Toby Buckle

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272 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2018 last heard Oct 2018

Toby Buckle’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Elucidations · Episode 109: Bonus Episode with Matt Teichman and Toby Buckle · 13 Oct 2018 podcast

And the value to me

of showing that those things arise through historical circumstances is not so much to show that they're false, but to show how divergent those claims are.

Across different societies and across different timelines, and this may be somewhere where we differ, in that the value to me is to show how unique our morality is, and how it really is one point amongst an almost infinite sea of possible ways of understanding the world, some of which are not only counterintuitive to us but barely intelligible, as ours presumably would be if we could go back and see what.

what Plato would have thought about what we think.

Yeah.

So let me give a general thought and then try and make this a bit more specific if this seems like a very big pie in the sky sort of conversation.

So the thought I'll give is a paraphrase of uh Mill in On Liberty, where he says if you think back to other peoples, other cultures throughout history, they have values and commitments that seem to you not only wrong but absurd.

you will appear the same way to future generations.

And if you're just saying, well, it's intuitive to me that we need to do X,

Then you're trusting the world around you to be right.

And you're trusting the world around you to be right without good justification for doing so.

Let's make it a bit more specific.

So there's a view I've been very critical of, which is just a pure neoliberal, libertarian conception of the economy, the state, the social structure, which would run something like this: people are rationally self-interested, given that they're rationally self-interested.

There's a particular way of optimizing that, and you know, which is like a free market system or whatever.

And anything that deviates from that is necessarily going to have poor consequences because you can't change the fundamental axioms of human nature, which is rational, egotistic, maximizing, and so on.

And that seems quite intuitive, right?

You know, the idea that, oh, I want to.

Sell you this thing, you want to give me this much money for it, we exchange, what could possibly be wrong with that?

Well, every single one of the categories that that rests on is historically contingent and historically unique.

Which isn't to say that they're false, but the claim that people are individualistic rational maximizers is an empirical claim that's empirically false.

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