In this interview, Spencer Case, international research fellow at the Wuhan University school of philosophy in China, discusses pros and cons of growing up Mormon, lingering regrets, contemplating proto-philosophical questions before college, Miles Davis, debating politics at Idaho State University, getting swept up in post 9/11 patriotism and enlisting in the military, being deployed to Iraq as an undergrad, moral fanaticism, the culture of repudiation, collateral damage, Atlas Shrugged, open borders, what it is like to be a woman in Afghanistan, grad school at CU Boulder, moral realism, swing dancing, being deployed to Afghanistan as a grad student, Obama’s Nobel Peace prize, working with Mike Huemer and Alastair Norcross, writing for National Review and Quillette, his philosophical weaknesses, the connection between epistemology and ethics, escaping Wuhan and the COVID-19 pandemic, his podcast, McCain, Trump, Das Boot, and what he would do if he was king of the world…
4/17/2020
Where did you grow up?
I was born in Portland, Oregon. During my gestation, I absorbed every conservative impulse out of the surrounding atmosphere. This explains why the city is the way it is today. We moved to Ogden, Utah when I was 5, and then to Pocatello, Idaho a few years later. That’s primarily where I call home.
What was your family like? Religious household? How were you similar to, and different from, the rest of your family?
I’m the oldest of four. I joke that the first child is the crash test dummy for the younger siblings. My family is very active in the LDS Church. I wrote about my protracted departure from Mormonism in my essay from last year “Bearing Witness.” That’s one of the main ways I am different from the rest of my family. Another one is that although I like running and working out, I’m indifferent to team sports. They follow BYU football and volleyball almost like it’s an extension of the Mormon faith.
How did the fam react to the article about Mormonism?
Well, it was a little bit difficult. I did talk to my dad about it before it was published and made a few changes based on his reaction. He said he felt bad hearing what my experience growing up in the church was like from my perspective, what a struggle the whole “testimony” thing was for me. He actually thought it was well written and honest, though a bit lacking in context. I want to emphasize the positives here to add some nuance.
The kind of community that the Mormon church fosters is admirable in all sorts of ways. I think I was taught very effectively to treat women with respect, for example, and not to be pushy or manipulative. I think our culture could use more of that (which is obviously not to say that every Mormon male has internalized this).
The Mormon church has a private welfare system. Every ward, which is a unit of a few hundred people who have sacrament meeting together on Sundays, makes sure there are at least a couple of people to check up on you at your house to see how you are doing. The requirement for males of a two-year proselytizing mission is effectively an ordeal that marks the transition into adulthood. In my opinion, one of the big problems in American culture today is that the boundary between childhood and adulthood is too vague.
Finally, I’ll remind you that one of the church’s mottos, and promotional slogans, was “families can be together forever.” Think of what it says about your image of family life if being together with your extended family forever is your idea of heaven! It’s almost the opposite of Sartre’s picture in “No Exit,” in which hell is other people.
And I could add, since my essay emphasized the church’s culture of conformity, it’s not as if secular individualism is entirely free of conformity.
As a teenager, did you get into any trouble? Any regrets?
There was no sex or drugs when I was a teenager, but I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I could never be a complete turd. I definitely could be smug and judgmental at times. I remember being picked on at school when I was younger. Some of it was pretty bad. And on occasion, I took that out on other kids who had nothing to do with it. Only verbally, but still.
A few years ago, I thought about something I said to a girl when I was in fifth grade and thought, man that might have really been hurtful. You’re just not in a place to assess the impact of your words when you’re 11. I’m not even Facebook friends with this person, but I actually tracked her down on the internet and offered an apology, which I did by text. She remembered me, but not that I had said anything hurtful. Thank goodness. I didn’t try to jog her memory.
It seems cosmically unfair that we don’t get to take back any of our actions. It would be nice if everyone got a certain number of literal do-overs – just reverse time to the point of the mistake and try again (though I doubt a world in which everyone had this freedom is consistently conceivable). I never publish anything unless I’ve gone over it a million times and considered each sentence in light of the whole. Still there are mistakes! But life is one long free-writing exercise where you don’t get to revise what you’ve written, and never take it all in until the very end. Everybody’s a first draft. Remember that whenever you judge anyone, you’re only ever judging a first draft of the person he or she could be. That should soften our judgements a bit.
In “Bearing Witness” you talk a lot about your early doubts about Mormonism. It seems like you had a philosophical temperament. I imagine you had other philosophical thoughts rolling around your head…
Well, I first learned about “philosophy” by that name my senior year of high school when I did debate. So if that’s what you mean by “getting into philosophy” then it was then. But you might also mean when did I start contemplating philosophical questions. That was much earlier. I remember wondering things as a kid that seem like philosophical or proto-philosophical questions. If my parents were replaced by malevolent alien replicas, how could I know that? Is it more puzzling to think that the universe had an absolute beginning, or if time receded infinitely into the past?
In third grade I started having the thought that everything I supposedly needed to do, was needed for something else. Nothing was just plain “needed.” So I would joke about this. I think one of my aunts told me that I need to eat and I replied, “Well, I need to eat in order to live. But I don’t need to live. I could just die.” It looks like I was trending toward the view that all imperatives are hypothetical. Fortunately, these anti-realist tendencies relinquished their vice-like grip upon my young mind before any permanent damage could be done.
At some point in my teens, I realized I wanted to be good for its own sake. I’m not sure when or why that happened. But I remember this conversation I had when I was 15 or 16. I was in this elective music class that was essentially free time to practice whatever instrument you were learning to play, which for me was guitar, without much oversight. So as you’d imagine there was a lot of goofing off. I remember some of my friends were considering the question: “Suppose God gave you a freebee to do any wrong thing you liked without punishment, what would you do?”
I don’t remember what anybody else said, but my answer was that I’d kill Saddam Hussein and the other baddies in charge of Iraq. And then somebody said: “That wouldn’t be wrong.” And he was right: I thought that violence to get rid of dictators was justified. If I didn’t think it was justified, I wouldn’t have wanted to do it, even if I could get away with it. I just didn’t want to do anything that was really wrong even if could. If God gave me a moral freebee, I would decline to use it. I’d ask God if I could trade it for a refillable popcorn at the movies or something. But I guess now it would have to be vegan popcorn.
So, do you think these experiences—being bullied, say—gave you philosophical insights?
No. I don’t think being a victim, or being a member of a victim group, reliably confers any kind of moral or epistemic advantage. It doesn’t even mean you’ll empathize with the bully rather than the victim in a different context. It might, or might not, depending on a bunch of other variables. America being victimized on 9/11 certainly didn’t overwhelm the nation with moral insight!
How and when did you become a vegan?
It was a New Year’s resolution for the year 2015, I think. But the journey started a long time before that. When I wrote for the high school newspaper, I actually wrote an article making fun of animal rights activists. But then in college, in 2003, I got into an argument with a guy who worked on the college newspaper with me, Jayson Merkley. He had written an op-ed on a local controversy. PETA had bought a billboard that said, “meat is murder” and some annoyed locals responded by organizing a barbeque under it. I remember Jayson asked in his op-ed how some people would feel if pro-choice activists opened an abortion clinic under a pro-life billboard. Well, I argued with him that eating meat was o.k., but I had reoccurring doubts about my position. Years later I was walking across the quad someone handed me a flyer arguing for veganism and I took it and months later read it cover to cover. I began to realize that I really was gravitating toward the position that eating meat was wrong, and I was more and more choosing to eat vegetarian food, though not strictly. But I didn’t announce myself because I didn’t want anyone to think I was a liberal. Really. What a dumb reason. And after a while I realized that if I was going to be a moral philosopher, of all things, I couldn’t keep telling the voice of reason to take a hike. So I ended up going vegetarian in 2009, shortly before my second deployment, and then vegan several years later.
What music were you into in high school?
I listened obsessively to MxPx, the closest thing to a punk band I would be allowed to listen to, and even went to a concert of theirs with my dad in Salt Lake City in 2000. I actually got to crowd surf for like two whole minutes, but my left shoe fell off and I don’t think we ever found it. Got Mike Herrera’s autograph, too (he’s the lead singer of MxPx.) Then I got into the Christian rock band Jars of Clay, which of course my parents had no problem with. I played guitar and bass (both badly) and was in the Pocatello High School jazz band for one semester. My career as a musician was short lived, but I started listening to Miles Davis and John Coltrane as a result of it. Later I took up swing dancing at my mom’s encouragement, since she knew I was already into jazz. So that class paid off. Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue remains my favorite album, but I also love his later work with the second quintet, which had Wayne Shorter in, in the 1960s, especially the albums E.S.P. and Nefertiti. Oh yeah, and the four albums that Miles did in two days to finish his contract with Prestige – Workin’, Steamin’, Cookin’ and Relaxin’. Definitely listen to these albums! If you don’t like them, then at least you’ll know that you have bad taste.
What was your plan for after high school?
My plans were vague beyond that I wanted to be a writer, and specifically a novelist. I knew I was college bound. When I was in eighth grade, a school counselor encouraged me to drop out, get my GED and enroll at Idaho State University, at age 15 or something. I talked about it with my parents (who would have supported me) but decided against it mostly on the silly grounds that I wanted to walk across the aisle with my friends during high school graduation commencement. Man, I dodged a bullet with that decision! In retrospect, it's obvious that I didn't have the maturity at that age. I would have been momentarily flattered and then quickly overwhelmed. Growing at my own pace was the wiser course. High school let me discover jazz, writing for the school newspaper, and debate (belatedly, in my last semester).
I did end up attending ISU when I turned 18. I really put no thought into which school I wanted to attend, just thought "I need to go to college -- oh, here's one close to my house." But it worked out for me! I developed lasting relationships with several of the philosophy faculty there: Jim Skidmore, Bill McCurdy and Melissa Norton.
From high school to college, how did your political views evolve?
I definitely liked debating politics. That started in high school, mostly after 9/11. I organized a debate about whether we should invade Iraq (I was in favor). I was always unafraid to ask speakers challenging questions. When Ralph Nader gave a talk at ISU in 2003, I asked him what I thought was a tough question about frivolous lawsuits. He said, “Thank you for being a corporate child.” I think his talk was called, “How To Not Be a Corporate Child.”
I resurrected the defunct Young Republicans in Pocatello High School and wrote many, many opinion pieces for my high school newspaper and later college newspaper. These should never again see the light of day. I recall that there was someone teaching in the ISU business school also named Spencer Case, and he wrote a letter to the editor of the Idaho State Journal informing the public that he wasn’t the Spencer Case writing those articles. So that’s where my hate mail was going.
My intermittent involvement with the Republican Party when I was an undergraduate eventually made me suspicious of political partisanship. I remember going to this one fundraiser for Republican candidates in the 2008 election where they were doing an auction. After every item that was sold, someone would get up and make some joke ragging on Obama and the rest of the Democrats. They also fulsomely praised their own candidates. I found the constant affirmation of the party line mind-numbing. Their jokes were painfully unfunny and yet the audience was laughing like a bunch of hyenas that had been huffing nitrous oxide.
(I think it was at the same event that I sat at the same table as now-disgraced Idaho senator Larry Craig, of “wide stance” notoriety. Nothing weird happened under the table, in case you’re wondering).
This episode helped me form the opinion that partisanship often compromises intellectual integrity. Once you feel invested in a political party or movement, you’ll root for your own team. You might laugh this mirthless laugh at any joke that disparages your opponents, whether it’s funny or not. When opinion becomes a matter of your personal identity, it becomes very hard for you to qualify or reassess your views. I think political activism is something philosophers should probably keep at arm’s length for that reason.
Surprises in college?
Although it was never part of my plan, I joined the Army reserve when I was 18, during my first year of college. My motivation was a cocktail of post-9/11 patriotism, wanting to pay for school, wanting to write about things more exciting than changes in student aid policy. So I enlisted as a 46Q, a public affairs specialist focusing on print media. Basically, I took photos and wrote stories for magazines and newspapers for internal dissimulation -- whoops, I meant to say "dissemination." I deployed to Iraq from 2005-6.
Why 46Q? Why not infantry?
Well, I was kind of a wuss when I was 18, unlike the tough guy that I am today. And I wanted to be a writer, so it made sense.
Ha! Do you feel good about the decision to enlist, in retrospect?
I have mixed feelings about my military career. I got writing experience and toughened up, and it was good for me financially. But it took my enthusiasm for the war on terror down many notches. It was almost a second loss of faith. I think most of the troops genuinely had good intentions. I certainly hoped I would help bring peace and prosperity to those countries. But now I think it's hard to deny that we did more harm than good. For that reason, I feel conflicted when well-meaning people say, "Thank you for your service."
So, what is it like to get swept up in 9/11 patriotism?
I wrote an essay about this last year, which I’ll shamelessly plug here.
The attack intensified my sense of identification as an American, and I really wanted to smite the bad guys. There’s something intoxicating about righteous anger, the kind of anger that seems like evidence of your moral goodness. For me, hating bin Laden was like that for a while. I thought that if America had defeated the Nazis and then vanquished the communists, defeating the jihadists and bringing democracy to the Middle East shouldn’t be a problem. I wanted to be a part of that project. It seems so naïve today.
I see this as a lesson in the dangers of political enthusiasm. This ties in with some of my recent philosophical interest in the nature of moral fanaticism. We tend to think of our political opponents as being motivated by unappealing emotions like hatred and resentment, but think of ourselves as being motivated by compassion, patriotism and other seemingly benign feelings. But love and hate typically come together in a package deal. You hate whatever threatens what you love, and love whatever opposes what you hate. Seemingly benign feelings are often less benign than we realize. Unreflective moral emotions distort our thinking and behavior in the same way that (non-moralized) anger can, but more insidiously.
Reaction when Bin Laden died?
Well, I had a Bin Laden is dead beer, for sure. And I still have no qualms about the operation taking him out. But it did seem a little bit hollow, a little anti-climactic after all those years of war. When I was in Army basic training, the drill sergeants would sometimes rile up the troops by asking “Who’s going to kill bin Laden?” and we’d all shout back “I am! I am!” for quite a while. Almost a literal “two minutes of hate” from 1984. And so now he’s dead, but by this time I was pretty disenchanted with the military and it seemed likely that some other fanatic would soon take his place.
So, do you currently consider yourself a patriot?
My relationship with patriotism is complicated. I do think a certain amount of it is good. Roger Scruton talked about the “culture of repudiation” – a kind of knee jerk tendency to reject or condemn your own country. I think that’s a real thing and that it isn’t good, as I’ve written here. Among student activists, you find the mentality that any kind of gratitude toward your society is just complacency with injustice. There’s an unhealthy excess there. On the other hand, even benign patriotism can easily morph into something unwholesome (as I think happened after 9/11). It’s very hard for us to get the balance right.
As an undergrad how did your worldview evolve?
Well, I think I became better at maintaining conversations with people I disagreed with. I think my confidence in some of my positions declined a bit. These changes were largely because my circle of contacts expanded through the army and college, so I knew some Democrats. I’ve got more to say about how being in the presence of people who disagree with you on critical questions is epistemically important, but I’ll set that aside for now.
I remember going through Jim Skidmore’s philosophy of war and terrorism class made me think a lot harder about things like collateral damage. Before that, I regretted it, but kind of shrugged it off as an inevitability of war. I thought that rules of engagement did nothing but tie the hands of the good guys. Jim’s class helped me see the value in having conventions that help to curtail the destructiveness of war, even if that does come with certain tradeoffs for the people fighting.
I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged when I was 18 and enjoyed it, but never did drink the Randian Kool-Aid. Rand’s instrumentalization of friendship was an ideological dealbreaker for me. I can imagine seeing sex as a commodity as she does, but not friendship. That just destroys the whole notion of friendship. I had libertarian sympathies, though, and these caused me to reconsider my stance on drug prohibition (I had been in favor, but I became very skeptical). I could never go all the way with libertarianism though. At a certain point, it ceases to be a critique of utopian ideas and becomes a rival form of utopianism.
Right.
Several years ago, I attended a talk at an event by an economist, responding to objections to open borders, at an event hosted by the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies. One of them was: “What if the newcomers don’t share our values?” I was interested in what he’d say because I’d been thinking about this lately. If you’ve got a small country that’s functioning really well, like some Scandinavian countries, aren’t you taking a gamble by allowing many people with different values and beliefs to enter and reside? Couldn’t that potentially change things for the worse?
To my disappointment, this speaker said something like “anyone who chooses to come to your country is going to probably prefer your values to the values of wherever they came from.” And I just thought: on what planet is that true? Obviously, you can want to be in a rich country while holding secularism and many individual freedoms in contempt. I’ve talked to Saudi students in the U.S. who said they felt this way. I think some people get tempted by this simplistic vision of the world where some value, like freedom, is so predominant that we never have to worry about compromising it for competing values.
This exchange also highlights one impulse that helps to make me “conservative.” I think that we in the U.S. – on balance, of course, and with many qualifications – have inherited a pretty good situation. Being in places like Iraq and Afghanistan has made me appreciate the full range of human possibilities. Things could have been a lot worse. They could still get a lot worse. That’s not to say: “quit your complaining, at least you’re not a woman in Afghanistan.” But I don’t think it’s outrageous to balance your complaints about the system with a sense of gratitude for how well it really is working overall.
If you’re a college student in the U.S., chances are your situation is very good relatively speaking. In terms of standard of living for all people who have ever lived on the Earth, you’d rank near the very top. So it’s weird, and a bit disturbing to me, to see some college students foster this spirit of comprehensive repudiation, like the system is so corrupt that it needs to be torn up root and branch. My view is that progress has to begin with appreciating what you already have in my view and treating it as something that could be potentially lost if we’re not careful. Many will say they agree with this, but then say or do other things that suggest they haven’t internalized it.
Imagine that, as a result of ceaseless activism, we made significant progress on some issue you believe in. Presumably, you’d want the next generation to venerate this progress and have some respect for the effort needed to make it happen. You’d want them to not take it for granted. If that’s right, then it seems to me we should have the same affirming attitude toward the progress that has already been made. I’ve heard the point that conservatives are trying to conserve things that were once considered radical. The flipside of that is any kind of progress has to be conserved if it’s to be more then ephemeral. That can’t be done in a society in which each generation applies this relentless hermeneutic of suspicion to whatever came before it. Progress requires some conservative impulses. So I reject the idea that conservatism is opposed to progress.
I should say, by the way, that I’m very glad to have participated in several IHS events. I’ve learned a lot there and they’ve been very supportive. I even got a sympathy card after getting evacuated from Wuhan several weeks ago! I don’t think anyone should begrudge them their Koch funding. Billionaires do a lot of good things, and this is one of them in my opinion. There are plenty of organizations that attempt to advance other points of view. And I do think that the libertarians in academia do add a bit of ideological diversity that I welcome even when I disagree. So I don’t mean to put them down at all.
Tips for maintaining conversations with people you disagree with? Asking for a friend!
The fact you’re asking suggests that you don’t (or your friend doesn’t) actually need my advice. But maybe I can say a couple of things.
One is that you should pay attention to whether you outnumber the person you’re disagreeing with in whatever context the discussion is occurring. Have you ever been in the position where you are trying to put forward a position in good faith and you’re at a table with six or more other people, all of whom can be expected to disagree with you? And moreover, in which a few can be expected to get angry and say that your position is repugnant and stupid? I don’t mean debates about possible worlds or something abstruse, but about politics. And I don’t mean relatives over Thanksgiving dinner, but with people who are either your peers or your superiors in the field, and whose views matter for your career. It’s a different beast.
I think this experience might be alien to a lot of philosophers. I’ve heard some people casually say really insulting things about conservatives or Christians without bothering to inquire whether anyone in earshot might disagree. Because duh we’re all on the same page here. Whereas any conservative who is thinking about saying something political has to do this mental calculation about whether it’s worth the risk of unpleasantness. There really is a kind of privilege associated with being in the political majority, I think. And I think on this issue there’s an ideological wormhole that takes you from the right to the part of the left that’s concerned with standpoint epistemology. I’ve been critical of standpoint epistemology – even in this very interview – but I do think that there’s something to the idea that certain kinds of social status can epistemically insulate you in ways you might not be aware of.
Also I find that having considered an objection abstractly is one thing, actually hearing an epistemic peer press it is a different animal. There have been plenty of times that I thought an objection to my view was silly, but then it seemed forceful once someone I knew was intelligent and trustworthy said it. If you’re not regularly hearing objections to your political positions actually pressed by people who are actually moved by them, it’s unlikely that you’re in a position to know how forceful they are.
Second, few people are demonically evil. Most people, even people we’d agree really are in the grip of truly abhorrent ideologies, are motivated by some perceived good. We are, in sociologist Christian Smith’s words, “moral, believing animals.” Try to identify an actual good in your interlocutor’s motivational set and proceed only once you’ve found some sort of common ground. Like I have no sympathy for communism at all, but I can see how a desire to promote the common good might lead someone there.
Finally, remember that everyone is rationally spotty. If one irrational view made you an irrational person, there would be no rational people. To add to Smith, we are “moral, believing, highly compartmentalized animals.” People who have unreasonable or repugnant views on one subject might have incredible insights on other subjects. If you dismiss people as “idiots” for one very misguided view you aren’t being fair and you risk cutting yourself off from possible sources of insight.
In a previous interview, Robin Dembroff used the term “ideological mercy.” I think that’s a good phrase to keep in mind. We all have need of it.
Was grad school what you expected?
I can’t remember what I expected exactly, but I was very anxious about performing well. I was moving from a small pond, ISU, which doesn’t even have a philosophy department proper, to CU Boulder, which has a big and thriving program.
Pleasant surprises?
Running the Bolder Boulder 10k on Memorial Day every year became sort of a tradition. It’s really a lot of fun. I could say the same about the 1940s Ball at the Boulder Airport, though I’ve only been to that a few times. I really got into dancing in Boulder, though I learned some of the basics in Idaho. Colorado turned out to be a great place to live, and it seems certain I’m destined to miss it wherever I end up.
Unpleasant surprises?
My first week in the CU Boulder master’s program, which was in August 2009, I got transferred to another military unit and mobilized for deployment to Afghanistan in advance of the so-called “Afghan surge.” During the pre-mobilization training at the chow hall I saw the news over the TV that Barack Obama was getting the Nobel Peace prize. Well, whoop de-do. Here’s a guy who campaigned in 2008 saying that Afghanistan was a war that must be won, but who ultimately just hands it off to the next guy after 8 years of ramping it up to no positive effect.
Also the APA Committee on the Status of Women site visit report.
Who’d you work with?
Mike Huemer was the best of anyone as far as timely paper feedback goes. For example, you might send him a draft of a paper at 9:00 p.m. and wake up the next morning and find an email from him timestamped at 2:37 a.m. or some other ungodly hour with detailed comments. He could be brutally honest. On one draft of my paper he wrote something along the lines of: “The only interesting part of your paper is page 8. And really, the only interesting thing on page 8 is paragraph 2. And really the important part of paragraph 2 is the third sentence. And that sentence is false.” But that paper’s published now.
I remember the last time I was leaving the philosophy building for my second deployment, Mike Huemer and Ajume Wingo were walking past me. Ajume said: “Spencer’s going to Afghanistan right now.” And Mike turns and says deadpan: “don’t die.” I didn’t know Mike very well at the time. I was like “yeah, I’ll try not to.” I wish I would have said: “That advice has always served me well.”
I saw Alastair Norcross more than I think anyone else in the philosophy department when I was a graduate student since we were in a running group together, Revolution Running. We ran in many of the same races. I think he beat me in only one of them, the first half marathon I ever ran. But he never lets me forget my age advantage.
I should also mention Graham Oddie, my advisor. I felt like I never got enough of his time because he was advising so many dissertations. And it’s no wonder he’s in such high demand: Graham’s very broad-minded and rigorous. I wish his work were better known. He doesn’t put much weight on metaphysical parsimony, though: he describes himself as “an entity’s friend.” I think he out-realists even me. He’s encouraged me to listen to more classical music.
So it’s a colorful cast of characters at Boulder.
What was your dissertation on and who did you work with?
My dissertation was a defense of moral realism, further developing a strategy that Nathan Nobis and Terence Cuneo also explored (Cuneo was the outside member on my committee). Basically, the argument is this: we have to be realists about epistemic assessments, and epistemic assessments are linked with moral assessments in such a way that we have to be moral realists, too. Oddie, as I said, was my advisor. Also on my committee were Norcross, Huemer, and Chris Heathwood.
Moral realism? Non-naturalist or naturalist? How does moral epistemology work?
My argument is just for generic realism, compatible with either naturalism or non-naturalism. I’m inclined toward non-naturalism because I’m skeptical that normativity can be naturalistically accounted for, but I remain open-minded about that. I’m interested in exploring moral epistemology. My default view is that I happen to have all the right intuitions. Lucky me.
More seriously, I think moral intuitions are important, but I suspect that the way in which we experience things as valuable is likely to be an important piece of the puzzle.
You mentioned how the lack of religious experience, and experiences during war, made you doubt theism. Would any experiences make you doubt moral realism?
Maybe if something really, really terrible happened to me personally, I might be so jaded that I could no longer interpret my moral intuitions as intimations of some reality, or experience anything as valuable. From that perspective, I might doubt realism. But from my current perspective, I can’t see it that way.
You've published in National Review. How did that come about?
I’ve always enjoyed writing commentary, and so I thought I might as well see if I could get into a larger venue. In 2013, I started writing for the College Fix just because it wasn’t hard to get published there and then put together a portfolio for an application for the 2014 summer internship. And, lo! I got the interview, then the job. It was stressful because I wasn’t ever sure what, exactly, was expected from me. My only instructions were “pitch five story ideas to Rich Lowry every morning during the meeting.” I ended up writing about three stories a week that summer.
It was good experience, though I left thinking I wasn’t sure how I felt about producing that much opinion writing that quickly. In order to do that consistently, you have to have your opinions already formed and ready to go in response to the news cycle. And there are some things I’d rather mull over a bit. I worry about having a career in punditry because I fear it would incentivize me to rush to judgment—especially if I’m writing in an environment where most people agree with me. There are certainly epistemic dangers there.
So I still send articles there, but I like doing it at my own pace. I think the articles I published there were better after the internship was over. I ended up shifting a lot of my work to Quillette because they are generally more amenable to the longer pieces I like to write. But recently, I’ve resumed writing with National Review.
I think a few people might find it objectionable that your write for Quillette. Has anybody criticized you for writing for Quillette? If so how do you respond? If not, how would you respond?
I haven’t ever been criticized for that, but I’d already written for National Review. So my critics probably had low expectations for my choice of venues. Some people are opposed to them because they give a hearing to the “human bio-diversity” crowd in the social sciences, which critics say is racist. That isn’t what I write on, but I think it’s useful that there be some outlets that allow minority views in academia to be expressed. Quillette can be criticized for a few things perhaps, but they publish a lot of high-quality material on a wide range of topics. The smear that this is some kind of alt-right outlet or something just doesn’t have legs, as anyone who reads it regularly with anything like an open mind knows. It may seem uncharitable, but I suspect that the drive to discredit it comes in large part from the fact that critics know that much of what is printed there could actually persuade centrists.
In your estimation, what were your strengths and weaknesses as a grad student?
I’ll mostly just talk about my weaknesses for the benefit of anyone who can relate. I’ve had pretty severe math phobia since I was a kid. In school I excelled in subjects that emphasized verbal skills, but hit a wall with math, and later with logic beyond the basics. Studying these subjects makes me feel like Aquaman in the Sahara Desert, my powers neutralized. But I’m working on it.
I’ve read quite few popular books on mathematics, like George Polya’s How to Solve It, in pursuit of a breakthrough that has so far eluded me. However, there have been a few encouraging signs. My friend Bill McCurdy at ISU, who works on the mathematical elements of C.S. Peirce’s logic of relations, has over the years helped me see how high-level math can illuminate philosophical problems. I’ve also seen a number of very good videos online, some of which Bill has brought to my attention, that show how mathematics can be interesting and counter-intuitive in fun ways. He helped me understand Georg Cantor’s “diagonal” argument for the plurality of infinities.
The other weakness is that I’ve never been able to write a publishable history of philosophy paper. I couldn’t even really get anything workable out of my 2012-2013 Egypt Fulbright project after spending years learning Arabic. So I respect people like Bob Pasnau and Dom Bailey who can do history of philosophy well.
On the plus side, I came in with a strength in writing which got better as the years went on. I was also hardworking, and able to get along with pretty much anyone. I gained a reputation for asking good questions during talk Q&As. I finally did get some good publications, but man did it take me a while!
Job market horror stories?
Well, I had to get evacuated from Wuhan several weeks ago, and then quarantined for two weeks at Travis Air Force Base, California, because of the COVID-19 crisis. Now I’m living with my parents in Idaho, waiting until I have the opportunity to return. Days before Wuhan opened up again for domestic travel, China imposed a travel ban that prevents almost anyone outside of China from entering the country, which is just fabulous. So I think I’m going to have to wait out the crisis here. But I fear the real horror story is the one that awaits all of us going on the market this year.
Of the stuff you've published so far, what are you the most proud of?
Of my popular work, I think there’s almost a consensus that my Quillette essay “Bearing Witness” about leaving the Mormon church is my best popular work.
As far as my academic work goes, I think it’s between “Normative Pluralism Worthy of the Name is False” for the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, or “From Epistemic to Moral Realism” for the Journal of Moral Philosophy.
What are you working on nowadays? Exciting new projects in the works?
Since I took up my postdoc, I’ve been working on some new projects. Several different things. It feels reinvigorating to begin to work on stuff that’s beyond your dissertation.
Totally. What are you working on?
One project is a defense of “epistemic moralism,” the view that epistemic normativity is reducible to moral normativity. Roderick Chisholm defended a version of this, but it’s unpopular. When I say I’m working on that, some philosophers say, “interesting” and others say, “that’s ridiculous! Why not defend a view that might be true?” The other thing in the works is a paper on moral extremism. We often call people extremists, zealots or fanatics when they have their hearts in the right place but “go too far” in some significant sense. It’s not obvious what we mean by this, though. I provide an account and work out some implications.
What was your election night like in 2008?
I was at the Red Lion Hotel in Pocatello, Idaho. The local Republicans and Democrats were both having election watching parties there. Some Democrat at the bar was saying that Bush should have been assassinated. At Republican corner, I said something to the effect of “I voted for McCain, but man, he sure screwed up picking Palin” and that didn’t win me any friends. I thought we were admitting that to each other. Obama won, and I was disappointed. I never did warm up to him, but I have to admit his acceptance speech that night was good.
2012?
I watched the whole thing unfold from Egypt. I didn’t bother to send in an absentee ballot because I was registered in Idaho and Romney had Idaho in the bag anyway. My then girlfriend, who I talked to over Skype, was obviously happy that Obama won again. I was sullen and like “ok, don’t rub it in.”
2016?
I protest voted for Johnson. I thought Trump had no chance of winning. The best I thought I could do was register my displeasure at both parties given that the outcome was a foregone conclusion anyway. I did watch the election results come in with the college Republicans, who were much keener on Trump than I was. I ordered a vegan pizza, and so I spent a lot of the night arguing with Trump supporters about the merits of ethical veganism. This may have been the only pro-Trump election watching party in the nation when that was being discussed. And then the results came in. I’ll never predict anything again in politics.
2020?
This is going to be a painful one no matter what happens. I’ll leave it at that.
Politically, why do you dig Trump? What do you disagree with him about, politically?
Despite very much disliking Trump personally, I do agree with some of his moves. I’m sure I’d prefer his Supreme Court justice picks over whomever Clinton would have chosen. He also undid some executive orders and other administrative actions by Obama that I strongly disagreed with. One of those in the latter category was the 2011 Department of Education Office of Civil Rights “dear colleagues” letter concerning Title IX, which helped to eviscerate due process for men accused of sexual misconduct on college campuses. I’m glad Betsy Devos walked that back. I’m glad that the U.S. military under his command killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. I hope he gets us out of Afghanistan and allows our allies from there to immigrate here.
My biggest gripes about Trump have always been about his moral character, but I’ve got political misgivings, too. One is the apparent lack of morality in our foreign policy. It’s always “We’re getting screwed on trade” or “we’re getting screwed by NATO” or whatever. I’d really like a leader who projects a sense that America stands for values beyond national self-interest. This is one thing the neo-cons got right. In the George W. Bush era, we were kind of fanatical about promoting our values, now it seems like we’re often afraid to assert that we have any (beyond “our interests matter!”). I want our foreign policy to have a discernable moral direction. That involves, for starters, consistently condemning dictatorships and human rights abuses.
As a person who was in Wuhan, what do you make of Trump’s coronavirus response?
I can’t say I’ve been following his many, many press briefings on the topic with rapt attention. And my having been in Wuhan doesn’t make me any kind of authority on this, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I think that probably any president would be caught flat-footed by this, and I’ve seen a several clear cases of his opponents exaggerating Trump’s mistakes. Even taking that into account, I’m unimpressed with his leadership. For the time being we’re just going to have to endure some economic pain. The disease is still worse than the cure, but the cure is going to take more time than any of us want. It’s taken too long for that to be effectively conveyed.
By way of comparison, H1N1 killed 12,500 Americans, hospitalized 274,000, and infected 61 million 2009-2010. Some skeptics are asking: why didn’t we freak out about that? Well, that comes out to fatality rate of .02 percent. There are a broad range of estimates about COVID-19’s fatality rate, and they’re all much worse than this. A .8 percent fatality rate, which is very much on the optimistic side of the numbers I’ve seen, is 40 times worse. Intuitively, people don’t grasp the difference in severity between a 99.98 survival rate and a 99.2 survival rate. But the difference is immense! Given that there’s so much uncertainty, and truly catastrophic outcomes are possible, I think the economic and social price of prolonged social distancing and other measures is probably worth it.
One other thing. I speculated in my article about 9/11 that the next tragedy of that scale wouldn’t unify us. I’m afraid that’s now being borne out. We are projecting our current divisions onto the COVID-19 crisis. Trump should abstain from petty slights against his political opponents (of course he’s not alone in this). That might seem like a mild criticism compared with “Where the hell are the tests and ventilators?” But it’s low hanging fruit and completely in his control. I think this could be a unifying experience inasmuch as nearly everyone is being affected by this, regardless of race or party, to one degree or another. The rich might be less affected than the poor all else equal but they’re also generally older. We’re not all nurses working double or triple shifts, of course, but nobody’s totally insulated from this. We’ve got a common enemy and this time it’s non-human and thus less prone to activate our often-destructive retributive impulses. I hope it reawakens our sense that we are all in this together.
What are you up to during this quarantine? How bad is it going to get, you think?
Right now I’m living with my folks, reading philosophy books, and writing a bunch of stuff. I talk to my girlfriend in Wuhan daily using WeChat’s video chat. Distance really is making the heart grow fonder (at least on my end!). I also just launched my podcast, Micro-Digressions: A Philosophy Podcast. There should be two or three episodes up when this appears. And I’m working out almost every day.
I have no idea how bad it’s going to get. Trump has a hunch that this is going to be over by Easter. I haven’t before trained my unerring faculty of moral intuition on epidemiology (that’s the right science, right?) [shakes internal Magic 8-Ball] … Memorial Day.
Favorite books? Movies? Music? TV shows?
I’ve already said enough about music. I have trouble naming favorite books or favorite philosophers. I try to learn from a wide variety of sources, and I probably read more history books than philosophy books. I really loved the autobiographies of Miles Davis and Frederick Douglass (I mean the third and final of Douglass’s autobiographies, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass). One book I really enjoyed as a kid was the supposedly true Arctic survival story, The Iceberg Hermit by Arthur Roth. I was big into Dostoyevsky in my early 20s, but I hardly read literature anymore. I need to get back to it!
As far as movies go, Finding Forrester has a special place in my heart. I also really liked The Witch, Das Boot, Grave of the Fireflies and just about anything with Orson Welles (Compulsion is a very good one that’s often overlooked). TV shows I don’t have strong feelings about.
King of the world, what's you first move?
Nobody should be king or queen of the world, including me. So I’d abolish that monarchy. But I’d abolish factory farming first. If I could install a global nuclear missile defense system in space, I do that too. Realistically, though, the things I would do before abdicating would multiply indefinitely. That’s part of the reason nobody should be king of the world.
If you could ask an omniscient being one question, what would it be?
What do you think I should know?
[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]