Cass Sunstein: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think of him as weak on individualism and autonomy and the notion of the self and that he ended up in a fairly extreme version of effective altruism that Bernard Williams was always pushing back against. He thought the notion of desert had no meaning, and it was important to convince people of that. Those are not exactly liberal views. He was pro-free speech, but that can lead you in a lot of different places, some of which concern me. That’s fair. I think Parfit’s later work on the three foundations and their commonalities is extremely interesting and quite liberal and not really convincing, though amazing. The work that you’re concerned about is a form of philosophical thinking that isn’t my favorite. It involves designing exotic cases and then seeing what our intuitions are about those cases and giving them authority. Our intuitions about exotic cases, we know, with respect to multiple things, are unreliable with respect to predictive judgments or factual judgments. In the moral domain, I think it’s the same. Parfit — some of the anti-individualist and anti-identity and self stuff, the stuff that looks illiberal and also looks brilliant but peculiar — I think he’s replicating the early research agenda of Kahneman and Tversky, coming up with very exotic cases and then asking himself what he and others think about them and then giving those things authority. We know from Kahneman and Tversky’s work that the domain of predictive judgments or factual judgments — that’s not very sensible because the intuitions people have about exotic cases are self-contradictory or violate elementary logic. That’s not a bad thing about people. It’s that our automatic judgments, or our intuitions aren’t suited for exotic or unfamiliar cases. Why should they be? Parfit seems to me, in his, let’s say, ambiguously liberal or illiberal conclusions, pursuing that less than fully promising research agenda. Now one of the most interesting features of your liberalism book is you have a fair amount of sympathy for Ludwig Mises, which is unusual these days. Even a lot of people on the right don’t. What do you find most interesting in Mises?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.