Glen Weyl: belief

Transcript context

…You wrote a paper in 2009 called “Whose Rights? A Critique of Individual Agency as the Basis of Rights.” Do you think now, standing in 2020, are individual rights ever an appropriate concept to invoke, to argue for or against a policy? I think almost any moral concept is a useful concept in certain contexts because all our ideas are proxies for some deeper truth that we don’t fully understand. I often make arguments about individual rights, individual liberties, even though I ultimately think we need to get past our standard conception of individuals as atomized and understand individuals more as being an intersection of different social circles that they’re a part of. But of course, the more sophisticated these ideas are, the more true to reality, the more complicated and foreign they are. And we always need to strike a balance between clearly communicating and verisimilitude to the reality we’re trying to describe. You still think, in principle, that either group rights can be meaningful or even a component of an individual could have rights, and that there’s no particular reason to necessarily stop at the level pinpointed to methodological individualism. Would that be a fair description for you now?…

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