. Yes, true in football, true in basketball. Still, the defining feature of liberalism has always been its youth, its energy and its fierceness, its delight in human agency, its insistence on laughter, its openness to novelty and surprise, its high spirits, its opposition to cruelty, no boots on people's faces in a liberal regime. And its capacity for indignation, its optimism, its adventures in self definition, its refusal to despair, its sense of mischief, its Commitment to experiments in living liberalism, more than anything, is full of hope. Hopeful people are remaking it every day. Thank you.
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Paul Kelly
Thank you very much, Cass. The noise is actually NYU next door.
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Cass Sunstein
Nyu.
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Paul Kelly
No, we're obviously jealous.
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Cass Sunstein
They're jealous. And it's New York. And I think NYU feels a commitment to noise to replicate the city in which the university mostly sits.
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Paul Kelly
Anyway, thank you so much for that. I think I'm going to go straight to the audience if I can ask you to put your hands up clearly, and then very briefly introduce yourself and ask your question. And obviously, questions would be helpful rather than your random theories of how else we should do things. So I'll start right over on that side with Danny, and then gentleman in the Brown, then on that side, and then try and be as inclusive as possible. So keep your hands up, Danny.
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Danny
Hi, Professor. My name's Danny. I work at the LSE for Larry Kramer. I know he was one of your early students, and I was. This is much less intimidating than your. I took a class from you in 2012, so this is much easier. Very simply, I'm curious about what I see as a contradiction in the argument. You brought up Dewey's comment that liberalism must always grow and change and potentially kind of expand its reach. But it seems to me that what you're trying to do is limit the argument. This is what a liberal is, and they're fairly limited in scope, which means you can include a wide breadth of people. So either liberalism is fair, limited in definition, and it must include very specific things, or it's been growing. And for me, this is the big political problem with liberalism today is that it has grown far beyond your limited definition, and people identify it with a whole host of things they don't like. Freedom of capital, freedom of movement, things like that. So to me, can you explain that contradiction?
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Cass Sunstein
Thank you.
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Paul Kelly
I'm going to take the three together. So. Second question. Yeah, speaking, I think. Yeah.
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Jay
Professor, thank you for coming. My name is Jay. I am an American, obviously, and I recently finished a master's here at the lse. My question has to do with the. My question has to do with the US Supreme Court. Two of the, you know, great liberal American presidents that you identified are also the two who probably had the most contentious relationship with the Supreme Court. And for someone you know, of my age, a lot of the Court's decisions in my lifetime have seemed decidedly illiberal, especially in recent years when we know a number of the justices are getting large amounts of money from, or at least perks from, billionaires to perhaps rule in one way or another. And yesterday we've seen the likely.
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Cass Sunstein
Gutting.
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Jay
Of Section 2 of the VRA. So I'm wondering how you imagine a future liberal American president interacting with the court, which seems perhaps less committed to liberalism than it has in the past.
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Paul Kelly
Thank you very much. And then our third is over here.
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LSE Events Podcast Host
Hi.
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Paul Kelly
Hi.
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LSE Events Podcast Host
I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSEIQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.
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Paul Kelly
Thank you.
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Huddy
Thank you so much for the time, Professor. And thank you as well for your law of group polarization for 2002. That was really helpful for my dissertation. My name is Huddy and I'm a student from DOES just down the road at King's. So thanks for having me. LSE hostile territory. My question is. I'll keep it very simple. You wrote this book partially in response to the left. What narratives or arguments coming out of the contemporary left identified however you like it. But say the democratic socialist left in the United States worries you the most as a liberal and why?
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Paul Kelly
Okay, thank you. I'm going to take those three and then put your hands up and we'll take some more questions.
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Cass Sunstein
Okay, so I'll take them in random order. On the United States Supreme Court and liberalism, there's only one decision in the last 10 years that in my view offhand, is clearly illiberal. And that's the decision that grants presidents immunity. And the reason for that is to square that with the rule of law is very difficult. There are arguments that can be offered. Let's just stipulate that that's a challenge to say the president is immune from criminal process even after being president. There's a rule of law problem for that. The rest of them are not incompatible with liberal commitments to freedom, the rule of law, and pluralism, even if they're incompatible with what contemporary left of center people in the United States and the United Kingdom like. So I don't see the United States Supreme Court as an illiberal court today, though I don't. I disagree with multiple decisions. If there's a. The current president is going to lose in the Supreme Court, he's lost some. The any future president will. And there are a couple of things you can do. You can say it's normal order, and I'll do what other presidents have done, which is try to find a way to achieve my goals consistent with what the Supreme Court thinks. Or you can do what President President Roosevelt did, which is try to take the court on in a very public way and hope that the court will see the error of its ways. So those are the two roots. I should say that the word socialism in America makes me worried. But what the democratic socialists want, that is illiberal. I don't know enough about what democratic socialists in the United States want to know if. If they are unhappy with private property, if they are unhappy with freedom of speech, if they have a problem with freedom of religion, if they are fully respectful of religious pluralism. So I need an account of what the democratic socialists think on all of the liberal views. In terms of the contemporary left in England and the United States, there are occasionally, say, less than fully enthusiastic judgments about the scope of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. And that is worrisome. And to be fair to the contemporary left, one would want to have a list. And I don't have a list. I have anecdotes. And so if leftists in the end say everything that liberals are four, I'm four too, then these are liberal leftists, and there are plenty of them. The liberal political actors in the United States, liberal, meaning people who endorse the liberal tradition, who are left of center, are plentiful, so far as I can tell. Senator Sanders, Bernie Sanders, is a leftist, and I didn't vote for him by any means, but he's a liberal also.
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Audience Member
So.
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Cass Sunstein
So there we are on the contradiction. I think there'd be a contradiction if the two propositions were liberalism is committed to specified things and liberalism isn't committed to specified things, then we would definitely have P and not P. If we say that liberalism is committed to the rule of law, pluralism and freedom, and that our understanding of what those things specifically entail is not frozen over time, then we haven't had a contradiction. So think, for example, of the Constitution of a nation that's not had a Constitution for two weeks. The understanding of what the Constitution specifically entails probably is different now from what it was X number of years ago. But the Constitution hasn't changed. It's just the specification of the ideas has changed. So here's one example. You might think that there's a conception of freedom which entails that discrimination on the basis of race is presumptively forbidden on something like Mill's grounds in the subjection of women. Then you might conclude that discrimination on the basis of sex is picked up by the same conception of freedom and forbidden on something like an idea that there is no caste here. C S T E not Cass. There's at least one CAS here, but no caste here is a liberal conception of freedom. And whether that entails something like an assault on sex discrimination might be unthought of really at one time, but generally agreed upon at another time, if that makes sense. So maybe I'll give just one other example, which is the if suppose you have a law that forbids discrimination on the basis of sex and that's thought to be a liberal commitment that is part of what freedom requires, then let's suppose someone argues that if you forbid discrimination on the basis of sex, you forbid sexual harassment too. It might be thought by the people who wrote the law forbidding the discrimination on the basis of sex. That's a very surprising thought. We meant you can't hire only men and forbid women from being hired sexual assault. We don't even know what that is. It might be that the liberals who designed the prohibition on sex discrimination agree after reflection that if a woman is told that she can't have a job unless she's very friendly with her boss, that that's sex discriminatory. Because if she were a man, she wouldn't have been told that. And that might seem. Oh, the liberal reaction might be oh, and this is not a science fiction example. The idea that sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination was voiced most prominently by Katherine MacKinnon, legal theorists at a time when that was an extremely inventive and bold idea. And a few years after she wrote a Supreme Court that was very right of center, unanimously agreed, every single one of them agreed. And there's no contradiction in saying that the prohibition on sex discrimination is a natural reading of the liberal commitments and then saying that the probation on sexual harassment is a natural reading of the pro what the probation on sex discrimination entails. And if where we are in 2025 on these matters is the same place we are in 2035, then we probably aren't listening to each other well enough.
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Paul Kelly
Thank you. Three. Yes. So one and two. So the woman first and then the person behind you.
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Cass Sunstein
Sorry.
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Paul Kelly
And then one at the far end, please. Yes, you.
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Audience Member
I just wanted to ask you whether you can elaborate on the relationship between the paternalist, which is embedded into nudging with liberalness. Is there any contradiction or. I'm curious about your take on that.
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Cass Sunstein
I'm nodding, not in agreement that there's a contradiction, but an acknowledgement of the question.
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Paul Kelly
Right, gentleman behind you and then gentleman over here in the green jumper, please. Just a quick question. How has the notion of liberalism changed historically from the Enlightenment to date to this idea of neoliberalism? Could it be that it has underwent sort of some sort of specification, or has the term simply been broadened to just encapsulate so many other things that we have come to know? Okay, and then.
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Arman
Thank you very much for your talk. Professor. Oh, yes, my name is Arman. I'm a second year undergraduate studying philosophy and economics. I really enjoyed your talk. Thank you very much. So much of liberalism's intellectual lineage is based on ideal theory. To what extent do you think that the failures of liberalism today, on top of this kind of mischaracterization of the caricatures of liberalism, can be related to the translation from ideal theory to non ideal theory in everyday life? And the failures of that and people kind of losing hope in that.
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Paul Kelly
Thank you. Thank you once again. You choose.
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Cass Sunstein
Okay, great. These are fantastic questions. So really thank you all for them. On liberalism's historical shifts, two that deserve to be highlighted and celebrated is the shift from perfectionist liberalism a la Mill to political liberalism a la Rawls. And you might agree with Mill and not Rawls, some very distinguished people do. But putting political liberalism front and center is a great achievement. Charles Larmore and John Rawls are the principal doers of this. Let me explain. You could have an account of liberalism that says everyone should live a liberal life, meaning you should have a conception of agency and freedom for yourself that embraces something like Mill's kind of romanticized conception of what a good life is. That's a comprehensive view of what life should be that would be associated with liberal notions of agency. Or you could think that liberalism doesn't embrace any comprehensive view. If you think that the liberal conception of what an individual life is like is terrible and you want to have a life of devotion or a life of growing things, meaning not your own agency, but like plants and animals, where you want to have a life dedicated to poetry that is skeptical of or antagonistic to the liberal conception of what a life well lived is. Liberalism says go for it. So let's invent a term. Political liberalism is go for it liberalism, which means that it is a political creed. It doesn't embrace a comprehensive view. So it has an idea of what liberties people have. It has an idea of self governance, it has an idea of the rule of law, but it doesn't say that any particular person must live a liberal life. That political liberalism has a lot of attraction because it is neutral toward and fully respectful of competing comprehensive views. Okay, this is. We're getting into philosophical waters. Some influential anti liberal thinkers think that liberalism isn't neutral with respect to the good, that embraces a sectarian conception of the good that is destructive to many and arrogant and horrifying and kind of Stalinist. I'm stating it vividly for color, but the notion of liberalism as Stalinism, that's the music of some anti liberal texts. You want me to name names? I'm not going to name any names. This is an upbeat set of remarks. Political liberalism says we aren't endorsing any comprehensive view. And that's very different from liberalism in its early days. And in my view it's better than perfectionist liberalism. Rawls difference principle which says economic inequalities are justified only to the extent they're the benefit for the people at the bottom. That is a development of liberalism. I think it's too stringent, but it's a foundation for thinking about economic inequality and under what circumstances it's just justified the idea of the original position. Rawls notion of what would you choose behind a veil of ignorance when you know nothing about yourself? You don't know if you're male or female. You don't know if you're strong or weak. You don't know what color your skin is. That is, I think, an endlessly productive addition to the liberal tradition. And it might lead to something like something in the direction of the difference principle. Though I personally wouldn't endorse the difference principle. Okay, so I'm going to give an inadequate answer to the great question about ideal and non ideal theory. There's a lot of talk about the failures of liberalism and on one view, that's loose. I play the sport squash. Do everyone in the room play squash? Yes, everyone in the world knows squash. And on some days, horrible to confess, I'm playing loose, meaning my this is too much information maybe and too esoteric, but my backhand is too high. When I'm trying to hit it low or it's too low, I'm trying to hit it high. And the failures of liberalism is like me on those squash days. I think in what way has liberalism failed in the United Kingdom or in Canada or Australia or New Zealand? Is the commitment to pluralism a problem for Canada? Is the commitment to freedom of speech and religion causing catastrophe in New Zealand? Is the belief in the rule of law something that is causing evils in the United Kingdom and is the idea of freedom from fear. A source of distress here that would be very, very surprising is the notion of security from private and public depredations, which is, I think, a neglected core to the liberal tradition that if people want to steal your shirt or your watch or your home or your arm, they can't even if they're really strong and the government can't do that either. So there are failures, to be sure, and they're multiple. Which ones are failures of liberalism? Oh, paternalism. I didn't get to paternalism. That was a paternalistic non response. That's great. So. So there's a terrific book by Sarah Conley, who's a terrific philosopher, which has the name Against Autonomy, and she is a liberal and extremely upbeat about coercive paternalism. That's what she defends. And she says coercive paternalism is justified across a number of domains in which people's exercise of their own agency leads to mistakes because they lack information or suffer from behavioral biases. Now that book is a defense of liberalism squarely within, I'm sorry, a defense of paternalism of a very invasive kind within the liberal tradition. I don't agree with her and have some cautionary notes against coercive paternalism and in favor of liberty respecting paternalism. I wouldn't want to engage in one upmanship and say that her position is anti liberal and mine isn't. That would be name calling because she works in a tradition that values welfare and freedom of a liberal sort and ends up favoring coercive paternalism with respect to such things as compulsory seat belt laws, motorcycle helmet laws, bans on trans fats, obesity counteracting stuff. And that's. This is all with her defense is all within the family. The liberty preserving paternalism of the sort that Dick Thaler and I like is legitimately characterized as anti liberal in the sense, I think, in which the anti nudging people are legitimately characterized as anarchists. That's not a legitimate criticism. They're not anarchists. So you could build on Mill's examples of where he would allow intervention. Like people are about to fall off a bridge, he says, then you can interfere. It could be that a GPS device is not plausibly an interference with liberalism. It promotes individual agency. Probably the majority of nudges are analytically identical to a GPS device. To the extent that they aren't. They're more designing architecture. If you have a store that by its own light says we're going to have the healthy things at the front and the unhealthy things. The back that's an exercise of the stores own liberal agency. If there's a government that does something to promote automatic enrollment and pension plans subject to opt out, I feel that to argue that that fits within the liberal tradition is it's self evident. So there are lots of objections that can be made to certain kinds of nudges. The argument that they're illiberal. There's a lot of name calling and less name calling is good. Let's not even call people who call names a name.
- [54:20]
Paul Kelly
One further question I'm just going to yes, you've got your hand up quickly. Do you want to start your question while we're yes.
- [54:29]
Audience Member
So thank you so much for your lecture. It was really fascinating. I have a question about following on from what you were saying, applying this to policy to governance. I come from a public health background, so I'm very interested in your nudge book because actually in my language it's very similar to the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion. It's three pages written by the whole and very much covers a lot of this about how policies can structure our lives to make people healthier. Your book adds a special nuance which I think is the freedom and the opt out aspect, which is quite interesting. But none of these policies, from tax policy to road safety to any of these things, will work if you're living in a system that essentially does not have good governance. And so I guess how do we promote more of the sort of nudge and creation of these systems? But also how do you move governments that are not liberal governance, so whether it's political or military or others, you know, to governance systems that allow these nudges to happen with the opt out.
- [55:46]
Cass Sunstein
That's fantastic. Thank you for your work as well as your question. So. So top of the list is health. Okay. So there's a ton of effort at the WHO and at the United nations and at the World bank to use behavioral science, including nudges to promote public health. And I'm thinking for road safety in Sweden there's a vision zero which has accomplished a great deal. And there are many nations. I was in Argentina a couple times recently and they're focused on road safety. And what I love about the road safety example is the idea that thousands of people die in a nation because of crashes. That's staggering. And it's such an opportunity to help. In my country, 125,000 people. You know what my country is because of my accent. I've been here a few days and I notice that you all have beautiful ways of speaking. And when I hear myself, I'm like those people on TV who say, like, American. That's how I talk. But in the country where people talk like that, about 125,000 people die a year because they don't take medicines that are prescribed. Those are all preventable deaths. Some private entities and some government officials are taking simple steps that are nudges to try to get people to take their medicines. Now, is that paternalistic? Yes. Is that objectionable on liberal grounds? You won't be surprised at my answer. Yes. What might the steps be? They might be so simple as having a little box which has each pill in a place and it says Monday morning, Monday afternoon, Tuesday, Wednesday. And if the pill is there, then you take it. And that sounds tiny. It's a nudge. And it has a paternalistic feature. It suggests that people aren't good at figuring that out. So that's that problem. You will have a thousand others. And there are so many things that are doable. Now, on the good governance thing, I'm thinking that I've been in. I was at a conference in the UAE, an international conference, which had approximately 700 people from all over the world working on nudges, and a number of them in public health. And some of them were in nations where good governance might not be the first words that would come to mind when you think of them. But the people at the conference are trying. They're really trying. They might not be in democracies. There were some people from Iran who were super inspiring, and one of the issues they talked about was road safety. They also talked about public health and their experts on nudges. They were unbelievably impressive. And they said, we want to, you know, jumpstart this in Iran with health problems that we think we can overcome, or smoking secession, where nudges can help. In some countries, cigarette taxes, which aren't a nudge, they have a paternalistic feature. Are they illiberal? Well, to the extent that they counteract externalities, clearly not to the extent that they counteract internalities, I say not then either. But there's a question to be discussed still. There's a government that doesn't have good government can, I hope, do something to make the roads safer or make automobiles safer or impose a cigarette tax or have information about the caloric content of food on the front of the pack.
- [59:47]
Paul Kelly
Thank you very much, Ken. We do now have to finish. Cass will leave quite quickly because there was a car. So hopefully you'll allow that to happen. Can I thank you all for coming, thank you for your questions and your participation, and then ask you to join with me in thanking Cass for his talk?
- [60:20]
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