Philosophy of freedom podcast with philosopher Rebecca Lowe

Here is the audio and transcript.  Here is one excerpt:

Tyler: I think there are many notions of freedom, more than just three, but positive and negative are by far the most important. And they’re the ones you can at least try to build into political systems. A greater number of people understand what you’re talking about. And if you can manage to take care of those two in a reasonably satisfactory manner, odds are you’ve just succeeded. And I wouldn’t be too fussy about the others.

But I bet if you sat down, you could come up with 57 different kinds of freedom that are relevant. Look at Amartya Sen’s Paretian liberal paradox. Well, what would you choose if the choice affected only you? For him, that’s a significant part of liberty. I think it’s an insignificant part, but if he insists on putting it on his list, okay, it can go on the list.

And:

Rebecca: So when you talk about positive freedom, I think maybe what you’re talking about is something like an agent-focused framing of freedom. So I think one of the problems with the kind of negative framings generally, so if we think about the classic, particularly on the kind of liberal/libertarian side, people might want to say something like freedom is non-interference, freedom is non-coercion. The republicans might say it’s non-domination.

One risk with these things is I think it avoids centring the person who it is who’s doing the free thing, the person who has freedom, the agent. Is that fair?

Lots of lengthy threads and back and forth, so not so easy to excerpt.  This podcast was almost entirely fresh material, and of course it is recommended.

We also decided to leave in the post-podcast discussion of the podcast itself.  A good practice which should spread more widely, here is part of that:

TYLER

Let me give you a sense of where I think we’ve arrived at, and tell me if you agree. See if this is some kind of constructive progress. You want to defend societies based on freedom with some kind of metaphysics and you want to build up that metaphysics. I want to defend societies based on freedom, which are roughly the same societies as you want to defend, with a minimum of metaphysics. I’m always trying to push the metaphysics out the door. So a lot of this conversation has been Rebecca drags in the metaphysics…

REBECCA

This is my life! You know this!

TYLER

… and then Tyler… the baseball is thrown at him, he sort of quickly has it in his hands, and then tosses it to the other side of the room. Metaphysics, get away! And then Rebecca is frustrated because the metaphysics are gone and she throws more metaphysics at him. And that’s what we’ve been doing. Is that a fair characterisation of, you know, the show so far, as they call it?

Here is Rebecca’s Substack and podcast more generally, the emphasis is on people doing philosophy.