Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 322 | Philip Pettit on Language, Agency, Politics, and Freedom

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

When we think of the capacities that distinguish humans from other species, we generally turn to intelligence and its byproducts, including our technological prowess. But our intelligence is highly connected to our ability to use language, which is in turn closely related to our capacities as social creatures. Philosopher Philip Pettit would encourage us to think of those social capacities, as enabled by language, as the primary locus of what makes humans different, as discussed in his new book When Minds Converse: A Social Genealogy of the Human Soul. And that linguistic aptitude helps us understand the nature of agency, responsibility, and freedom. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/07/21/322-philip-pettit-on-language-agency-politics-and-freedom/ Support Mindscape on Patreon. Philip Pettit received his Ph.D. in philosophy from University College Belfast. He is currently Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values at Princeton University and Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. Princeton web page Google Scholar publications Wikipedia Amazon author page

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We human beings like to flatter ourselves, perhaps, by thinking of ourselves as rational creatures. We all know that we're not always rational. There's a whole little subculture of rationalists trying to convince us to become more rational. There are debates in economics about how rational actors really are and whether or not we can take irrationality into account or whether or not we should just generalize our notion of rationales. rationality, et cetera, but it's an old conceit that what distinguishes human beings from other kinds of animals or even other living beings is our rationality. There's a motto that man is a rational animal that is supposed to reflect an Aristotelian way of thinking. Aristotle himself didn't say quite those words, but he basically said things like that, and it became kind of a catchphrase, right? You know, other animals, there's a little bit of thinking involved, you know, some puzzle solving here and there, but we human beings, we're really the rational ones. One thing that follows from this perspective, even if you understand all the caveats and all

the irrationalities, et cetera, it kind of puts the spotlight on our brains, or at least our inner thoughts, right? We human beings think, whether it's rationally or not, but we cogitate, et cetera, and then we go out into the world, right? We interact with our environment. we interact with other people and social situations, etc. And that's a hidden assumption that is worth interrogating. Today's guest, Philip Pettit, is a distinguished philosopher,

one of our most distinguished living philosophers at Princeton University and also Australian National University, so he splits his time. And one of his themes throughout his work is sort of inverting that hidden assumption to say, you know, let's first think about the social world. Let's first think about how human beings interact with each other and then ask how our thinking, how our reasoning, how our cogitation, our rationality arises out of that. He has a new book on exactly this theme called When Minds Converse, a Social Genealogy of the Human Soul, where he goes through what human beings have the capacity to do, using language and thinking,

and how all of that relates to our social lives. And it's a little bit more than what an anthropologist would do. We love the anthropologist here, nothing against them. But as a philosopher, Philip relates it to things like agency and responsibility and free will and even all the way up to morality and ethics and politics. Indeed, it's as a political philosopher that I think that Philip Pettit has made his biggest impact over the years, although he's very wide-ranging, doing a lot of things. So we do take the opportunity here in the podcast to make that connection very, very explicit, going from this idea of imagining human beings as social animals who developed rational capacities to be better social animals, and to use language for that purpose, and then extend it to what that means for political organization,

what freedom means, how we should construe the notion of liberty, and even some quite practical implications for how to order our society. So to me, it's what philosophy should be. We do, Philip does say at the beginning, and I'm very sympathetic to it, that it's a shame that more philosophers these days pick a lane and stick to it, right, and do their little disciplinary thing. It doesn't need to just be philosophers. People in physics or biology, all kinds of academics, are often most comfortable doing a kind of research over and over again. But philosophy in particular invites you to be a bit more generalist than that, right? To cross over from logic to ethics to aesthetics. And that's exactly what Philip has done in a very admirable way over the years. So I think this is a good

conversation with a great philosopher. I hope you enjoy it. Let's go. Philip Pettit, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. I'd like to ask for, you know, someone who's been a philosopher for, let's say a long career, if that's okay. You know, some philosophers have projects, right? Their life's work sort of coheres into a set of themes. Would you, would you think of yourself that way? Like, do you have an overarching project you've been engaged in all this time? Well, I think of myself that way, though it may be a false of image. We all know that we tell narratives about ourselves. I began in philosophy as a seminarian and a Catholic training to be a priest. And I discovered philosophy in my second year. And I fell in love

with the idea. And in particular, I started reading Jean-Paul Sartz. And the great thing about Sartz, as I felt at the time, was here was an overall view of human life in human experience and also branching into novels and these plays and so on, and with a core claim at the Centralist view. And I found that almost intoxicating. Just the unity of it. I suppose in a way it was answering to a religious urge, you know, to want an overall view. And I found it so exciting that in philosophy you could ask your own questions. You could, you know, interact with the history of the subject. You could interact with all range of disciplines and the contemporary world and really do your very best to come up with your own answers.

And, you know, having come out of a more doctrinaire background, that to me was, you know, heady stuff. It was like discovering your first alcohol or whatever. And I'm afraid I drank the alcohol and got sucked into it. And over the years, as I suppose I have, and bit on typical, well, maybe typical of my generation, which is now aging out, so to speak, in the sense of thinking of philosophy as essentially a generalist project. You know, when I was younger, for example, the best people in philosophy wrote about everything, mainly because they had to teach everything within a certain range. I mean, from ethics to philosophy of mind, to metaphysics, to history of philosophy,

whereas nowadays philosophy departments tend to be more compartmentalized. And it seems to me that's a bit of a pity. I mean, one of the lights of philosophy for me is precisely that you get a carte blanche, as if it's to wander across a whole range of areas. And what I found over the years myself, I mean, I may not have convinced others, but that as you move from area to area, you discovered there are keys, there are intellectual sorts of motifs that are important and profitable in different areas. And you can use the same tools. You know, it's not as much tools as building blocks to fit in building different sorts of edifices, as it were. And so I've really enjoyed being a generalist.

And if you get bored with any one area, you can also move, always move elsewhere. Now, I suspect this may appeal to you given a look at the range of your interest, which is certainly untypical for a scientist. Well, it certainly explains why I'm doing a podcast where I talk to people who are not just physicists. That's a great way to, you know, interact live in a way that just couldn't have been done back in the day with, you know, great thinkers in all sorts of fields. Absolutely, yes. But okay, but despite the generalist, I mean, there are themes that come up over and over again, right?

I mean, it seems to me, I'm going to make myself look foolish by trying to put your career into my words, but you're trying to understand how human beings function as sort of both rational and social creatures in a world full of complexity and organizations and nations and laws. Is that okay? How do I do? Yes, I would emphasize the social. I mean, I think that if there's any theme that bulk so large in my own thinking, it's that we are essentially such social creatures. Now, in a way, that's a platitude.

You know, it's been there since Aristotle, the zoan, the political animal, the social animal, that's what we are. I think that that can be taken deeper than it normally is in ordinary thinking. And a recent book that I've just done called When Minds Confersed is an argument that essentially what we think of as mental activity is the internalization of an activity we learn in the first place as a social practice, as a social activity. I think of our minds, which we think of as primary and then social life as secondary, with our minds being expressed in social life. I think we're inducted into social life.

We gain competence in the practices of conversation, exchange, making sense of ourselves, making promises, keeping our promises, holding another responsible, and that our mental life is really the internal, of that. So in that particular book, I take six human capacities and I provide an argument for why we might think of these in each case as the internalization of a social skill, the skill and the exercise of a social capacity. I mean, that's all very abstract. So maybe I should give you some examples. Examples, yeah. But I guess I did want to get on the table. It does remind me, let me put it this way. This whole point of view that you just articulated of the social sort of shaping our interior mental lives is not one that I would have given much credence to years ago. But I'm coming around to this point of view. In part because of a conversation I had on the podcast with Hugo Marcier, who's work you must know. Yes, yes.

Who's worked with Duns-Berber I know quite well. Exactly. Thinking of reasons. Truth actually in this book, yeah. Yeah, reasons as primarily serving a social function. And your book seemed to be, you know, sort of building on that theme in multiple directions. It's not just reasons, but lots of aspects of humanity and what we think of as reasoning, rationality or whatever, as coming out of these social forces, social impulses. Yes, that's a fair comment, I think.

although what I do is done in more philosophical key. Well, good, yes. And Louvre's work or dance. Well, that was the other thing I wanted to start with. You know, this book that we're talking about, which will be coming out pretty soon, I take it. When it will it be coming out? I don't actually know.

It's already come out. It just appeared, actually. The best. Okay, good. We'll hope to get a bump in your sales from the podcast episode then. I mean, you're tackling a famous question of what, makes human beings special, different from other species here on Earth. That's a fraught question to ask, right? It's an important one, but it's also easy to make mistakes. And you're coming at it

from a primarily philosophical point of view. So like, how did you, how do you guard against sort of telling stories that couldn't, that would be overturned by future discoveries in the study of animals and so forth? Oh, well, none of us, mine is being overreaching. You know, the main thing is to make some sort of input to the conversation, you know, that may help things along. And I'd be much happier with the thought that what I've got to say might be paid some attention and then overturned than with the possibility that no one pays any attention whatsoever, which is decidedly a possibility here. I mean, in a way, the book is, it's a very unusual look for philosopher to write these days, where philosophy tends to be more specialized in any case. And, you know, I sort of feel sometimes, I can only have the courage or the boldness, the recklessness to write it

because of being on the outer edge, so to speak, age-wise of the profession. I mean, I sort of feel that, you know, life is short. And I want to give this a go, and it may be found objectionable or faulty in all sorts of ways by other people, but, you know, it's at least it's giving a shot at making sense of our social nature and connecting with our mental capacity. And as you say, with our difference from other species. And you certainly put a finger on our capacity for language as something that gives rise to everything. else. So how do you perceive this role of language as being super important? Well, I don't say anything, at least anything interesting, on the origin of language,

which is, of course, a much debated question. Other than arguing in the first chapter of the book, that we don't have to think of the emergence of language as entirely mysterious, because languages we use, it combines, I think, two different aspects, so to speak, of communication systems. On the one hand, we know that other great apes, for example, chimpanzees, can actually communicate in a sense that Paul Greis, a well-known philosopher, explicated better than anybody else, I think, in the, well, going back to the 50s. What he argued was that in communication, the distinctive thing is that you seek a certain effect, a certain response in particular in other people, in other conspecifics, and you seek them to provide that response simply by making clear to them what it was.

response it is that you're seeking. Oh, okay. You don't engineer them into giving the response. You just let them see what you want, and you rely on them to provide in response to their recognising what you want to actually deliver the goods. So, for example, in targeted help scenarios with chimpanzees, what's been found is, roughly speaking, the following, that you've got two chimps, let's suppose, in cages side by side, It's separated by a relatively high barrier.

And one chimp, let's call them chimp one, wants to reach some fruit but needs a long stick. And the sticks in his or her in its cage are too short, but it sees a stick in the nearby chimps cage that is long enough. And it can't reach that. it's too far away, but what it does is draw the attention of the other chimp to what it's doing and then reaches for the stick, you know, obviously with no help of success, but thereby clearly making clear to the other chimp that what it wants is to get the stick. And the other chimp in most cases, I think it goes up to 90%, actually, I'm recognizing what the first chimp is seeking, recognize the response it wants, it delivers

that response by giving the stick to the first chimp. Now, I think that's an extraordinary sort of achievement, and that is Greisian-style communication. The first chimp is seeking an end to get the stick by just revealing to the other chimp what end it is that he's seeking, and the other chimp then delivers the goods. That's the core of communicative capacity. Now, chimps, as we can see, use gestures for this purpose, like the reaching for, but they don't have available to them as we're a discrete information-bearing signs. Right.

But we know that other animals, for example, do have a use of information-bearing signs, though they don't use them with the intention of communicating. So a standard example that I use in the book is from the study of vervet monkeys in Kenya by two well-known evolution biologists, Safraith, Cheney and Safarth. And what they discovered was that the chimps in that area, there are three main dangers that they face from snakes in the grass, from lions it is in Kenya, and from eagles in the scuba. and they do, and it seems to come to them by nature, it's not a land, although that's debated,

they make a noise in response to whether it's a snake or an eagle or a lion. And the thing is that other chimps who hear that noise, it gives them information that there's a lion around or a snake or an eagle. And it does that in the sense that they respond to the sound. as if they'd seen the eagle or heard the lion or whatever. So they basically, they don't just respond with a routine piece of behavior, as in always do X, whatever that be. They respond as is appropriate to avoid the lion or the snake. So if they're in the grass and hear a snake call, they go straight for the tree.

If they're in the tree and they're here an eagle call, they make sure they go lower in the tree rather than higher. the tree. So basically what they're doing is they're giving another information. But the evidence is they're not intending to give one another information. The sign, the sound they make, comes more or less spontaneously. And it does give the information. Now, I say, what I think of as a very simple language would involve the use of signs of the vervet kind through a communicative purpose like that of the chimpanzees. Now, I think that we all know language evolved at some point in hominin history,

and all I say about it in the book is that we needn't treat it as, so to speak, a divine mystery that language appeared amongst our kind, because there's nothing entirely mysterious about the fact that a species might unite these two different capacities. And that's what having a simple language would be. And then what I argue in the way the book, sorry, to go on at length, but roughly speaking, the plan of the book then, is to characterize a set of creatures, I call them humanoids, who are pretty well like human beings on the basis of what we know

about human beings in language independent ways. And then to imagine what the effect would be, it's a thought experiment, to speculate about to explore what the effect would be on these creatures of being able to use suddenly language, of having a simple language that involves the use of information-bearing signs to a communicative purpose. Good, and that does sound like a quintessentially philosophical exercise. You're not doing an experiment out there in the wild. You're not in Africa. You're asking yourself the thought experiment, what would the humanoid do if they were given these new capacities? So tell me, what would they do?

How would they start behaving? Well, can I just say first, John, I mean, the idea with Gadankan experiment, the thought experiment is not the invention of philosophers, as after all, just to go to your area, think of Einstein on the occurrence principle, you know, between acceleration and gravity. And, you know, you were invited to that thought experiment of being on the lift, you know, and would you be able to detect the fact that you're actually going down or the fact that,

sorry, the fact that you're actually static but subject to gravity? Einstein was kind of a philosopher, though, right? In addition to being. Well, okay, but think about Galileo, you know, and the thought experiment that made sense to the fact that things light and heavy will fall at the same rate. You imagine two bricks, and then you imagine they're connected with the thread, and then you imagine the thread becoming solid, connected to the two breeds, and you ask the person, well, now, do you think they'd fall more quickly than the individual bricks or then the bricks connect by the thread? And of course, everyone says, no, they wouldn't. You know, that's a thought experiment. Okay, so the thought experiment is to ask, how would the humanoid respond to this new technology, as you might say, this new way of?

Now, in characterizing in the first chapter, the nature of humanoids, I make them out to be very like human beings in being in all sorts of ways. and I draw to an extent on psychology and evolutionary biology and so on in characterizing are the nature of these humanoids. But one thing is they're deeply self-reliant species. There are species such that they die alone or they survive together. You know, they've just got to hang together. Now, so the first argument is that with the technology of language available, it would would make possible for them the communication of information about their environment to one another.

And they will thereby benefit one another by increasing the pool of information. And not only that, but they'd each have very good reason to be, well, let's say truthful, and competent, careful in making a report, in using a sign. you know, let's say there's a sign for lion, there's a sign for zebra, in using the lion sign when there really is a lion there and only when there's a lion there. Because if they're not reliable with other people, they can hardly expect other people to be reliable with them.

There's a tit-for-tat mechanism, well-known in evolutionary biology. That would explain why. Not only would they use these signs to communicate information, but they would use them reliability to communicate information. and they benefit one another in that way. Think of that as a social practice of information giving as between different creatures. And you can imagine that evolving as a purely external sort of practice

that they benefit to another in, a bit like the vervet monkeys who are giving information to another, except they're giving information intentionally, in the sense of that. the chimps communication. And then what I argue, just to give you this first sort of wrong on the ladder that I characterize in the book, is that what they'd quickly discover, of course, this is just speculation.

What I say is this would be very likely, robustly likely, as in it wouldn't take a miracle for them to discover, regardless of how things were, they'd be likely to discover. that actually they themselves benefit from giving information to others, as well as benefiting from the information they get, because you ask me, let's suppose, I'm on a higher level than you, what's that animal in the difference? You use an information-bearing sign, line, zebra, whether it are just animal, in an interrogative mode, which I argued perfectly intelligible,

that they should do that. And that prompts me now to want to give you an answer, right? And if I can see, I can lift my head and look in the distance about the part where you asked, the place you asked about, and I can see at my height, with my vision, that it's a lion, I'm going to say a line in response. Now, I've given you information. You didn't know what the animal was.

You now know it's a line. You better take cover or whatever. But I've also given myself information because by means of this intentional action I've taken, maybe raising my head, turning and looking, sharpening my eyes, I have given new information, but I've also given myself information because I may not have noticed the animal before, and I now know it indeed is aligned. So I benefit from giving as well as receiving information. But now, so I argue it to be robustly likely amongst these humanoids, they know how to ask questions of others.

They know how to answer the questions of others, I mean, when the evidence is available. But they, and they know that they benefit from answering questions. Well, why shouldn't they ask questions of themselves? And why shouldn't they treat themselves as an interlocutor? make intentional efforts to answer that question and thereby increase their own information. So they are at once the instructor and the informant and the informed, so to speak.

And so I wonder, you know, there's an animal. What is it? And I make an effort to say, oh, it's a zebra, you know. And so I relax, let's suppose. Well, what are I done? I've been talking to myself, as it were. I may have done it out loud, but of course I could do it without actually speaking the words

if I'm in the habit of using the words. And what I say is, now look, at this point, wouldn't the human rights have developed the capacity very like what we tend to think of as thinking? As in making an intentional effort, in this case, screwing up your eyes or going to a higher level, et cetera, an intentional effort

that is designed to provide you with information to increase your domain of beliefs and that actually is very close to what we think of as trying to make up your mind as thinking in that sense as in a very, so to speak, simple mode,

the sort of thing that Le Ponser, Rodin's, Le Ponser does. As you see him with his hand on his elbows, you know, meditating on something. Well, of course, we do that ourselves, you know. So I stop and I think, who was that I saw yesterday? I recognize the face. And then I, you know, that's all sort of making intentional effort. Now it's purely mental activity here and remembering in order to increase my information, my body of information in order to form a belief. I say that's really what

thinking is, and my own hunch, it's really more than a hunch, is that animals don't do that sort of thing. You know, like in Gary Lawson cartoons, dogs may put their head on their paw, sort of speak, and be seen as wondering about this or that. But actually, of course, they're very simple animals comparatively with the Great Egg, but they don't show any signs of doing that. the beliefs update all the time, you know, as the dog runs around, you see the rapid or whatever, it forms a belief.

But it doesn't make an intentional effort, you know, to do something with a view to forming a belief. And that's what I call thinking. And that's what the human rights would do as the result of coming to even a very simple language. So if I can just now comment on the general theme we began with, Sean, I said that I tend to think of mental activity is the internalization of social activity.

Well, here you've had amongst the humanoid the development of a social practice of making intentional effort to answer the questions of others. Presumably the development of a skill in this practice, for example, learning that you better tell the truth, learning that you better be careful

or do be ignored as an informant in the future. That's the tit-for-tat mechanism. and then, so to speak, treating themselves as an interlocutor in asking themselves questions and then seeking, by making intents or efforts, to answer those questions. So that is actually internalizing the social practice of raising questions for others and answering the questions. You do it simply with yourself.

And there's every reason why you do it because you're going to benefit from it. You've got the means of doing it, the technology. is language, and now you've got the motive to do it as well, which is you increase your body of information. So I say that at least goes some way to making sense of a way in which thinking might have evolved in our kind. I don't say it evolved in the, as-of-ware thought experiment fashion, which is simplified in all sorts of ways, but that may tell us something about what thinking is.

And I'm not super educated about this, but it sounds like, I mean, there's been plenty of work done on the relationship, or plenty of speculation anyway, in the relationship between language and thought, right? Language shapes thought, language, the development of language, had probably feedback on evolutionary biology and the shape of the brain and things like that. But it seems that it's mostly on that technology side. You know, once a we have symbolic manipulation of ideas that shapes our thinking. And you're placing, shedding light more, putting the spotlight more on the incentive side, the motivation side. Like it's not just that we have the ability to symbolically manipulate some symbols. It's that in this social context, we are incentivized to start doing something we recognize as thinking. The standard view, and it's, you know, it's got a strong presence. and the history of philosophy, Descartes being the sort of supreme figurehead or exemplar of this view, is that it's what I think of as an inside out view of language that we have thinking as a capacity that comes to us by nature,

by first nature, as it were, and then we discover speech as a way of externalizing our thought and communicating our thoughts to one another. So, so to speak, the inside comes first, it's inside out, and then the outside comes second. What I want to say, argue for, is an outside-in view of the mind, that the outside comes first, the language comes first, and that thinking is really the internalization of a practice and a skill that in the first place is social.

So it's a very different view. It's a view that language isn't just useful, instrumentally, or expressively whatever, of course, it is all of that, but that it's also constitutionatively important. It's what constitutes the capacity we think of as thinking. Now, of course, some as well said, but animals think. Well, of course, there's a sense of the word think of which animals certainly do think.

But as I say, animals, and the animals I know at any way, I'm not an ethologist, but I have very interest in the ethology, especially of the Great Apes. They certainly update their beliefs all the time. But I think that has done, the evidence is, I think, that that is done more or less autonomically or, you know, subpersonally, as is often put. They don't make an effort to update their beliefs. the beliefs just update and response to the environment, the new stimuli and so on, they're coming their way. Whereas thinking in the sense in which I'm using the word now is where it really involves an intentional effort to do something, like the effort of Le Ponce de Herre or the effort

of just trying to remember who was that person I saw yesterday, or screwing up your eyes and saying, what is that animal in the distance? It's the effort of that kind intentionally conducted, which has the payoff if the evidence is available to you of actually yielding an increased body of information, which is what we all need, of course, in order to act in the world. There's obviously so many things to say and think about this, but time is finite, and I want to leap forward to some of the bigger ideas that follow up. I mean, you do talk in the book about not just thinking for ourselves and the relationship to language, but then connecting it to agency and morality and what it means to be a responsible person. So, and that's probably the payoff for you of being a well-traveled philosopher in many different areas over many different years. Well, maybe well-traveled.

The trouble being well-traveled is you can end up being a tourist in every area and a native in none. I try to use my friends to assure me that I'm not merely a tourist in the areas where I venture in as I have to do in this book, for example. Well, how to get there? There's a chapter on reading and perception, on reasoning and perception, but let's leave those apart for the moment. And just go to a development I think I trace in chapter four, which is the development of what I call the capacity or the practice of commitment. So even game theorists will tell you. it is a good definition of committing to a thought as distinct from reporting

that something is the case, reporting a thought. If I tell you that is a zebra there and you say, is it really, you know, you're not so sure somebody else throwing you was a lion or whatever, you're just doubtful about my capacities. And I want to communicate to you that I really I'm quite certain about this

then one way of doing that, of course, would be to make it costly for me to be wrong. So, for example, if I say, if I put money on the table and I say, Sean, you know, this money is yours, if it turns I'm wrong about this, well, you've got more reason to trust what I say, right? But now there's a natural way in which the humanoids, and I think human beings do, can make their reports, so to speak, their information bearing acts of communication more costly. And that is by

by closing down excuses that might otherwise be available for getting things wrong. So for example, if you ask me, what do I, this is true in particular when we're communicating about the state of

our own minds. And of course, to have reports about state of minds already means we're further along that ladder. I've skipped the sections on reasoning and what I call recipients. But if I'm communicating about my mind, you might ask me, what do I believe about such and such? Do I believe that, you know, that Trump will go up for election another time? And, and, uh, and, uh, and, uh, I may say to you, I may report that belief, but I'm saying, well, look, I think I believe that. You know, I sort of come and go, but actually, I sort of, I think I believe that.

Now, in that case, I'm giving you a report, but I'm qualifying the report. But if I want to make it absolutely sure in your mind that I really do believe this, I can say something like not I think I believe that Trump is, but I can say Trump is going to have a go at being elected again. Well, I can't now, in the case of the report, I could have excused my failure by saying to you, well, I must have gotten myself wrong. You know, I really felt if, for example,

you discover I act as if I believe Trump was going to stand in the next election, but I said I thought I didn't believe that. I'd say I must have gotten myself wrong, but if I say he will, I avow the belief as I put it on in reporting the belief. Well, in that case, I can't say I must have gotten myself wrong because clearly when you ask me the question, I wasn't thinking about my mind and what I believed. I was thinking about the stage of affairs, and I was standing with the belief I formed that indeed Trump is going to sound for the next election.

But let me make it stronger. I can make a commitment much more strongly. than that. So for example, if I'm communicating an intention, you say, am I going to go to that game tonight? And I say, yeah, I'll be there, and I don't turn up. And you complain. I said, well, look, I did a vow, and I did indeed have the attention. You know, I didn't say, I think of the intent. I said, I will be there. It's true. I vowed it. I can't give the excuse that I must have got myself wrong. But I can still say I change von Neint.

You know, I can give that excuse. But there's a way of shutting down that excuse, too. I can say, depend on me, I'll be there. Or I can say, using our own language, I pledge to be there, or I promise to be there. Now, that's a very heavy commitment. Why? Because now the expense of being wrong is really much heavier than would be had I given a report, or even a mere vowel of the intention.

You're going to say, you know, I'm not going to be trustworthy if I made a promise and I then let you down, you know? And I realize there's a big loss in store if I am wrong about being there. And so you can trust me when I say I will be there now in this pledging mode. Okay, that's background. I'm sorry for taking so long about that. Very helpful. No, great. But, okay, if we, I argue that we,

other humanoids, for example, would have strong motives to make vows and pledges as well as just reports on themselves to one another in order to elicit credibility and to build relations with others who will trust them now that they can see they're putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak.

Okay, but that means in turn that if I'm now, I'm a little bit doubtful about whether you're going to live up to your pledge, for example. Maybe you pledged to me to tell the truth about some incident involving us both, and it's important to be you do tell the truth, say, to a third

party. And you've really pledged, and there will be a loss for you. But I'm beginning to worry about you, as in, I think you'll be subject to temptation, you know, because it's an embarrassing incident. You're going to... Well, I can say to you, in advance

I can say, no, listen, Sean, you can tell the truth. You're up to it. Come on. You know, brace yourself, man. You know, you can do it, right? I call that, I exhort you to tell the truth. Now, I think that the humanoid would learn that by reminding one another of commitments they made are the costs that are in store if they fail the commitment,

and they can, in that sense, make it more likely that the person will actually keep the commitment. So I make it more likely, as I believe, that you will tell the truth if I actually say, you can tell the truth if I exhort you in advance. So that's very important, it seems to me. But now, if I do exhort you in advance like that,

what am I going to do if actually nonetheless, you let me down? So you come out of, say, the meeting with the third party and you said to me, and I say, okay, you told him, did you? And you say, oh, God, I'm sorry, I didn't. I just simply, I couldn't in the end. I was too embarrassed, I didn't tell the truth.

Well, what do I say? I think I'm going to say to you, well, I could give up on you. I could, you say, Sean Carl, you just can't deal with him. You know, he's an inveterate liar. He doesn't, you know, he's just, I could shun you or put you at a distance forever. But that would be really cutting off my nose despite my face, because, you know, we're going to bother relationships and so on. And so I think what I'm quite like to do with you is remind you of the exhortation and say to you, not you could do this because I was in the past, but I say, Sean, you could have told the truth.

You know, it was within your capacity. And now I think that it's going to be very natural amongst the humanoids that they adopt reactively the proactive stance of exhortation. and reactively adopting that stance, treating you still as exorable, saying you could have done a chore, and I'm not giving up on you, that that actually amounts to holding you responsible. So now this is moving very much into the norm of domain. So I want to argue that once commitment as a practice comes on stream, you're going to get related practices of exhortation. and then of holding responsible. But I also say, if I can just go back to the social to mental move, I also argue that the humanoidists would quickly discover

that they actually can, as we're, bind themselves to the mast by saying, I will do this. Making a commitment to themselves, making a resolution, let's suppose to vote at the next election, as it's saying from just predicting they probably will vote, as if they make a promise to themselves. And that is really an internal resolution. And then if they fail to do that,

they don't just sort of say to themselves, oh, well, I change my own eye. No, they berate themselves like they might berate another person. And that's developing a conscience, isn't it, after all, you know? And here you're moving right into the heart of moral consequences. The concept of holding responsible other people and mutually holding others responsible, being expected to be held responsible by others, developing a capacity, a fitness to be held responsible, as in generally living up to the commitments you're held to by others.

But then you can do all of that with yourself. And I think this is a major sort of, you become, at this point, I think you close to become what you call a person, as you can encourage yourself and berate yourself. You can hold yourself to an image of yourself, the image that sort of speak is embedded in these commitments you make to yourself. And that, I think, is to become something like a person. So that's at least to make one connection with the normative domain. Well, yeah, and not only that, I mean, I hate to give the short shrift to,

the book. I know a book is a big undertaking, but you have all of these other wonderful works in philosophy, especially political philosophy, and I can kind of see how they're connected now, right? I mean, once you start having human beings making promises, one might almost say contracts and exhorting, maybe even punishing others, at some point one is going to want to formalize this and ask, okay, how should we order our society in the right way? Absolutely. I mean, and for me, they are connected. Of course, there's always the possibility, though, in telling myself a narrative that is,

I speak, self-satisfying rather than narrative that's really accurate. But what is certainly true is this, that the distinctive sort of themes in my own political thinking came to me initially in writing a book many years ago, which was in a way an antecedent of the when minds converse book, which is called the common mind, that also argued about the importance of language in bringing people to minds, so of speaking, making them mindful, in minding them in that sense. And in developing that book, what I realized is that, It really didn't make sense to think of human beings as creatures who could ever exist in isolation, in a solitary condition. I mean, you might have the Robbins Gruthold, but that's a later period in his life, so to speak.

But you begin to think that the idea of a baby being raised or raising itself or being raised by a wolf in the traditional example, without exposure to speech, without induction in the social practices that are the counterparts of the men. practices that are so important to us, I began to think such an individual would not actually develop a human soul, if I can put it that way, would not actually come to humanity. That humanity is something that requires that social evolution and the social contact with others. And this is a very deeper version of the society first,

outside in theory of mind that attracts me. Okay, but once you think in that way, and then you think about, well, what are going to be the ideal, so to speak, of relating between human beings, in particular between human beings taken at random, not just friends, not just family, etc. And, of course, we all think freedom is, you know,

surely going to be a major sort of feature. We all want to be free in relation to random others. to do our own thing or whatever. But then you ask, if you, so as speak, thought the solitary condition was a conceivable condition or human beings, you might think,

well, being free is just being as near as possible to existing in a world where there is no one else to thwart you. There is no one else to get in your way. But if you think that's just a totally inappropriate image because we are essentially social, and then you ask what freedom is, well, you very quickly come to the idea that,

well, to be free is basically to be related to other people, but in such a way that they give you a space of your own. You know, they don't actually get in your way in certain sorts of choices at any rate. And nor do you depend on their will, sort of speak, their goodwill in order to use. achieve this space. They don't even, the ideal would be, they don't even have a power.

There's a block to their getting in your way. You don't, you're not at their mercy. You're not in their hands, so to speak. And I came to think of that as a notion of freedom as, not just being let alone by others, but existing in relationship with others, well, those don't have the power of getting in your way. in certain choices. And then I became aware

through the work of historians, Quenta Skinner, is very important to me in this respect, that actually the long way of thinking about freedom and what's often called the Republican tradition, going back to Republican Rome, argues that you're not free if you've got a boss in your life,

even if the boss, so to speak, leaves you alone, gives you carte blanche, gives you free reign. So, for example, the Romans met a point of arguing that the slave who had a kindly master,

a gentle master, a master who was away all the time, who let them do as they wish, is still a slave. They're not free, even though they're not actually being interfered with, because they depend on

the good will of their master in order to act according to their own will. So I can to think of freedom as being able to act as you will in relevant choices, regardless of what you yourself wish to do, and also regardless of what others wish you to do. It's to have that power, which is, so to speak, which means you don't, you have the power regardless of what you want. You can do it in any given choice. You can choose to vote or not vote, let's suppose, in a country like America.

And you can do either, depending on what you want, but also you can do either regardless of what other people want you to do. Others may want you not to vote or may want you to vote, but actually you are free insofar as they don't, others don't have that power. Now, if you, for example, we're in a workplace where the employer required you to vote, and maybe required you to give evidence of voting his or her way, so to speak, then you'd lose the freedom, so to speak, to vote

because you wouldn't be able to vote or not to vote, regardless of the will of others, the will of the employer. If they wish you to vote, you've got to vote. I sometimes give the example in, you know, Henry Gibson's play, Adald's House. Thorvald is the husband Nora is the wife

and under Norwegian law as it is at the time the play is depicting which is the 1860s a man has all the power so depending what Thorvald wanted he could dictate what she wore who have what friends she had where she went in the evening

whether she could attend play or the opera, whatever. It was all under his power. But in that play, at least at the beginning of the play, Torval is so totally in love with Nora that he gives her carte blanche. She can really act in effect just as she wishes. She can act according to her own will.

And the question is, is Nora free? Well, I would say no. Right. Because she can act as she wishes only so long as Thorvald, wishes that she should be able to act as she wishes. So she's dependent on his will, even though she has freedom as non-interference, as I tend to call it,

she does not have freedom as, well, I tend to say non-domination. She has a dominus in her life. The dominus is her husband in this case. Now, if you think of freedom as non-domination, and then you think it should be an ideal that we can all enjoy in our society, then that gives you the beginnings of a political philosophy of working out how things should be ordered in society. But you probably have

questions for me, and I'm going on at two great lengths, but I'm quite happy to continue on this line if you want me to do so. I think that you anticipated my question. I guess I wanted to ask, given that conception of freedom, this Republican version of freedom as absence of domination, what does that suggest about organizing society to let that happen? Because it sounds maybe a little conceptual. Like, I can do whatever I want, but someone else has the power to stop me, but they're not using that power. What are the practical effects of that way of thinking?

Well, the practical effects, I think, are this. if we assume, as I assume, and I think all of us would assume, that in a society, if freedom is not ideal, people ought to have access to that ideal equally. People ought to enjoy equal freedom as non-domination. And now you ask about how would that be possible? Well, one requirement would be that you identify the range of choices where they can be given, security in choosing as they wish regardless about how others wish. And traditionally, that set of choices that were, so as to be promised, are assured in the society, have been called the basic liberties. So, for example, they certainly include the liberty of speech, of association, of movement,

of employment, of changing job, and so on. They include much more, I should say, but those are just examples, then the first thing you'd want in your society is a system of law that gives everyone freedom of choice in those particular areas, and not only that, that enables them to practice those choices with impunity, there's no penalty from doing so, but equally that protects them in the exercise of those choices, secures them in the exercise of those choices. And that is a world in which, you know, you think of the law is really important, that it actually establishes in an impartial way, a space within which each person is secure.

Of course, within that space, they may choose to form intimate relations with others, friendships, family connections, and so on, that do bind them, but they can exit those relations as well as entering them. So they are basically sovereign in this space that the law gives them. Now, in this picture, the law is actually what creates freedom for us. It's the infrastructure on the basis of which we are free. So, for example, freedom of speech. We enjoy only insov ours there is a constitution, a set of laws,

that actually ensures us against certain sorts of interference in the exercise of choice as to what we say or don't say. And very importantly, though, we all agree that when the law gives each of us that sort of secure space, say to speak as we wish, it does only under certain provisos, under the provisos, for example, that the use of the speech is not damaging

in various ways. For example, if it disturbs public order, you know, like calling out fire, you know, in a pack theatre, the old example, then freedom of speech should not protect you in a case like that. There have to be provisos. This means there really have to be courts in order to interpret the law and to introduce new provisos if provisos are needed.

But the idea is that the law should identify basic liberties which have the following characteristics, that everyone can enjoy each of those basic liberties. acting, exercising those liberties according to their own will, and independently of what others would wish them to do. Each should have that, but equally we should carve out these basic liberties so that everyone's enjoying them doesn't make everyone worse off than they would be if they didn't have them. Now, a very pertinent example here. I mean, I divide my life as I think you know, between Australia and

and the United States. In the United States, there's a freedom to own a gun for personal protection with very light provisors, but still some provisors, of course. In Australia, they're very, very heavy provisors, so there really effectively is not a freedom to own a gun just for self-protection. Now, some people, you know, who make a, think that freedom of the freedom of the freedom of, freedom to own a gun for self-protection is essential, so to being a free person. Think that everyone's a slave, sort of speak, to that extent in Australia.

I have to say it doesn't feel like that. You know, when you're in Australia, most Australians will say this. You don't feel, any of the less secure for guns not being available to you to protect yourself, because, of course, you also know they're not available to others, at least very widely. So that's a case of where we have to devise the basic liberties in different cultures, different legal systems, different countries, we'll select different basic liberties to privilege and protect, so to speak. But what's really important is that in our lives we should have a law that establishes the same body of liberties for all of us. I would say that, if I can just add one thing more at this, that it's not just important that the law stops other people interfering with us in the exercise of these liberties.

It's also important, I would say, and I think it's part of the Republican heritage, the classical Republican heritage, the civic Republican heritage, as you might say, that the law and the society should equally make it possible for people to be able. to enjoy those basic liberties should make it possible by, for example, guarding them against destitution, by ensuring their education, because you've got to be educated to basically hold up in relations with others, to provide help for them in the case of medical emergencies rather than depending on the goodwill of others. It's got to empower people to enjoy the basic liberties as well as protecting people against others in the joint of those basic liberties. So that's one strand. I call it the social justice strand in a republican way of thinking.

And now maybe the connection may seem a bit slim to you, but I do think it goes back to thinking about human beings. We're essentially social creatures who depend on one another, who have to find space in relationship with another to create our own individuality, internalizing the social practices, in the development of our own thought processes, in the development of our own commitments to others, in the development of own relationships.

And law is at the center of that, and especially a law that is enforced and enacted on the basis of rule of law constraints in a way that is impartial between the citizens of a society. and a law that empowers as well as protects people. That's the social justice, so to speak, strand in this civic republican way of thinking. I actually see the connection with the language and human exceptionalism and the social aspects pretty clearly all the way up to the political philosophy.

The question I was going to ask, and you sort of hinted at it, but let's make it a little bit more clear, when one has a political philosophy centered on a conception of freedom or liberty, one does have countervailing values that other people are going to care about, whether it's security or equality or whatever. And I think you're admitting, yes, those are also values, and so therefore we put in provisos there. It seems like a little bit less than perfectly systematic to me how we figure out where to protect the freedom, where to bound it in favor of other values? Of course. It's, you know, I think that Aristotle says somewhere, you know, we shouldn't look

for more exactitude in any discipline than reality makes available, so to speak. There isn't a mathematical theory, basically, of how best the policy ought to be ordered. It's always a matter of judgment, and there will be disagreements, and there have to be compromises, negotiated, you know, discursively negotiated compromises. And I think the great thing is that in the evolution, at least so far, of our post-enlightenment, you know, Western democracies, I think we have evolved, a system of law, you know, and an understanding of law and of the place it gives us in relation to one another,

that is really deeply important and that we dare not lose, If we do, we descend, I think, into a very much inferior sort of level of life. But there is one, I said, that's the social justice strand of this Republican philosophy. Of course, law isn't dissued, so to speak, by an algorithm, or isn't dissued by an impartial presence in the sky. Law is itself created by human beings. It takes people to establish a constitution and maintain it, to establish a constitution, to establish legislature and maintain it, to establish courts and to maintain it. And of course, what's always a danger is that the law might protect us from one another,

from, so to speak, the arbitrary power of others, the power of others who interfere depending what they wish in our space. It may protect us against arbitrary or by others. But there still could be an arbitrary power of the source of the law. So the lawmakers, you know, might be an elite, are a despot. individual who, so to speak, makes laws just as he or she wishes, you know, or they wish, that make laws arbitrarily in that way. And to that extent, we would be subject to a dominus, so to speak, of a vertical kind, even if that dominus protects us against the

masters, the domini, you know, in our private lives. And so you have to have a vertical dimension of justice as well as a horizontal, a democratic justice, you might call it, justice in relation to the lawmakers on the law imposers and the law adjudicators. And, you know, we have evolved a system of doing that, which is very imperfect, but I think perfectable. And that is, broadly speaking, a democratic system, which involves more than election. I mean, the election of some officials, and of course we don't elect all of those who play part in government.

We generally don't elect judges, for example. probably I think a good thing because judges have a specific job to do, which is to interpret the law according to the books and to apply it according to the books. If you elect them, you give them a contrary motive, which is a motive to be re-elected, which may actually bend their commitment to fidelity to the law. So we do have authorities, so to speak, have power over us. That's very important. And what has to be the case is that the decisions they make in making laws, in changing laws, in imposing laws, interpreting laws, applying laws, those decisions have to be constrained on terms that we the people generally support. Government has to be on the people's terms. And this is ensured in various ways, I would say, by election is certainly part of it.

but even more important, I would say, is the contestatory possibilities democracy gives us. We can take those in government to the court. A different part of the government system, but independent and importantly independent in our way of thinking, the system of checks and balances, we can criticize them in the media. Assuming we have a free media, a public broadcaster, or private, broadcasters that are at least in competition with one another to the point to keep one another, that they keep one another relatively honest. And of course, we have the possibility of contesting in the streets as well as in the media and in the courts.

And that contestatory aspect of democracy is just as important as the electoral. We also, of course, have the appointments that are made in government that are not by election, say, of judges and so on, are made under constraints that the law the Constitution lays down, that ultimately are the constraints they're done by we the people, on how those should be made, on the transparency that should be available, on the conditions under which the judges should act on what they should be faithful to. And these constraints ideally could build up a system of control such that those in power, those in power in the state, do not make decisions just as they wish, regardless of what we wish. They don't make the decisions arbitrarily in that

sense. They have to make decisions under constraints that we the people impose. The constraint of not being elected next time. The constraint of being shamed in the media. The constraint of facing huge opposition from the people at large, whether in the courts and the media or indeed on the streets. These are all constraints that are really important aspects of the system of control that would mean that there is no vertical dominance in our lives, as the law ideally should prevent us from having to suffer the private dominance in our lives. That's the political dimension.

Right. It's a wonderful philosophical underpinning for the rule of law, the checks and balances, the, you know, not concentrating power. Exactly. These are all means. These are all facilitators of popular control over what government does. And they're crucial. And if you give it up, if you move to a form of government where those in power do not will bound by rule of law constraints, do not feel bound by checks and balances that the system has in place, do not feel bound by the court ruling against them, for example, can be high-handed in their attitudes. Then you're moving to a free-for-all, which is to say chaos or sort of anarchy, or indeed despotism.

You're moving away from the sort of civilization that is within our grasp, but is only imperfectly realized. Connections to current events are left for the audience to work out for themselves. Okay. But I will. One final question before we let you go. If your Wikipedia page is to be believed, your political philosophy has actually had real-world implications, especially in the country of Spain. Is that true?

Could you say a few words about that? Yeah, that is true. I published a book called Republicanism, which sets out this view of Republican thought and its implications for politics. In a book I published in the late 90s, it was translated to Spanish, and the leader of the opposition, Zapatero, decided that he wanted a political philosophy to guide him in government if he won government. And I know from his advisors, he read widely in political philosophy. and he was taken apparently by this republicanism book and decided that this civic republicanism was the sort of political philosophy

ought to guide him. And he did come to power in 2004, and he invited me to give a lecture to a very large audience in Madrid, because he'd been using the thoughts of the strands of thought in the tradition. And I do say it's not my invention, civic republicanism. I'm just giving voice to a tradition that I think was there right down to the American founding and including the thought of the American founders, which was lost in the 19th and 20th centuries by my own perceptions. But he adopted this and he used phrases from my book,

for example, that no domination, you know, no domination became the great catch cry. Even on electoral bills, I have sort of a nays for this. And people sort of came to understand it, you know, what he was talking about. And I sometimes use what I call the eyeball test in determining how far a society really is one, which are enjoying freedom as non-domination, which is to say it's a society where people can look one another in the eye without reason for fear or deference based on the power of the other, that at least in the realm of the basic liberties, they can stand tall, they can look one another in the eye.

And I think that is only possible in virtue of law. You know, it's not possible on the prairie, so to speak, in the wilderness on your own or in an anarchic society. It requires the shaping of law, the cultural law in our societies. And he was very taken by that. And so, for example, one of the first acts of his parliament was to introduce gay marriage in a very Catholic country. His legislature was the third legislature in the world to introduce gay marriage, which is extraordinary. And he used the eyeball test in persuading people to do this.

There is a book which are published with the Spanish lawyer and political. theorist called Jose Marti called political philosophy in public life, where he writes about a Zapatero parliamentary presence on this theme,

where he, in Parliament, said to Parliament, and indeed said it at large, which of you can leave this Parliament and meet a gay friend, assuming you're heterosexual, and expect them to

to be able to look you in the eye without reason for fear or deference, if you have just voted to deny their intimate relationships, the protection that you are heterosexual enjoy in your intimate relationships. And apparently it was very powerful. It does happen. And I think in other ways, he used the Republican themes very effectively in the first parliament when he was my minister, president they say in Spain until

that was until 2008. The great financial crisis rather changed the focus a bit, but most of the laws that he introduced and I was saying I gave this lecture in Madrid. At the end of this lecture, I joked him about

for example, he had he had already passed a law in which the public broadcaster in Spain, a sort of BBC of Spain, was really made independent of the government of the day, that law. And he claimed to be following my book in going that direction. I think very important that if there is a public broadcaster, it should be an independent public broadcaster, even if it is funded from government sources. Right.

And he had done this. And I said in my talk, jokingly, as I thought, look, you've made this law, and I think that's terrific. I fully support it. But you're going to find very difficult to live up to this law because I predict that a year from now, the public broadcaster will be a critic of your policies and you're going to be sorely tempted to ring up the director

and to remind him of who he got this power from, so to speak, or she got this power from. And it meant as a joke, but in response to my speech, rather than giving his prepared remarks, he said he would live up to these themes on a whole range of issues. And in token of his confidence in this, he invited me. He had only met me for the first time, a half an hour previously, to review his government for its performance six months before the next election. Wow.

It's not the sort of thing I generally do or even would ever wish to do. But I, and some have stood up in the audience, that said my foundation will support Philip Pettit in doing this if he accepts. And of course, I had to accept the invitation. So I did do a review in 2007 prior to the following election. The press in Spain all pressed me very strongly to give him a mark. I was happy enough to say nine out of ten or something like that. Okay, good.

It was very interesting in that period I met with him in number of occasions where he was anxious to persuade me. He was being faithful to the principles of Republican thought in the policies he was introducing. And indeed, they were very, in some cases, very remarkable policies. And I think he was broadly faithful. But it gave me a sense of how he was thinking. He was this man I came to admire greatly, deep believer in democracy. But in democratic leadership. So, for example, he would not have pushed with that gay marriage law,

acceptance of ours he brought people along with them. When apparently prior to his introducing it, there was a majority even his own party against, when it passed, there was a 65% majority in favor in the Spanish people. The opposition immediately said, we will revoke the law as soon as we get to power. Of course, they didn't. They didn't.

By then, most people have gone to a gay, marriage to a gay wedding, you know, and it just seems so mean-spirited to withdraw, you know, this license, this legitimation that you've given to a large section of our population. Anyhow, that's the connection with practical life. I've had a few others, but that's certainly the only technical one, so to speak. Well, and it sounds like his gestures at your talk and your responses both fit in perfectly with where we started with human beings, you know, offering assurances of their speech acts representing true beliefs and commitments at the time.

Well, it's very nice for you to say so. I'd like to believe that's the case, but as I say, I may be deceived myself. You've given us a lot to think about. Philip Pettit, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Sean.