Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right, well, welcome, everybody. I'm very excited to be hosting my first, or co hosting my first x space here with the Atlas Society. So tonight's topic is objectivism and objective law with Atlas Society senior scholar Rob Tricinski. So I know this is a really interesting topic, and we're going to let Rob give us a little intro, and then I will be able to bring you all up for q A. So if you want to join Q A, you know, ask request to speak, and I will invite you up, and without further ado, I will pass things over to you, Rob.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Thanks, Abby.
You can all hear me fine.
Yep, coming through loud and clear. All right, so I have not really been that active on Twitter recently. I'm not very happy with new Twitter, but. So this Monty Python had a contractual obligation album that they did many years ago, and this is my contractual obligation Twitter spaces.
So I guess part of my beef with Twitter is that they wanted us to pay to be here to produce content for them. So at least I am getting paid to do this by the Atlas Society, if not by Elon Musk. At any rate, my sort of mandate for these Twitter spaces is talking about some basic ideas or some overall concepts in objectivism, and so in objectivist philosophy. So I wanted to focus on that with. I've got a whole variety of things planned out, but one of the first ones I'm talking about, because it has a lot of application today and to politics and that sort of thing, is the concept of objective law. It's a key principle of objectivism as applied to political philosophy. Now, objectivism is a philosophy of individualism, and therefore it seeks to control and limit government to keep it from running roughshod over the individual. So that's one of the reasons why objective law is so important to objectivism as a philosophy. But also objectivism is a philosophy of reason. Ein Rand was an advocate of reason, and that's another reason for making the laws objective. Notice that name implies objective law means we are taking subjectivity out of the law. We're taking personal prejudice, a whim, out of the law. We're putting reason into it. So you can't be subject to government power just because somebody feels like it.
Now, stated that way, I think this is pretty uncontroversial. But the application of this is actually far broader and more interesting if you take it fully, consistently, and much more consistently than most people do. So I want to talk today about, briefly about why we need objective law, the basic underlying justification for it, and then talk about how that's similar to the widely recognized concept of a need for the rule of law, but also how it goes beyond, in some ways, goes beyond the current understanding of the rule of law, how it is a more consistent version of the rule of law.
So first, why do we need objective law? Now, let's start with the very basics of human life, which is living itself, the needs of life, the needs of staying alive. So in order to live and achieve our goals, we need to be able to make things, to build things, to be able to create the goods we need and have the security, to be able to use them and enjoy them. So simple examples, food, clothing, and shelter. You need to build a hut to live in. You need to go fishing or hunting or farming, be able to acquire food. You may be able to store that food and be able to have it to feed yourself and your family.
And to do that, you have to have.
Well, first thing you have to do is you have to obey the laws of nature. So if you're planting crops, there are certain things you need to do or avoid doing. You need to do them at certain times in a certain order, in order to have those plants grow and to be able to protect them from drought or pests, to be able to harvest them properly, to be able to soar them so you can eat the food when you need it. Or if you're building a house, there are rules you have to follow to make sure it's going to be strong and stable and not fall down on your head and be able to keep out the elements. So there are laws of cause and effect, laws of nature that you need to follow. And reality is predictable to some extent in that respect.
Obviously, there are things, unexpected things, that happen. And if we're talking about a primitive man, reality is not so predictable because they don't know very much. But as you gain in knowledge, you have the ability to have more and more control over your environment, to be able to build bigger things and better things and grow more food and become better off because of it. So that's when you're dealing with nature. So with nature, there are laws of cause and effect. There are laws of nature that you can follow that will give you this predictability, that if I do this, I will get this result.
But when it comes to something with other people, let's say with your friends and neighbors, with the tribe next door, or with maybe somebody you come and hire to work on your farm or with the government, you're going to be looking for that same predictability, that same ability to discern, here are the rules, here are the laws, here are how things work. And I can make a rational plan about what's going to happen in the future. And you can see, if you didn't have that ability to make rational plans for what's going to happen in the future, that life would become extremely difficult very quickly, right? If everything were up in the air, if you could lose anything at any moment. But what you want is, if I do certain things, I will get certain results. That predictability you get from understanding the laws of nature. You want to have that in dealing with other people. So it's that need for planning, for predictability, for the world to be intelligible to human reason, and therefore, to some extent, at least, under your control. That's what gives the need rise, the need for rules and laws and for the rule of law.
And you see this in the origin of government. Scholars will go out there and try to find out, well, how did governments first come into existence? And they go back and forth, and sometimes it's a little unclear. But one of the major theories that said how government came into existence is there's this pattern. You see at the very beginning is the dawn of civilization. You have the first farmers who are practicing agriculture, this new technology of agriculture, and they are able to settle down in one place. They're able to build structures. They're able to put away grain and build up food for the winter. And they begin to build a certain degree of wealth that was never previously available to human beings.
And then there's this pattern where they build up their little city and they build up their civilization, and then marauders come down from the hills to raid them, right? So there's this pattern of building up and collapse, because the barbarian marauders come out of the hills and attack you and take your stuff. So you stored enough grain to get you through the winter. You plant your crops next year, and then somebody comes and takes it all away. So this is the lack of predictability, the apocalypse that would happen to you if you've done all this work. And now you can't enjoy the benefits.
So one of the things you do is conclude, we better have a government. We better have soldiers and weapons. We better have somebody to protect us from the marauders. So we end up having a warlord or a king who is in charge of all the soldiers, but now who's going to protect us from him? This is the old question of who watches the watchman quiz. Custodiate ipsos. Custodia. I'm trying to remember my latin. Basically, who watches the watchman? Government protects us from the criminals, but then who protects us from government? So we need government to be controlled, so we create laws and procedures for enforcing these laws, so we get the kind of predictability that we're looking for. Now, again, the ideal is that we want government to be as knowable and predictable and as impersonal as the laws of nature. So to achieve that, the laws have to be objective. The rules have to have a meaning that can be rationally determined. You can use facts and reasoning to figure out what's going to happen, as opposed to just being somebody's feelings, somebody's favor, somebody's decision based on what they have for breakfast in the morning. You don't want it to be arbitrary, capricious, or subjective.
So let's talk about the characteristics of objective law that we're going to look for, if that's what we're trying to achieve.
The first characteristic of objective law is that they're going to be clearly stated. Right? So Einran put it this way, I don't think this is at all unique to her. Men must know clearly in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do and why, what constitutes a crime and what penalty they'll incur if they commit it. And you can see that basic need for predictability that I go out to act in the world, I know that I'm going to not get stomped down upon if I stay within certain rules.
Hence things like the ban on ex post facto laws in the constitution.
You can't pass a law that goes back in time to punish people for things they did before the law was passed, because that removes that element of predictability. At the time somebody took that action, they didn't know it was against the law because it wasn't against the law, so they didn't have that predictability. The law can only go to people who can only be applied to people after it's passed and announced publicly.
Or the law doesn't mean one thing for one person and something different for another person. This goes all the way back to the Old Testament. I was delighted to discover this is in Leviticus, that Moses is laying down the law for the Hebrews in the Old Testament, and he says the law should be no respecter of persons. What does he mean by a respecter of persons? Well, it means that it's not taking into account somebody's status or their position or their title, right? It applies to all people equally. So you could be in the aristocracy and all the laws will still apply to you. There aren't special laws, a special set of laws that are more lenient on you, or you could be a beggar on the street, and the law also still protects you. There's not a law that somehow gives less protection to you because your status is lower. So that's an idea that goes all the way back to the Old Testament in the constitution. There's also a ban on what's called the bill of attainder. Now, a bill of attainer was something from the old aristocratic system, and it basically meant that Congress or parliament would pass a law dictating punishments for you, for one person specifically. We're going to pass a law to that Robert Krasinski guy. We hate him. We're going to pass a law to take away his property and ban him from doing certain things.
So again, the constitution says you can't have a bill of attainer, so you can't have a law that targets a specific person or company. Laws have to be general and universal. You have to say all people of a certain. And sometimes people try to get away around this. By the way, in Congress, in state houses, they do this too. They'll pass a law that's like. It's made to sound like it's general, but it creates a set of conditions that only apply to one company or only apply to one person.
And they try to get around doing this, but you're not supposed to be able to do this. All the laws have to be, this applies to you and to anyone who does something similar.
And it's general enough to apply to all people equally. So we have the idea the law must be stated explicitly, it must be universal. And also the law must be specific. It can't name something so vague that there's no reasonable way to tell what it would mean in practice.
So you could have a law against murder, because people are pretty clear on what murder means, right? It's a killing that's done deliberately and not in self defense. The exceptions, like you can say, I'm not guilty on the grounds of self defense. Those exceptions are well known. They're easy to understand.
Now, today we have a number of big examples of laws that are not specific in this way and are non objective in that way. So, for example, antitrust laws ban, quote, restraint of trade. Well, what does that mean? To the extent it has any clear meaning, I think it would apply to a lot of what the government does, but applied to private companies, nobody really knows what it means. So there's this whole body of laws that's been built up to try to figure out the guesswork of what does it mean to be restraining trade. And so one of the notorious things that comes out of this about antitrust is that just about anything can be considered an antitrust violation. The old saying is, if your prices are too high, you have monopoly and you're gouging the consumer. If your prices are too low, well, you're unfairly undercutting the competition. And if your prices are the same, well, that's collusion, right? So anything you do, prices high, low, the same. Anything you do, that's something that shows you're engaged in restraint of trade. So again, you have a standard that's so vague it could apply to anything, and so it becomes arbitrary or subjective. Companies can't figure out what's legal and what's not.
Or we have laws allowing the government to ban things that are, quote, offensive by local community standards. Now, you might recognize that those are the laws from certain obscenity cases, cases banning pornography.
In the early 1970s, there are a series of supreme court rulings on that, and they said, you can ban something if it's offensive by local community standards. Well, what's offensive and what are the local community standards? So I'm going to use some real life examples here. Is it a movie with sex scenes and how many and what kind of scenes? Is it a novel where a character uses racial slurs? In what context? Is it a children's book based on a real story about two male penguins raising a baby chick at the zoo? Again, real examples. All of these. Is it an art exhibit designed to criticize muslim restrictions that require women to wear headscars? Right. All of these things have been claimed to be offensive and therefore been banned or attempted to be banned, depending on which, quote, unquote, community standards you go by. So in both these types of examples, you have antitrust and anti obscenity law. You have eliminated the elements of predictability. A judge or a jury or an ambitious prosecutor. A lot of these cases, it's an ambitious prosecutor. A guy wants to get his name in the papers, who gets to decide what law means in a way that nobody could reliably guess beforehand.
Now, the other thing I'd throw in on this, too, is that we also suffer in this day and age from an excess of law that creates this element of non objectivity, of subjectivity in the law, which is that when there are. Somebody wrote a book once called 10,000 commandments, when you have a vast regulatory state, where every time you step out your door, there are 10,000 different laws that apply to you. No one could possibly know what all those laws are. The sheer number and complexity of the laws prevents them from being complied with, prevents from the free even being known by all but the most arcane specialists.
And so you end up with an element of subjectivity that comes from the simple fact that the laws are too. There are too many laws, they're too big, too complex to be understood. And that's one of the problems with the modern sort of regulatory state, where you have thousands of bureaucrats sitting in offices drawing up new regulations and laws for you to follow, which the average person could not possibly keep up with them all.
There's lots of interesting things to say about that, which I'll get to if we get to it later.
And so, most widely, one of the things that objective law supports, this concept of objective law supports, is the idea of originalism in legal interpretation, and especially in terms of the Constitution, as opposed to what they call the living constitution.
I have my criticisms of originalism as is being implemented. I think the current Supreme Court is sort of using it to create their own living constitution, but we can get into that later. But the idea is that the basic law of the land means what it says and not what we think it ought to say, and not changing, based on the notorious phrase from a Supreme Court ruling, the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society. Well, what does that mean? Right? What are the evolving standards of decency? How does anybody decide that? You have to go to the same cocktail parties as the Supreme Court justices to find out what their standards of decency have evolved to. Right. So again, it's in favor of this idea of originalism, of interpreting the plain meaning of the words, rather than evolving them in some unspecified way. Now, from that issue of being specific and predictable, we can work up another layer, and I'm going to go very briefly over this one, but we could talk about it more, which is the need for objective law creates the need for certain procedures of law. And we call the due process of law. But I mean the due process of law in the sense of if the law is being implemented by a single person, right? If there's a single guy who decides what's legal and what's not, and how to interpret the law in your particular case, you can see there's elements of subjectivity. The law is going to be interpreted by that person in a way that might be idiosyncratic to him can be twisted and misinterpreted in whatever way that suits his interests and goals. There was a peruvian dictator who said, famously said, for my friends, everything for my enemies of the law. In other words, for his friends, there's a very lenient interpretation of what the law is for the enemies. There's a very strict interpretation of what the law is.
So instead, we have to have a procedure where multiple people and institutions have a role in interpreting the law. We have to have them balanced against one another. Separation of powers, different layers of government, jury trials, all these procedures that are meant to make sure that the law isn't being implemented just by one person on their say so, that it has a process that it goes through.
And the more you do that, the more it means that there's a chance that it's not just going to be somebody's feelings. Right? So objective, this word objective means oriented toward the most fundamental philosophical meaning of the word. Objective means oriented towards the facts, the objects that you're seeing out in reality, you're objective if you are oriented toward the objects or the actual facts as they are on the ground.
Now, objective can also mean unbiased or not belonging to any faction, but that meaning kind of dependent on the original one. Right? A decision that goes through a process that's not dominated by one faction or interest group is going to get good results because it's more likely to be based on the facts rather than on prejudice or group thing. All right, so this takes us, I think, as far as the usual concept of the rule of law takes us. This idea, you have to have impersonal institutions rather than personal bias or special interests.
But then there's a part of objective law as Einran conceived it, and more broadly, as also in some other legal theories that goes beyond this.
And this is the idea that for law to be objective, it needs to not only be clear and specific and predictable, and not just go through a procedure meant to remove bias and prejudice. The law has to be based on objectively reproofable requirements of government. So in this view, what makes the law subjective is also, if you're just making up a power of government out of the blue, saying, in effect, if enough people feel government should be doing something, I can go do it.
There is no purpose of government in this view, there's no purpose of government. And this is, by the way, the most widely accepted view today on both the left and the right. In this view, that there is no purpose of government other than to reflect the subjective desires of the majority.
When I mentioned earlier democracy, I'm an advocate of democracy in the good sense, meaning we have voting, we have laws, we have a process and a procedure to keep one faction from taking over as an oligarchy. But there's also democracy in the bad sense. And this is the pure majoritarianism, the idea that people can do whatever the people as a whole can do, whatever they happen to feel like at the given moment.
This is the democracy in the sense of two people on a desert island voting to cook and eat. The third, they have a two thirds majority. They can get supermajority. They can do it right. So in this view, there's no specific objective purpose of government. It's just a vehicle for the fads of the moment and the whims of the moment, and with no limit to what government can do.
So the viewpoint of objective law goes back to the issue of predictability, and specifically the predictability necessary to act to achieve the needs for your own life.
Just giving open ended power even to the majority takes away that predictability.
So objective law in this sense says you have to have some clear basis in basic political ideas for why government gets to have this power in the first. When you think about in this sense, objective law is not that radical an idea. So consider the first amendment to the US constitution. What does it say? It says, Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press. So if we talk about rule of law or due process, this is a declaration that there could be no rule of law or due process when it comes to imposing government censorship, because no law or process is permitted in the first place. Anything the government does to shut down and engage in censorship against individuals is doing without law and without process.
Yet somehow this doctrine actually is very controversial, both for the left and the right. And the doctrine is called substantive due process because the idea is that the right to due process of law doesn't just mean going through the right procedures.
Sometimes due process also refers to the substance of what you're trying to do. In some cases, there is no due process because the thing you're trying to do is beyond the limited powers of government, and there's no legitimate procedure for doing an illegitimate thing. That's the idea. So this idea of substantive due process is very controversial. And I said, both the left and the right don't like it. The left doesn't like it, because substantive due process was once used to limit the power of the government over economics. And actually, the term substantive due process was coined during the New Deal era as a criticism of judges who are trying to block FDR's latest big economic scheme for regulation. Now, the right doesn't like substantive due process because it blocks them from doing things that they want, mostly in terms of moral regulations. So, for example, when the Supreme Court recently struck down the right to abortion, this is the Dobbs versus Jackson women's health organization. I think it was in the Dobbs decision they struck down the right to abortion. They did it specifically by rejecting the idea of substantive due process, because one of the arguments being offered in favor of abortion rights was that a woman's freedom to control her own body was a matter of substantive due process, that there was no proper process by which government could take away a person's freedom to control their own body. That was a substantive due process argument. So this is the final sense in which objective law is law. That can only be made in this final sense of objective law is that law can only be made for specific, justifiable purposes based on some factually verifiable needs of human nature. And I think it's not that radical idea. It means, basically, you stick to the declaration of independence. The idea is that governments are formed for a specific purpose, to secure these rights. Governments are instituted among men, so you have the rights to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. The purpose of government is to secure those rights. So a government action has to be based on those core individual rights and justified by reference to them. And if it isn't, then, as the first amendment puts it, Congress shall make no law. Government doesn't have the power to do something.
But this all goes back to the idea of objectivity, which means predictability, which means making human laws work as much as possible, like the laws of nature. And so they have to be based on certain facts about human nature, which is captured in the concept of individual rights. All right, so this is like the full scope of this concept of individual, of objective law as conceived in objectivist philosophy and objectivist political philosophy. And now, like I said, this is strangely, in some ways not controversial because you can see it used all the time in different ways. And it's also tremendously controversial because it gets in the way of a lot of things people on different sides of the political debate want to be doing. So let's sort of open it up for questions, comments, counterarguments, et cetera.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: All right, anybody who wants to come up and ask a question, please request to be a speaker, and we'll bring you up to the stage. In the meantime, I do have a couple of questions myself while we're waiting.
I guess, first of all, you'll hear a lot from, I guess, if you want to say, young people, I took some pre law classes. I thought I wanted to go to law school for a while. One thing that bothered me was a lot of my peers were just like. They've abandoned the idea of truth altogether. So this idea, that of objectivity in general, has been completely thrown out. And therefore they think they're going to throw that out in the law as well. They just think, well, there's no way to be objective. But somehow they still want to practice law and be lawyers. And it just doesn't seem to make any sense. And there didn't seem to be any logic to it, but they were still there to be lawyers. So I don't know what you have any thoughts on.
Just the rejection of truth among.
[00:25:55] Speaker B: Well, it's not exactly a new idea that the purpose of law is to employ lawyers.
I also think it does tie into, though, the idea that I think it's the dominant political philosophy of our era, which is that politics is not about principles. It's not about delimited powers. Politics that ties into the wider political philosophy. Where, in this view, politics is about various interest groups and pressure groups. And the whole point of politics is you are trying to get as much as possible, as much power as possible, as much benefits as possible for your interest group or pressure group, and take as much benefits and as much power away from the other guy. Right.
[00:26:38] Speaker A: Right.
[00:26:40] Speaker B: And this has various versions. I think the conservatives are hastily assembling their own version of it. They call it common good conservatism, which basically means the conservative faction, with its view of what the common good is. They get to gain power and influence and use that to impose their view of the good life on everyone. The leftist version of this, which is much more longer and more established, is more sort of. I mean, you could say it's marxist, although I think it goes a little beyond Marxism. But Marx is a great sort of far out example of it is this idea that, look, all there are. They're competing classes in.
You know, for Marx, it was the workers versus the capitalists. Now we know race, class and gender. We have all these different. We've redefined our interest groups and our pressure groups to include the various, quote, unquote, marginalized people of various types. But the idea is that there's simply various groups out there in society. And you're trying to gain power for certain groups and take it away or do it at the expense of power for other groups, other groups who have had more power than you in the past. So it's all just a scramble for power. And that's, I think, how you get these sort of idealistic young. These people who talk themselves into a weird idealism in the law, right? They don't actually believe in the law. They don't believe in principles, they don't believe in objectivity, but they believe they're fighting for the right group. They're fighting for the marginalized and historically oppressed groups against the oppressors. And that makes them the good people.
[00:28:10] Speaker A: Right?
[00:28:12] Speaker B: But what they're not getting is law as something that's objective and that exists to protect people rather than be part of a power struggle.
[00:28:22] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a really good point. And I think I definitely saw that. I know there was one girl in class, we were talking about Roe v. Wade, and she stood up and she said, I just want to know. Which is a common phrase. It's so funny. She goes, no vagina, no opinions. And our pre law professor, our pre law professor said, actually, unless you have a legal standard that you'd like to put forth, I'd like you to sit down. This is a pre law class, not a political science class.
And she was so mad about that. She was just flabbergasted.
[00:28:54] Speaker B: I'm so glad professors are being harsh on these little annoying little toe rags, because it's the thing about the young people to go in and think, I have these opinions and I know everything, and sometimes they need to be told, sit down and listen so you can actually learn something.
Yeah, I grew up in the era of. There was a movie late seventy s or early eighty s. I can't remember when, but I remember seeing it sometime afterwards called the paper chase, where they have this eminent british actor who was this revered and intensely feared Harvard law professor who gives the speech for opening day class. Will you come in here? Your minds are mush. And I'm here basically to teach you how to do the basic elementary thinking. Like a lawyer. I like to think there's still some guys like that out there these days.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I definitely had a very good pre law professor. He definitely was trying to do that. It was like, opinions, keep your opinions to yourself. You don't have opinions in this class. I don't care about your opinions. It's just very to the point. But definitely, guys, raise your hand if you guys have a question. We got some quiet listeners in here, but I have a couple of questions here about kind of on the same vein, if you will, we see things, I guess, on the right, I don't know if you want to call it on the right and the left, where we want to have criminal justice reform, where people are trying to kind of scale back some of these, like you talked about, the vague laws and this kind of just over burdensome legal system, but then sometimes it can go too far. And obviously the left and the right have their different objectives and some of them are not objective on both sides. But now we have cities that have, you can't get arrested for less than $1,000 in shoplifting, and now we have kind of retail theft rings. So what do you think of criminal justice reform? Do you think that is an important movement? And how do we kind of keep it from going too far either on the right and the, of my, one.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: Of my favorite quotations of this, because you don't need leftist theory or any of this modern stuff to understand this. You need something that a quote, well, it's usually attributed to George Washington. He probably didn't say it, but there's versions of this quotes that were very common about Washington's time. It's the sort of thing he might have said. So I'm not going to allow it. And the quote is, government, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Now you have to think this is an 18th century saying. So you can mention at that time most houses were heated with fire and they were lit with fire. If you wanted to read a book, you lit a candle. So you had open flames inside these houses, which were mostly, especially in America, mostly wood houses. Right? So you can imagine the tremendous fear people had. That use of fire was a necessity of everyday life. You couldn't cook without it. You couldn't stay warm in the winter. You couldn't do anything after sundown unless you used fire. But at the same time, there was this very significant risk of burning your house down and basically being burned to death. Right. So this analogy really, this metaphor really would have hit home in the 18th century, that government, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. All right. So I do think we always have to, this is why I'm in favor of criminal justice reform, because I think we always have to take into account that the more sort of unaccountable power you give to the government, that includes the police, that includes judges, the more power you give to them, the more it's going to be abused. Now, on the other hand, you have to balance that against the fact that you do actually need government, right? We're like the people in the 18th century. You do need fire to heat your home. You do need government to protect you from criminals. And so in trying to prevent power from being abused, you have to do this very difficult sort of prudential balancing act of how do I create enough procedure to prevent power from being abused? But not so much procedure. You prevent anything from getting done and you prevent the government from being able to protect people. And of course, the left wants to go the other direction. This thing about shoplifting, and we won't prosecute anything under 1000 or $750, something like that. Again, the law is no respecter of persons. It's this idea that somehow by being poor that the law should not apply to you and you should be able to steal whatever you like. And of course it ends up hurting the poor people the most because in their neighborhoods, the shops shut down because they can't protect themselves from being robbed anyway. That's. And the balancing act. But at the same time, you also see these outrageous cases. There was a great article a while back about some town in Missouri, I think it is, and it's a small town, but they happen to have a fairly big highway going through it that's in their jurisdiction. So their guys go out there all the time and ticket people relentlessly ticket people oftentimes for sort of BS, very marginal things. But it's this remote town, so they know we'll slap these tickets on the people. They're going to have to pay the tickets. It's not going to be worth it for them, or it's not going to be possible for them to drive all the way out here to contest it. And so they have this very well funded giant police department with all brand new vehicles in this tiny little town because they're basically highway robbers. They're looting people who come on the highway by giving them bogus tickets. So there are these cases like that where you have police that have not had, there's nobody with the proper checks and controls on them and the power is being abused. So you have to have some reforms.
[00:34:36] Speaker A: To deal with that kind of thing, right? Yep. That makes sense. We have somebody with a question. Dennis?
[00:34:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Hi.
[00:34:44] Speaker C: Can you hear me?
[00:34:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:47] Speaker C: Great. So I joined a little late, so definitely tell me if this question's off topic or not a good fit for whatever reason, but I heard you speaking about western institutions of law.
I think it was physicist David Deutsche who once said, I'm paraphrasing from memory here, that our institutions generally as imperfect as they are. They're often more rational than individuals.
So these things that you mentioned that are criteria for objectivity, like predictability, consistency, reference to some objective standard, not evading available evidence, those are things that we've generally come to expect from our institutions, but again, imperfectly, they're not perfect, but generally we can expect that. But when it comes to discussing with individuals and just evaluating ideas on a personal basis, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's come to find that people don't often live up to those same standards. So when evaluating some idea, they might ignore evidence that isn't in their favor, and so on.
So when it comes to increasing the rationality of discourse beyond mentioning specifics such as the criteria for objectivity that you mentioned, does objectivism offer a sort of guide, I guess, for how to become a more rational individual and actually adopting those criteria?
[00:36:09] Speaker B: Okay, that's an excellent question in a whole bunch of ways. Okay, so first of all, I'm going to second the observation.
Now, it's not always the case, and I don't like the word perfect because perfect implies everything is right and nothing can be improved. I like the word optimal. Optimal implies the best you can reach under the circumstances, right? So it doesn't imply that everything is perfect. It implies you've achieved the best possible result given whatever constraints you're dealing with.
And I do think that we tend to get more optimal results from institutions. I actually highly recommend, I have a few philosophical reservations, but I highly recommend the book by Jonathan Roush called the Constitution of knowledge, because he talks a lot about this, about the ways in which we've developed institutions like scientific institutions and journalistic institutions, as imperfect as they are, and political institutions to try to deal with this problem of basically, how do you derive at knowledge and truth? He has this great line about how, if you'd ask people 300 years ago, you know, questions like who should decide what's true?
The thing that would have been least natural for them to answer is nobody in particular should decide. It says, yet that's exactly the system we have. Nobody in particular decides what's true. It's decided by discussion and debate and this whole process within these institutions.
And yet we have way more knowledge now than we did then. So the system has worked in that respect.
So I think, I really recommend that book, Constitution of knowledge.
And he talks about this, and it's that metaphor of a constitution being used, that we have institutions and procedures that are meant to try to allow us to reach knowledge. And I added to that as something I call. I've had a long standing view of idea about this. I call it epistemological madisonianism that basically is taking some ideas from James Madison that he applied to the US government and applying it to thinking. And basically that he said, well, when you have more people, more different factions contending with each other, it becomes harder for one faction to sort of win the day just based on prejudice or interest or. Well, we all in our little ideological bubble, and we all agree with each other, the more they have to contest it, and they have to come up with evidence, and they have to come up with the arguments that are convincing to somebody outside of their little bubble. And so you end up getting better policies, because you have to convince somebody, not just the guy next to you, who has the exact same ideas and the exact same background and the exact same prejudices that you do. You have to convince somebody who's completely different from you. You have to give him some kind of objective evidence. So I think it does increase the objectivity of it.
You ask whether objectivists have contributed to this. I think objectivism has offered a great defense of reason and some very interesting theoretical ideas and epistemology about what is the nature of reason, what is the nature of concepts, et cetera. The one thing I think that I've personally been advocating for for a while that I think objectives hasn't done as good a job at, which is sort of the training. So I'm reading some stuff by the Stoics right now, and this idea that you have this sort of training in the discipline of using reason and of differentiating reason from your emotions, and having that practice of encountering people with different views, and how do you deal with encountering different views and use that to reach the truth. So this idea of the nuts and bolts of how do you implement being a rational person, objectivism great. Has done great work at some of the theoretical understanding of reason. Great work at sort of being advocates for the use of reason as opposed to various kinds of irrationality or mysticism or what have you. I think that an area that needs more work in the philosophy of objectivism is that question of how do you train people to have the institutions and the habits that will allow them to be more rational. So that's why I think that's such a great question.
[00:40:32] Speaker A: And I think one resource that we do have, Rob, is David's seven habits of highly objective people. I think it's sort of a training resource. Would you agree? It kind of shows you how you could practice objectively in areas where you might have blind spots and talks about kind of the difficulty of emotion and how to balance that. So that's a good.
[00:40:58] Speaker B: There's also the other thing I would say is that I've been reading the stoics. The other thing I've been looking at is what's called the cognitive behavioral therapy, which is, know, when I was younger, we were sold sort of the Woody Allen era, where freudian psychotherapy was the dominant thing in the field of psychology. And one of the most interesting, I think one of the best things that's happened is that cognitive behavioral therapy has sort of become the main thing, the dominant field, or the dominant school of psychology. And it's all based on this idea of not reacting on your emotions, of using cognition, of using thinking to sort of deconstruct, well, why do I feel this way? Is it really necessary? And then coming up with ways to sort of deprogram a wrong idea that you have? And that's all very much in line with the objectivist philosophy and the objectivist view on the emotions. There were a lot of actually connections in the early days of cognitive behavioral therapy, connections between that and objectivism. So that's another area where in the field of psychology, something has come up that connects to this question of how do you be rational? What are the habits that you use to become rational?
[00:42:14] Speaker A: And I think I've noticed, because I peruse the Internet a lot, we're seeing a shift of this in the parenting talk too, because I think you had a lot of that sort of psychotherapy in parenting for maybe kids coming up in my generation. And it was very much like, you talk to your kids, they're not really responsible for their behaviors. And now there's this slew of high school and college kids who cannot regulate their emotions and are not responsible for their behavior. And we're starting to see kind of the consequences of it. And I think I see this shift now among young mothers who are like, no, we have to teach behavior and we have to create responsibility, and it's kind of a shift back and maybe forward in some ways.
[00:42:55] Speaker B: Well, so one of the things this gets to, one of the things I'm actually personally trying to start working on, I'm at the very early stages on it, but I sort of see that this confluence of four things, which is objectivist philosophy, Stoic, the philosophy of the stoics. I'm sort of investigating how much of that connects to this cognitive behavioral therapy. And then the last element is Montessori education, because I have Montessori kids. I sent my kids to Montessori school. And absolutely that idea of regulating your own emotions and regulating your own thinking and becoming these sort of self responsible, self guided individuals was very much a part of Montessori education. So I'm sort of looking at how can you create this sort of integration of those four things to create a guide to life, a guide to how to live rationally.
And as I sort of think of it as well, the fifth element I like to, because I'm an inveterate Star Trek fan. The fifth element that tried to bring in there is Kolinar, the ancient Vulcan discipline of living by logic. Now, obviously, without purging the emotions the way that the Vulcans do.
But this idea that. Of developing this sort of idea of a spiritual discipline that will help you live by reason in your everyday life, I think we've got all these different elements that are there ready to. There's some sort of integration of those that's ready to be made, and I'm going to see what I can do in that regard.
[00:44:21] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I know we have some new people who've been joining us. So we're in our Q A section. So if you guys want to join Q a request to be a speaker. On that note, I know we have a question from Guardian G.
[00:44:34] Speaker B: Hi, Rob. Thank you for doing this talk.
My question to you was. So you've basically laid out during this discussion here.
[00:44:42] Speaker A: He's talking. Okay, well, while we're waiting, I can ping to another question unless there's anybody.
[00:44:47] Speaker B: I heard him.
[00:44:49] Speaker A: Oh, you did?
[00:44:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
Can you not hear me now?
[00:44:54] Speaker A: No, I can't hear him for some reason. That's weird. Well, if you can hear him, go on.
[00:44:57] Speaker B: Okay, I'll cue you when he's done.
[00:45:01] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:45:04] Speaker B: So my question was, basically, you laid out objective law very well, and I think from the discussion, we can sort of infer the opposite, what subjectivism is based on what objectivism is, and we can see the opposite. But maybe you could maybe go into a little bit more detail about what we might consider subjective law to be about, because people do make that point come up. But I don't want to just say it's the opposite because there's probably a bit more nuance to that statement.
That's a very good question. Yeah, a little bit more on that. So I talked a little bit about things like antitrust law, where you have a vague law that bans something that's so wide, that so wide and vague with no few standards to interpret. It that it ends up being sort of something you can apply to anything, or the same thing with obscenity or things that are offensive by local community standards.
I've been working for a while. In an article, Eiden Rand wrote an article about when these Supreme Court rulings on obscenity came out that said, you can ban it if it's offensive by local community standards. Ein Rand wrote about that in 1973 when it happened.
Hers was called censorship, local and express, because it's the local community standards. And I've been working for a while on an article called censorship local express and round trip. Because what I found interesting is this idea of, you can ban something that's offensive by local community standards. This was originated by conservatives. They could ban pornography. But when you think about it, where was it most thoroughly implemented? Well, on college campuses, where if you were saying conservative views, you were offensive by the local community standards of Brandeis or Harvard or wherever.
And then we've seen it then come around sort of full circle, that you now have a bunch of conservatives who are sort of saying to the nationalist conservative types who are saying, well, no, sure, since everybody agrees now that we should have everything police as to what's offensive by local community standards, we want to be setting the standards know reference to conservative values. So you have this way in which has come full circle. I even came with a great case, and it's all based on a case in Minnesota. So I mentioned that there's a case of trying to ban an art exhibit that's against the hijab, the mandatory headscarf in muslim societies. Well, there are a bunch of muslim students who, it was iranian students, iranian american students who created this art exhibit. Then there are a bunch of other muslim students who were offended by it and asked that it be shut down or closed off behind curtains. And it's one of these things we find, well, is this a leftist thing or is this a right wing thing? Is it right wing because it's religious conservatism or is it left wing because it's anticolonial or in favor of marginalized groups? And the answer is, you can't tell anymore. It's all come full circle and everything's combined together.
So that's the sort of thing we're talking about. The other thing that I was going to mention, though, is that I think is a good example of that non objectivity of law. Hold on. I had it in my mind a minute ago that I got on a different tangent. It'll come back.
So one thing I've mentioned is the sheer number of the laws have become so large and complex that nobody can deal with it. And there was. Oh, gosh.
Okay, I'm drawing a blank. There's one other issue I want to bring up to me. If it comes up, I'll get to it. But then I talked earlier with Abby about this wider view. Oh, I know what it is. Okay, I'm back to it now, which is that you'll often hear when commentators talk about a Supreme Court decision, they will talk about how well the Supreme Court was trying to balance different interests. The state has an interest in something, and then there's an individual interest over here, and then this group has an interest in this. And the whole purpose of the Supreme Court ruling was, we're going to balance the interests of these different parties that are involved.
And I think that terminology is what strikes me as being connected. Something I said to Abby earlier, which is how I remembered this point, which is this idea of viewing society as there are a bunch of groups competing with each other. And the whole business of politics is to try to get as much power for your group as possible and take it away from other people who used to have the power. And it's all just a power struggle between different groups with different interests. And that has really come deeply into legal theory.
I think, since the late 19th century. It came deeply into legal theory, the idea that what you have is different parties and different groups and sometimes individuals and sometimes the government, and they all have different interests, and then those interests are being balanced on some other. And I think that's the subjectivity coming into the law is that it is a group of gangs. Each one has something they want to do, and you just try to balance between them somehow. And I think that's an element that has deeply come into, I think, even more so living constitution theory, which is sort of a version of this.
It has kind of lost out in some ways to originalism. But the competing imbalanced interests approach to the law, I think, is one that is still everywhere, and it's endemic in discussions of the law. And I think the whole terminology kind of gives me the heebie GB's.
[00:50:54] Speaker A: Do you think know, obviously, when people have an will you see this a lot with Supreme Court cases, people who honestly have a lot, most often have very little knowledge of the sort of legal standards that are at know what the Supreme Court is actually dealing with, but have an opinion on the underlying social issue, if you will, whether it's abortion or affirmative action, whatever it may be. You get a lot of sort of talking heads then with their opinions, isn't it? Everybody says, oh, well, the other side isn't being objective. The other side, we're giving into the power struggle. Each side is going to think that they have it right. So to what degree is it just a continuing conversation of what is objective is actually beneficial to the law versus when it's become totally denigrated? I don't know if that makes any sense.
[00:51:44] Speaker B: Yeah, it does.
But that goes to what you're talking about, that story from law school where the woman says, if you're not a woman, you don't have the ability, you don't have the right to say anything on this that comes out. That's not just kids. The kids in law school are getting it from somewhere.
This is an 18 year old. They picked it up from somebody else, from somebody who's much older than them, who should have known better. And that attitude of, unless you're a part of, member of my group, unless you're a member of my interest group, then I shouldn't even have to talk to you and convince you of this. I think that is a problem.
And that goes back to this idea that we think better as groups and as institutions generally than we do.
We can be more objective as institutions, especially when it comes to government, than by putting hands and putting high power into the hands of an individual.
That by going out and having to talk to people who disagree with you, who don't think this is obvious, you actually are then forced to give the legal reasoning. And I think that's the habit we have to have.
Hopefully, I watch the talking heads occasionally do this, too, and shake my head at them, because oftentimes I think they're not instilling that habit of whatever argument you have, you have to distill it down to the issues and be able to explain that to someone who doesn't already share your viewpoint.
[00:53:06] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, that's a very good point. And we are definitely lacking that training in our university institutions now, which is really unfortunate because you'd think that's what they're designed to do.
For those of you maybe joining, jumping in, we are in Q A, so feel free to request to be a speaker if you have any questions.
Kind of moving through here, some of my questions.
We talk a lot at the Atlas Society. We've got scholars who we're kind of practicing applying objectivism, trying to bring objectivism into these conversations. But even as scholars and as there's, there's disagreements and as we know once you know, you got the Supreme Court and you have your dissenting opinions and your majority opinions and you see this disagreement, to what extent do you think objectivism can bring, I think we do a really great job of bringing what you were just talking about, the kind of, you have to be able to go and talk to somebody you disagree with. You have to be able to work through the issues, and then maybe you realize that you actually have reason through something wrong. To what degree do you think objectivism can bring that to the law? In places it's not really well practiced in other disciplines, I would say the conservative movement, obviously the leftist movement, they lack philosophy. There's not a lot of philosophical standards at play. Obviously that's something objectivism is trying to change. So maybe objectivism can bring a little bit of that to the law.
[00:54:34] Speaker B: Well, I also think objectivists have had, objectivism, as a wider movement has had its struggles with this as well, with not always dealing with our disagreements in a constructive way. That's why it's an area that I think needs now the Atlas Society stands for what? Open objectivism, which is more of that approach of, let's talk about these disagreements and work through them and use the disagreement to better articulate your own view and better to refine and articulate and question and further develop the truth. John Stuart Mill wrote some great stuff about this, about how basically your own ideas, if your ideas are true, they're going to actually be even better, richer and deeper after you've thought about them. Opposition, I won't mention names. There's a substac writer I've been reading recently, and everything this person writes, I completely disagree with it and disagree with that contemptual, say, I hate this stuff. But every time I come out, I think, oh, I've got an article I can write about this. I've got like two articles I can write just based, and it's based on, here's what's wrong with what this person is doing now. I don't write them in terms of here's this one person I hate. Let me tell you why they're wrong all the time, because that would be weird, right, for my readers. But it is true. It's this example of when I read this person, it makes me ask, well, why are they wrong? And then when I think, well, why are they wrong? I articulate some new part of my own ideas that I wasn't explicitly aware of before. And so it is a case in which dealing with disagreement, know John Stuart Mill was right. It does help you deepen and develop the true ideas dealing with false ideas.
But I think that's the thing that the objectives women has sort of had to try to learn. And I think that, like I said, more work needs to be done in terms of developing that. As one of the things I've become an advocate for is the idea of philosophy not as an abstract body of knowledge, but philosophy as a way of life. And this is really how, if you go back to the ancient greeks, this is how they thought of it, philosophy as a way of life.
And I really think we need to do some more work on developing what objectivism has to contribute to that idea of philosophy as a way of life, as a personal discipline.
[00:57:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's so important because when I was going into university and I was trying to decide what I was going to study, and I knew I wanted to go into law school eventually, but at the time, philosophy, people were like, oh, study philosophy. And in my mind, philosophy, from what I learned in high school was like going to a class where they pose an unrealistic scenario that doesn't exist, and then you try to solve it with philosophical theories. And to me, it just seemed so absurd. So I wanted to study something more practical, like political science. Now, looking back, if somebody had told me that philosophy was a way of life and had really billed it to me for what it truly is, or for the way that Rand talked about it, or the Greeks talked about it, because I was a classics minor as well, and about halfway through college, I was like, oh, man, I would have been much better off with a philosophy degree. But there's a lack of understanding of what philosophy is and what the practice of philosophy could do for your life. So we're definitely lacking that.
[00:57:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. You're talking about the bizarre scenarios. Was the trolley problem a thing for you? You're probably in the area where that was. We had our own, the trolley problem.
[00:58:05] Speaker A: I vaguely remember that.
[00:58:07] Speaker B: It's a runaway trolley, and if you throw a switch, it goes down one track where it kills five people.
But you throw the switch one way, it'll kill five people. You throw it the other way, it'll only kill one person. Do you throw it the one way that it only kills the one person? Right. But you've thrown the switch, and you've caused it to kill that person. So you're responsible for it. What do you do? It's a great dilemma. I saw a great thing on. I think it was. So I'm mostly on threads these days instead of Twitter or what? X? But everybody calls it Twitter. And somebody put up in there a great thing. It was like from the union of railway engineers or something like that. And they were like, well actually if you throw the switch to a certain way it will cause a controlled derailment and nobody gets killed. And so if you understand this, thank a railway engineer. So that was this great thing where it's like they came up with this philosophical conundrum and there's actually a practical engineering solution to it that no philosopher would actually bother to think about.
[00:59:08] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's what I felt like philosophy was going to be like. It was going to be not solving problems because you were too busy creating false conundrums.
So it's unfortunate. That is how philosophy is taught and I think it seems clever that way. Maybe that's why they teach it that way to high schoolers. It seems really clever. But I think it's undermining the depth of philosophy and it's pushing people towards what are actually a lot more subjective, like political science. I mean I don't know if anybody here is going into college, just don't study political science.
[00:59:39] Speaker B: Actually. No, wait, here's the thing about political science though.
My best classes were in the political science department.
I was a philosophy major, but the best classes I had were the political science department. But that's because this was the University of Chicago and at the time political science included a bunch of political theory. Like there's a class that was all about the political theory of Plato.
We read Plato's republic, Aristotle's politics and Thucydides peloponnesian war and then we discussed the ideas in there that was quote unquote political science. So it depends on how political science is taught, let's put it that way. Yeah, basically all the philosophy there, half the philosophy I learned was in the political science classes.
[01:00:23] Speaker A: Yeah, and I mean there were a few classes to give some credit to the University of Michigan. There were a few professors still teaching like that. We had a lot of classes though that were like why country music is racist, sexist and homophobic.
[01:00:36] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[01:00:38] Speaker A: Four credit course like real serious stuff. But we are here at 730 so I want to thank you Rob, for joining us. I know, what did you call at the beginning? Your contractual, contractual obligation tour. Yes, but I know that while you have some issues with X, we always enjoy your content on here and obviously we're trying to provide educational content on X and then other platforms as well. So later this night, later tonight, if you guys are interested, we have the Atlas Society asks interview at 09:00 p.m. Eastern time. We're live streaming on all platforms, including Instagram, where you're talking about threads. We're going to have New York civil rights attorney Bobby Anne Flower Cox is going to be interviewed by our CEO, Jennifer Grossman. So if you guys are interested in joining us, Facebook, Instagram, I believe on X, we will be live streaming and.
[01:01:30] Speaker B: Go to a website, for God's sake. One of the big beasts I have with Twitter is that you post something on Twitter and everybody responds to it on Twitter. You post one of my articles on Twitter, everybody responds to it. Twitter, nobody clicked the link to go to the article. Click the link, go to the articles, go to the Atlas Society website. There's more material there you can find.
[01:01:47] Speaker A: Yes. And Rob writes the Trozinski letter. So go to his website on substack. Yes. All right. Well, thank you, everybody, for joining us. We will see you next time.
[01:01:58] Speaker B: Thanks, everyone.
