Mark Lance
speaker
315 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2010
last heard Dec 2010
Mark Lance’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I mean, there are many ways in which I'd like to revise the structures that go with that.
And, of course, for some people, it becomes a completely untenable self-identity, and there is an attempt to decide not to be.
But it's never simple because it was constituted through so much.
I do want to say one other complexity is that it's often easy to misunderstand the choice cases, right?
And to say, well, you choose to take a particular job.
So you often see in debates about, say, sweatshops or something like that, you say, well, you know.
You can just choose not to take this job if you don't like the working conditions.
Well, of course, the reality may be that your actual choices, that is to say those things that you actually have the relevant skills and the relevant social positioning to make happen, are to take this job or starve and watch your kids starve.
And if that's the case, then there's something a little bit absurd about calling that a choice, right?
Or at least one wants to say that the normative implications of its being a choice insofar as it is are very different from the normative implications of a choice where you have, in fact, arrayed before you a vastly broader range of options with less dramatic implications.
consequences and things of that sort.
So part of the thought about the virtue of analyzing all this complexity of the pragmatic structure that lies underneath particular local performances is to make more explicit what's actually going on in some of these cases that we might superficially say, well, Lance decided to go to Pittsburgh for graduate school versus Harvard for graduate school, and this person decided to work in the sweatshop 24 hours a day rather than starve to death.
Well, you can call both of those choices, and in some sense they both are, but you're really obscuring more than you're illuminating by simply treating them as both choices in that way.
What we need to see is that these are very, very different structures of power.
Absolutely.
I mean, ultimately, the point of analyzing any of these things for me is to find the points at which it's effective to intervene, at which we can actually accomplish something and broaden the space of positive freedom of thought.
The actual ability of people to live flourishing lives.
And I think that's actually, for philosophers, a really important methodological point, right?
Because you hear a lot of times people say, well, what are philosophers doing?
Well, we're analyzing concepts.
Showing 241–260 of 315 · page 13 of 16
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