“What’s Wrong with Capitalism?” with Chiara Cordelli

Chiara Cordelli (Chicago) explores why existing critiques of capitalism fall short — and offers her own alternative, which focuses on the imperative to democratize investment. Read the paper at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/what-is-the-wrong-of-capitalism/CD320C659A33C006C6562D363FD5D954

Creators and Guests

Guest

Chiara Codelli

Chiara Cordelli is a political philosopher and an author. She is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and affiliated faculty in Philosophy. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at Sciences Po in Paris. Originally from Viterbo, she has lived in many places, including Rome, Barcelona, Brussels, London, Washington DC, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Boston, and Paris.

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A show presenting the best new scholarship in political and social philosophy, featuring lively conversations with leading thinkers. Join hosts Jeffrey Howard and Emily McTernan as they explore some of the thorniest ethical questions of our time.

Trump’s Lies with Jeremy Waldron
Welcome to Philosophically Speaking, I'm Jeff Howard.
And I'm Emily McTernan.
And this is our new podcast, where we'll interview leading philosophers on their recent work. Our chats are going to help you catch up on cutting edge scholarship and think through some of the trickiest ethical and political challenges of our time.
And that's all you really need to know for now. On to our first guest.
Let's do it. So today we're exploring the state of public discourse in an era of misinformation, focusing on the peculiar challenge of Donald Trump. Should we go get our speaker?
Let's do it. So this week, we're delighted to introduce Professor Jeremy Waldron of NYU Law School, who's going to discuss his article, Damned Lies, published in Political Philosophy. Welcome, Jeremy, to the podcast.
It's very good to be here.
Great to have you here with us, Jeremy. So we wanted to ask you first about the motivation for the paper and the particular political figure who motivates the paper. So could you tell us a bit about that?
It begins by being about President Trump during his first term of presidency and about the common allegations against him that he lies continually, he lies in a barefaced way, he lies in a way that's easy to be exposed. And to try and think a little bit about the different categories of the untruths that he tells. There's a phrase, there are three kinds of lies. There are lies, damned lies and statistics. And people use that phrase in their op-ed pieces and in their essays that they published about President Trump. And I was interested in what damned lies might mean. Was it just something that you said before you say statistics? Or is it supposed to have some meaning? And I decided to explore that. So I used President Trump's mendacity as my jumping off point.
And I guess one of the great things about him is that he does nearly all these kinds of lies. So we're going to get to that. But first we wanted to pick apart one particular kind of thing that you say is at least like a lie. But some of us might not think so. So you talk about white lies and bullshit and fibs, but also falsehoods that we believe.
Yes.
So why do you think they belong in this categorization of lying? Why they like lies in some sense?
Right. So when we say that a person has a duty not to tell an untruth, we're indicating that there's a kind of a duty of care, that they have to concentrate on this. And if other people are relying on them, for example, they've got to not just blunder into some proposition that maybe they believe, maybe they don't. They've got to take some conscientious effort to make sure that they're telling the truth. So people are responsible in some ways, in some circumstances, many circumstances, I think, for untruths that they tell, even though in some suitably casual sense of belief, they believe in the truths. And so it's a little bit like insisting that intentional wrongdoing is not the only form of wrongdoing. There's negligent and reckless wrongdoing. And if somebody is saying something under circumstances where they are indifferent as to whether it's true or false, they happen to believe it at the moment, but they could easily check, then that it seems to me falls into the same category as lying. If lying is important, then that's important.
So you take a swipe at what you call the subjective conception of lying, where falsehood just doesn't count as a lie if the speaker personally believes it to be true. And you note that if we lean too much into the subjective conception, it distracts us from the real problem of lying, which isn't about necessarily what's in the speaker's head, but about the truth as it is, about the world. Can you say a bit more about that?
Well, it's partly, as I said before, it's a matter of insisting subjectively intentional wrongdoing is not the only sort of wrongdoing. And often when we blame and denounce intentional wrongdoing, we are required also to denounce its reckless equivalent or its negligent equivalent, and to suggest it doesn't matter how you form your beliefs. Form them any old way that you like. It doesn't matter, so long as you actually happen to hold the belief that coincides with what you say. That, it seems to me, is a wrong approach to truth telling.
Do you think too much energy was expended, say, about whether those who purported that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, were lying about it, or whether instead they had just negligently come to believe something that was false?
Right. I don't know whether I would quibble about the allocation of effort and the denunciation of these various stages of mendacity. But there was a suggestion, and I think it's a good suggestion, that with something like that, you have an absolute obligation to make your best effort to find out whether it's true or not. And you have an absolute obligation not just to sort of build a belief in it in your own mind, but to check the belief that you have to make sure that it's actually accurate.
Great. And now we've got a sense of all of these different kinds of lies, and we've already got a kind of moral sense that these are bad going on. But then let's turn to lies in politics. Again, your guiding case of Trump. And a common refrain from Trump's supporter is that surely all politicians lie, and surely they have to, to some extent, politicians. So why is Trump so different? What is it that, why do we think that lies in politics do go together?
Well, there's a quantitative difference, first of all. There are many more lies issuing from Trump's mouth in the course of his politics, and there's a general degradation of truth-telling happening on his watch, through his best efforts and through his carelessness. People say that politicians have to lie, and there's something to that. There's a well-known argument by Bernard Williams, very important philosopher, no longer with us, I'm afraid, who said, look, you're not going to be able to do anything much in politics unless you mislead people to a certain extent or unless you create expectations that you're not going to be able to follow through on. You've got to look at the realities of politics that is going to require people to mislead others sometimes up to and including the extent of lying itself. Just as, and William says this too, you have to understand that there will be coercion in politics, there will be deceit, there will be betrayal. I'm not convinced myself that this is the case and certainly not convinced that this can be used as a excuse or a justification for lying. I think politicians lie because they are reluctant to give a proper account of what they've been doing. So lying and mendacity in politics is directly connected with accountability. When I think about accountability, I think of, say, the work that my lawyer or my accountant or my real estate agent is doing on my behalf. If I ask, what did you do with this money? I don't expect them to tell a lie and then go around and say, everybody knows that real estate agents have to lie a little bit. Sometimes lying directly upends, directly negates the basis of accountability, making it massively more difficult for people whose agents, these politicians are, to find out what they've been doing and therefore to be able to evaluate it and make their decisions about future elections.
And we're definitely going to circle back to the question of lying in the context of politics and the context of elections in particular.
Yes.
But before we do, we'd love to dig in to damned lies a little more. And so you've already given us Mark Twain's citation, perhaps apocryphal of Disraeli where Disraeli tells us about lies, damned lies and statistics. And you walk us through three different ways in which a lie might be damned. And the first one has to do with perhaps literal damnation, as in cases of damnation by perjury.
Yes.
What's on your mind there?
Well, just a matter of perjury tend to involve some sort of swearing to God that you're telling the truth. And the idea is that that's going to be coercive in itself. And we can insist on God coming to the defense of the truth-telling enterprise and damning to hell the person who tells a lie. It's always an odd and perhaps tenuous connection. And some philosophers of criminal process were very worried about the fact that somebody might find themselves between the rock of having to incriminate themselves and the hard place of having to lie and therefore perjure themselves. And maybe that's the origin of our privilege against self-incrimination, that we don't believe it's humane or appropriate to put people to that very hard choice. But there is a fact that we do continue with a quaint habit of marking the beginning of testimony with an oath. And we say, you're aware you're still under oath to the witness as they speak. And the implication of the oath, not explicit, but the implication is that you are damning yourself, damning yourself to hell if you lie during this period where you are under oath. We would want to examine whether there is a sufficiently strong interest, which I think there is, again, in having a categorical duty of truth telling in courtroom, whether the courtroom is one of those domains that we were talking about that is protected by a very special convention of truth telling. But at any rate, it does seem that that's one area where damned seems appropriate. And sometimes I quote a passage from the courts in Zurich, where somebody who had just about to give testimony against another person said, If I swear falsely and unjustly, then God the Son, my Redeemer, shall no longer come to my aid when my body and soul in the last end are separated from one another and on and on and on. And the idea was that given that she had given this sort of a severation of truth telling, it was not open to anybody to deny the truth that she told, given that she had so explicitly brought down the threat of hellfire upon herself. So that's important and probably connected with that is the fact that perjury is not only a problem because you don't get a proper account of what the accused person has been doing. Perjury is, as in this case, a problem because somebody else is accused by the perjurer. And we are worried particularly about the case in which a capital crime is attested to falsely by somebody who doesn't take seriously the business of truth-telling in court. And that might be damned, not because the oath does its work, but because there is something damnable about denouncing somebody else when you know that they're innocent, or when you have, again, going back to our initial exchange, when you are unclear as to whether they are innocent or not. So I use a case from the theatre, from Shakespearean drama, the case of Iago's denunciation of Desdemona to Othello, which his wife, Emilia, denounces as a damned lie and uses that phrase. His purpose in lying was to condemn Desdemona and to condemn Othello effectively by making him do something that he would later profoundly regret. So in that case, the damnation has to do with the impact that your lie has on the well-being and status of another person. That seems to me to be an important line of argument.
Is that going to be the secular variant of the religious tradition that you're pulling on? So this perjury, you're going to be damned by God, and then you're saying, well, if the consequences are bad enough, you're damned by your own eyes, or someone else will be damned by God.
Something like that. Or it might be that the secular equivalent has to do with the condemnation of the person who would be capable of doing something like that.
In these very high stakes cases like courts?
Very high stakes cases like courts. But even in the Othello case where there's no court involved, but just simply the contamination of ordinary interpersonal interaction with the damned lies of Iago.
So there might be quite a lot of context that look like a courtroom now. So I guess significant accusations, even outside of courts, That's certainly true. would count as your kind of perjury type cases, damned lies.
That's right.
You talk a bit in the paper about perjury by damnation. You then talk, and you've just started speaking now, about the harms that can befall specific individuals through lying. So defamations seem to fall into this category. Would you think of all defamations as kind of damned lies or only the most malicious sort?
Probably only the most malicious sorts. And I think it's probably a mistake to think that we want to clear on-off litmus test for damned lies. What we are interested in is the possibility that there is a quantum leap of some sort. Towards the seriousness of certain forms of mendacity. And that we must focus on those, even though we are inclined to say in a very relaxed manner, white lies, who cares? Fibs, who cares? Lies in politics, par for the course, and so on. We do tend to think that lies are just to be counted. Lies are peccadilloes. Everybody tells lies. Not to mention some topic that we haven't discussed, and I hope we will, lies that are told for good consequences. So we have to think a little bit about the intensifying effect of having a phrase like this, damned lies, rolling easily off the tongue, and not just being bogged down in the joke about statistics. It doesn't take us one iota closer to the nature of the damned lie.
There is a kind of flat-footed consequentialist view one could have about lying, where one just weighs up the positive effects that might flow from the lie against the negative effects and then on a case-by-case basis decide whether to lie. So you're a bit skeptical of that kind of view. I wonder why.
I am. I'm skeptical about it as I'm skeptical about all such calculations. The main difficulty being that the importance of lying has to do with a kind of systemic effect of failure to use language to tell the truth. Systemic effect, by that I mean the fact that the convention itself of truth-telling is something that all speakers rely on. We need to look at what happens if that convention gets shaken by actions of a certain sort. And maybe not just this one action considered an isolation, but by the habits of mind and the inclinations that tend to go with it, the repetitions of lies once you get a taste for it. And the worry is that, in my experience of Act Utilitarians, they are notoriously bad at weighing systemic consequences of that sort. They think, as it were, you can deal with this on a one by one basis. Whereas in many areas, we actually rely on vast conventions to sustain the good consequences that flow from certain forms of interaction. And so, if we look at ways in which those conventions may be shaken or undermined or degraded, then we need to, as it were, make sure that whatever utilitarian we have is a person who is inclined to take that seriously and count that into their calculations if they can find a way of doing so.
So we've got the three ways in which you can have a damned lie that's in your paper now on the table, I think. We've got the perjury, the harmful consequences, and then this thought that if you keep on lying or if we lie a bunch, somehow the system of assertions and believing each other and the conventions around that are going to get damaged. So one version which is not your version is Kant's infamous commitment, right? So the axe murderer comes to my door seeking his victim, he's hiding in my house and he says, are they there? And I'm not meant to lie. I'm not meant to say to the axe murderer, no, I've never seen this guy, go away. I meant to say, here he is, guys. In you go. And so you have a weaker and I think probably much more plausible version. So what is that and why is it more plausible than the Kantian? He says, any lie, any lie threatens the system, don't do it.
Well, there's several things to say about this case. Kant didn't just make that up. It was, as a number of people noted, and I mentioned this in the paper, a well-known hypothetical that was bandied around in scholastic literature and natural law literature and so on. Kant had some problems fitting his particular position into the framework of this little story about the mad axe murderer. He said, what are you to do if a declaration is required of you? And something solemn in the way of a declaration, you have to imagine, maybe it's not an axe murderer, but a Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Officer who comes to your door and asks you to make a formal declaration about whether there are undocumented aliens working in your factory. And at that stage, it's the system of declarations that seems important, that although we may well say that it's still a distasteful context on which to demand the truth, nevertheless, there are going to be some such contexts in which it's very hard to engage in any respectful public administration without a strong duty of truth telling. So we make fun of Kant for bringing up the mad axeman, but if we see him as simply deciding against all the odds to use this as a framework for his position, but the position itself is a position about the importance of declarations that people make. Solemn declarations where they have been given notice that in the course of public affairs, we need to have the truth told in these situations, and we need to have the person who is speaking give some serious thought to the lies or the truth that they are telling. Because I worry that people respond very quickly to Kant's position by saying, of course, we ought to tell lies, and this just shows the idiocy of the general condemnation of lying. Kant even says that we have to tell the truth to ax murderers. I think the position is much more complicated than that.
So I'm wondering about the deontological view that Kant seemed to have held according to which lying is wrong because it involves acting on a maxim that can't be universalized, which I think in the paper you suggest that that perhaps is too sweeping. But there's also a consequentialist cousin view according to which we shouldn't lie because in so doing, we destroy the reliance that each of us has on one another's testimony. And in the paper, you argue that that view also seems to claim too much. So why is that?
Well, I mean, we need to understand this convention of truth-telling that accompanies the use of language among human beings. So think of the number of propositions that human beings put to one another on a regular day, billions of them. This is a colossal convention, and probably it's relatively immune to being shaken by any particular lie or any particular mendacity. But nevertheless, it's worth noticing, and this, I think, is what Kant talks about, and it's not a consequentialist point. It's a sort of a bad faith point. That when you tell the mad axeman, oh, he went that way, pointing away from where he really is, which most of us think is the most sensible thing to do in the circumstances. When you tell the mad axeman that his victim went that way, one of the things that you are saying to yourself under your breath is, please, please let him believe me. Please, please let him think this is an instance of general truth-telling. Because if every house were to have a big sign saying, truth will not be told to mad axeman on the door, we couldn't, as it were, try to save the life of the victim in this way. We are relying intensely in this case on the general proposition that what people say is to be believed.
Even the liar relies on this norm.
Even the liar relies on this norm. Even the good faith liar relies on this norm. So we have to ask ourselves about such reliance in circumstances of, at the same time, flouting the convention. And probably it's not a matter of the empirical effect of the lying, although once people get it into their heads, they find it very easy to start rationalizing misleading people, lying or being careless. If they can go back to the point that we made at the beginning, being careless about whether you're telling the truth or not. It's extremely important for us to convey a sense that morality requires us sometimes to respect the conventions that we are implicitly relying on and not to act as though those conventions didn't matter. And that we think is important in this case.
Liars are sounding like a kind of free rider problem now, right? So they're taking advantage of the fact that the rest of us are contributing.
That's right. But again, the same point could be put. You could say, well, okay, but what's wrong with being a free rider in this case? How likely is that to shake this colossal convention that we have in human affairs and we're paid for thousands of years and so on? I think we have to try to get away from the consequences to try to look at the attitude that is evinced by the person who is considering.
If I wanted to push the consequence of this line, having a little bit of plausibility, I sometimes think that you can undermine the status of someone as seeming like a truth teller. People like that seeming like truth tellers slightly more easily. So I think you have lawyers, politicians. It can be that if enough of them do some lying, actually collectively, we just think that group are liars. Even though they're telling presumably thousands of truths as well, it doesn't seem to take quite as much as you're perhaps suggesting to undermine the whole system, consequentially speaking, when it comes to particular groups. They become known for being liars.
That's right. You might be right about that, that a particular group can quickly enough acquire reputation for mendacity or unreliability, or don't put too much weight on what I say and so on. There might be localized impact, consequential impact. But still, in order to understand them, you have to understand the importance of conventions and how conventions establish themselves. That it seems to me is key to the argument.
Let's now think about conventions of truth-telling in particular high-stakes contexts. So you talk about courts, you talk about parliaments, and you linger at the end on elections. And I was really struck by your thought that lies about the conducts and results of elections are really among the worst kinds of lies to tell. You call them libel's on democracy. Could you tell us a bit more about that?
Yes. So there you are. An election has been held. And elections are strange things. Elections are fragile practices that we set up, and we operate and participate in. They require people to count votes and counting opinions, and to be trustworthy in their counting. They require people to check counting because errors can creep in and to be trustworthy in their counting. And the stakes are very high because we are requiring one group of people to be humiliated and to give up power, and another group of people to have power handed to them. We're using this as the matrix on which we organize electoral competition. And electoral competition is the heart of democracy, and it requires careful nurturing and so on. So the stakes are quite high. I think, as Emily said, this is one of those areas where actually you can do a lot of damage quite quickly. And we saw that with the Trump fiasco about the 2020 election. The worry then was that this would become par for the course, an ordinary basis on which people would contest elections, making false claims and series of false claims and libelous false claims, not just libel on democracy, which is a nice piece of rhetoric that I invented, but libels on the election workers, the ordinary men and women who do the hard work of voting. Incomparably important work for the democracy in which they live. So, democracy is so important, it's so fragile, elections are indispensable to it. It's not just a matter of counting votes, it's a matter of being willing to assert against your interest that a certain result has been achieved. Not to mention the fact that there is a nice connection between damn lies and statistics in the case of elections. Ronald Dworkin, legal philosopher, once talked about a crude statistical view of democracy, and that was a crude statistical view of democracy, meant a democracy that was crudely committed to counting votes and totting up majorities and not allowing judges to solve political problems. But it is crude statistical. We have to count vote after vote. We have to count hundreds of thousands of votes, millions of votes, and all these votes, each one represents an equal say that people are given as a matter of respect in the organization of their community. But most of all, most of all, it's what's at stake in the voting. I mentioned in a footnote somewhere a point about the way in which concession speeches are given in democracies, which is another practice as well as vote counting that is immensely important when John McCain gave his concession speech to Barack Obama in 2008. The sense of importance that was associated with that moment where a white candidate would admit losing to a black candidate and command the winning candidate to the good officers of the community. So, there are many, many ways in which the practices of democracy are fragile and require very careful handling. Vote counting is one of them. Concession speeches is another one of them. Probably the making of electoral promises is another one, although we haven't talked about that.
So I'm wondering about some of the regulatory implications of this. So electoral misinformation is a very difficult problem to come up with a nice rule to combat. So in some jurisdictions, there are laws prohibiting the knowing communication of falsehoods about when the election is held, who's eligible to vote. Social media platforms have enacted a raft of rules against electoral misinformation. But this is tricky because of course there are some contexts in which allegations of voter fraud or tampering are entirely founded. Think for example of Trump himself soliciting Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State, in that infamous call where he asked him to find 11,000 votes. So if someone had alleged that conduct before we knew whether it would be happening, some would have said, oh, you're just spreading rumors about elections. So I wonder if you have any advice for regulators or indeed companies trying to figure out how to strike the balance between stopping baseless electoral misinformation on the one hand, but also allowing freedom of expression on the other.
Right. I don't know about whether freedom of expression is an important value here. This is one of those areas where freedom of expression may have to give way to regulatory imperatives, it seems to me. But it is important to try to think about the kind of regulation we're going to be operating here, whether we will focus primarily on egregious cases and try and use those as incentives to quash the more trivial cases that happen, whether we will have to use the tools that are often used in the regulation of high finance and banking, where we just require hard, hard work by regulators and investigators to ferret out claims of untruths. But most of all, we need to make sure that the regulation of elections and the regulation of election-related speech is taken seriously by the members of the community. If you have somebody who wants to move directly from the good consequences of lying to the mad axeman to the good consequences of lying to Trump voters to try to get them not to turn up to the polls, then we are in a very worrisome situation in that case, where people are going to say about election misinformation, the same things as we've been inclined to say about the canting and mad axeman, that the consequences will simply be better, and it will be better for us if we can dissuade Trump voters from turning up to the polls by misleading them as to where the polling stations are, for example. That, it seems to me, is the kind of worry that I have about the proliferation of act utilitarian approaches here.
It's a much stronger canting flavor here. I really admire that. You're going for the ax murderer case wasn't quite so silly as we thought.
Right.
And this is, and we should be so much more careful about lying than we're being.
Right.
We dislike Trump's lies, but we're kind of comfortable with misleading or massaging things on the other side of it helps us. And you're saying, don't stop.
That's right.
None of this should be here. So now we've got a sense of the real significance and importance and weightiness of these damned lies. How can we do better against this threat? What optimism can you offer us? Is it a matter of shoring up these important practices like honest testimony, gracious concession speeches, and the like?
Yeah. So we have to work from two ends, I think, on this. One is to work from the, in the areas where telling the truth is of paramount importance. And make sure that it's acknowledged that there are such connections. Do you remember during the Clinton presidency, when people were examining him and cross-examining him about his relations with Monica Lewinsky? And the question was whether he perjured himself. And there were an awful lot of my colleagues in American law schools who said, well, he technically told untruths, but it may not have been perjury. And if you look at it from a different angle, then you can see that all of this is going on. I think it's very important to hold the line around serious context where truth telling is massively important. And then at the other end, to work on the matters that we talked about at the beginning of the discussion today, to talk about the taking care about truth telling, doing some examination of yourself and your beliefs, making sure that you don't just accept whatever beliefs spring to mind. Harry Frankfurt has tried to help us with a little bit of this in his book, Bullshit. Bullshitting is the attitude of the person who speaks thoughtlessly, not caring whether he's telling the truth or not, not even entering his head as to whether that's an important consideration. We need to do a lot of denunciation of bullshit and a lot of realization that even the fibs that we tell can have bad effects, and that one of the bad effects they can have is lessening the importance we accord to lies in the more serious situations. That are at the other end of which we operate. So in that way, I think rather than just using the Kantian case as a whipping boy to criticize deontology, we can try to see what he's trying to tell us about the relationship between the truths and lies that we tell, and the systems of communication that we establish and participate in, to make sure that we understand the moral force of that. Even though we may still disagree with Kant about what to do about the mad Axeman, but it's very, very important to understand what there is to be said on the Kantian side.
The end of the paper you draw on, Hannah Arendt, and you note, the worst thing about this kind of lie, lies in these kinds of contexts, is the way they undermine our confidence that we live in a common world where we and our fellows orient ourselves to the same matters of fact. It strikes me that a lot of commentators of the Russian Federation today note that the problems of pervasive lying in Russia isn't that people necessarily believe the speaker's false testimony, but that they don't believe anyone's testimony. They lapse into a kind of general skepticism. Are you worried about that in the United States today?
Certainly. Certainly. I mean, we've seen it happening in Russia, as you say. We saw it happening in Czechoslovakia. We see it as part of what the Czech president, Havel, has been denouncing over the last 10 years or so. We see it in general in a worry that people have about how casual you can be on social media, on podcasts, in general politics, about how casual you can be about truth-telling. What we primarily are looking forward to is the effects of the things that we say. And the effects on whom? On us? On the people whose interests might be neglected? It's tough to think of how much might be thrown in doubt by the proliferation of falsehoods. There's one more point about the Hannah Arendt quotation at the end. She made a point that if we lose a sense of the laws of nature, the laws of physics, for example, if somehow all the physics books are burned, and the physicists are hanged, and we no longer get to the truths of physics. Nevertheless, there is a way back. There's a scientific method that we could find our way back to re-establishing them. And in some subsequent enlightened age, science became possible once again. But in history and in politics, where we are dealing with the interrelationship between particular contingent events, events that need not have happened but did happen, events that you can't argue back to, but just require the honest separations of journalists and historians. There, if you lose those truths, there's no way of arguing back to them. And we, in that sense, lose the common world constituted by our awareness of what contingently has happened among us. As she says, that there was a man called Trotsky and that he participated in the Russian Revolution. Stalin attempted to rid the common world of that belief. And once you rid the common world of that belief, it's very, very hard to reason back to it. You have to rely immensely on a discipline of fact-checking, site-checking, a discipline of maintaining archives and maintaining their integrity. All of that is important. Maintaining libraries, maintaining some place where contingent facts are recorded and can be credited. That's, I think, an important part of the campaign, the broader campaign against mendacity.
We do have one more question for you. The question is, what's a recommendation you have for our audience? It can be a recommendation about anything. A TV show you've watched recently, a new city you visited, a dish you ate.
Oh, heavens. Well, I'm an academic. I mostly recommend books.
That's fine too.
And one book that I've been recommending is the five-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, LBJ, by Robert Caro. It's called The Years of Lyndon Johnson. He's written four of the volumes. We're waiting for the fifth. And this is a glorious political biography that tells how much bullying, how much arm twisting, how much log rolling, how much bribery was involved in the hard work of American politics. I recommend it unequivocally. It's a wonderful read, and it will keep most of you going for the rest of the year.
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Jeremy.
Thank you for coming on.
Thank you for having me.
Well, I guess we're all gonna have to be a little bit more truthful now.
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, that was great. Took me right back to my doctoral supervisions with him in his office in All Souls. Yikes.
And next week, we have Professor Sam Bursler from MIT on to talk about her paper, Bad Question.
Fantastic. I really look forward to it. You've been listening to Philosophically Speaking, a production of the Digital Speech Lab at University College London. Our senior producer was George McDonough, studio recording by Matt Alcott, Teresa Baker, Ash Johnson, and Patrick Robinson. Music by the philosopher Adam Ettenson. Your hosts were Emily McTernan and me, Jeff Howard. See you next time.