Harry Frankfurt

It's very pertinent.

Something else that I've recently read, which I thought was pretty good, we should also link it, it's called On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt, especially the dissection between the bullshitter and the liar.

[laughs]

Man, I need to learn how to bullshit.

And that's the AI thing.

It's so much easier to bullshit because you can have AI write you really plausible-sounding bullshit.

And by Harry Frankfurt's definition, most certainly that's all bullshit, right? [laughs]

'Cause there's no grounding in truth.

We wanna assist agency." And they see, and I tend to agree with them on this, that the biggest problem is the, the weakness of will, right? You know what the good is, but you don't have the virtuous capacity to actually do the good.

Harry Frankfurt, well-known philosopher, had this, uh... developed this very influential theory of, of higher order desires.

And so one of his examples, um, and I'll s- stick with the, this example, is the unwilling alcoholic.

So the person who, because they're an alcoholic, whenever they're confronted, right, there's some wine in the back of the room, right, they have the strong first order desire to drink, right? Uh, it's a compulsion, "I want that drink." But they also have a first order desire not to drink, 'cause they know how it's affecting their health or affecting their relationships or whatever, right? And so they have these competing first order desires, "I wanna drink, I don't wanna drink," right? The angel and the devil on their shoulders.

And it makes sense sometimes to see it one way and sometimes to see it in the other way.

Actually, the contrast between these two addicts is used by Harry Frankfurt to illustrate the difference between the actions that are, in a sense, free, or I think as contemporary Flusher's action would say, things that you're attributively responsible for because they reflect on you, and actions that don't reflect on you.

And of course, Frankfurt's view about it was that the difference between the addict whose actions reflect on them and the addict whose actions don't reflect on them is a matter of whether they want to want to take the drug or don't want to take the drug.

And I think that's not the difference between the two cases.

And it might involve lots of complex agency.

They might have to dig through the trash to find their needles and put their dealer's contact info in their phone and engage in complex reasoning in order to do this thing.

which Harry Frankfurt would say is not free.

It's not truly their action.

And this isn't just in Murdoch and in Heidegger.

Someone like Harry Frankfurt's very interesting here, where he wants to say-

Yes, yes.

Yeah

And this isn't just in Murdoch and in Heidegger.

Someone like Harry Frankfurt is very interesting here, where he wants to say, in the beginning of The Reasons of Love, he says, actually, the more fundamental question is not what is the moral life, it's we need to pay attention to actually what we care about.

We can only really get to the ethical context by first understanding what matters to us.

And so I want to just start by thinking about how do you view that relationship between love and care or love and relevance? And this is interesting in the case of Murdoch.

There's a psychological reason for that.

In 1986, philosopher Harry Frankfurt at Princeton University published research on a category of dishonesty that is worse than lying.

A liar at least cares about the truth enough to hide it.

MAGA doesn't even do that.

But I'm hearing or maybe reading not enough arguments from colleagues and other people who are writing about this, about the world's poorest people.

There is a really great influential book, I think it was 2015, Harry Frankfurt, a small little book called On Inequality.

He was a professor of philosophy in Princeton.

And basically, he makes this argument that I found very convincing is that perhaps we're over focusing on making the rich less rich.

So I end the book with this kind of articulation, as you've said, this idea of alleviation of poverty.

From all my reading on psychology, economics and poverty and all these different disciplines, I think it's so ignored, this role of global poverty and its alleviations.

I think for me, like Harry Frankfurt, when I first read this little philosophy book, I think it's a moral imperative of our time to help alleviate global poverty i mean maybe one of the ways i can you know i can see from growing up in ireland as i write in the book i was born in 1985 i have this memory uh my initial years of ireland being a poor country right um and then it was with eu funding uh through the nine uh late 1990s and 2000s i think the country, it's kind of the stimulus package where people were working and universities were getting more money, education became free.

You get this kind of injection of financing based on the EU and it kind of led to these more capitalistic enterprises and increased the loss of people in Ireland and now it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world.