According to the NOMINATE Index, the last time the US was this polarized was just before and during the Civil War. So, how did we get here? And what can the philosophy of public reason liberalism teach us about living together—even when we don’t agree on much?
Dr. Kevin Vallier is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green University and author of Trust in a Polarized Age and Must Politics Be War? Restoring Trust in the Open Society. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Dr. Vallier joins Ross to discuss the doom loop between falling distrust and growing polarization and address how we can learn to disagree in more a productive way.
Dr. Vallier explains liberalism in general and public reason liberalism specifically, describing how we might build a shared doctrine that appeals to multiple reasonable perspectives. Listen in for Dr. Vallier’s public reason argument for restricting carbon emissions and learn what we can do to rebuild trust in our institutions and each other.
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Resources
Trust in a Polarized Age by Kevin Vallier
Must Politics Be War? Restoring Our Trust in a Polarized Age by Kevin Vallier
Nolan McCarty on Google Scholar
Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics by Yochal Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
Political Liberalism by John Rawls
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at NORI, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am the creative editor at NORI, the carbon removal marketplace. Today I have with me Dr. Kevin Vallier, associate professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University and author of the new book, Trust in a Polarized Age. Hey, Kevin.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Hi Ross, how’s it going?
Ross Kenyon: It is going well. I’m glad to have you here. It’s a very, well, good timing because I think if we had spoken a week earlier, you might have had different thoughts, but the inauguration was yesterday. You write about trust, why politics feels like war, must it be war as one of your previous books is called. Why is it like this? Does it have to be like this? Why is everyone so angry all the time as a maybe layperson way of asking it?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, so I’ll talk about the particular circumstances and then the kind of broader picture. So I work on the different topics of trust and political polarization. And I work on two kinds of trust. One is what’s called social trust or trust in most people in your society, usually trust in strangers as a whole. And political trust, which is trust in institutions, particular institutions like different parts of government, like Congress or the president or particular people who occupy those roles. Political polarization is a term that is a lot more familiar to most people than social and political trust.
And it’s typically thought to be the idea that people are moving further apart from one another in terms of their political views. But that actually isn’t the only thing we’re talking about when we talk about polarization. We sometimes talk about affect-based polarization, where people are coming to dislike people in the other party or other group more. So polarization involves both changes in issues and developing more negative affect. We’ve got more affective polarization than we have issue-based polarization. There’s also the phenomenon of sorting. And sorting is you’re not changing your views or attitudes, but you’re associating with the like-minded and dissociated from the unlike-minded.
Really what I talk about is those four different phenomena that are different things we mean by polarization. Okay. So hopefully we’ve given your listeners these concepts. I think they’re causally connected. So the idea is that the more polarized we get, the less trusting we get of other people in our society that are on the other team and of the leaders of those people. And then when they run the institutions, we trust those less as well. So polarization is driving distrust. And I think distrust is driving polarization because I think the less you trust people, the more you’re inclined to see their disagreements with you as cause for disliking them because you’re more likely to attribute their differences with you to some sort of fault in them.
I call this the illusion of culpable dissent in the book. So we think that their dissent is their fault because they’re dumb or evil or both. Only a moron or a bad person could think X, Y, and Z. So we’re in a doom loop between falling trust and polarization. Now, I thought until the last two weeks that we were seeing a slow linear decline in trust and a slow linear increase in polarization. But the thing about the last two weeks that my friend Ryan Muldoon points out is that sometimes social indicators and social norms don’t change in a linear fashion.
Sometimes they change in an exponential fashion. And I think that what has happened is that trust in institutions, particularly the democratic process, collapsed very, very fast on one side of the aisle. And it led to revolt. And that revolt has in some ways exacerbated political polarization, although I think it’s also highlighted the cost of it, which is good at least. So going from the general bits of trust and polarization, that’s how I would analyze the current situation. As a decline in trust in the democratic process leading to a revolt that continues to crystallize and further deepen divisions.
In fact, now that Biden and the inaugural talked about fighting domestic terrorism, I’m a little worried that we’re going to have a politicized new institution, a bit like the way we handled foreign terrorism, which was, you know, extremely poor and oppressive and terrible. So, um, That’s where I think we are. We have a lot of lower and lower trust in institutions in each other, more and more polarization of all these varieties, and it creates a flammable environment. Indeed, Trump is better at lighting that flame than anyone does so. So deliberately and repeatedly and ingeniously in order to benefit himself.
And it finally blew up in his face and hopefully has permanently disgraced him. I’m sorry. I’ve been very black pulled on Trump over the last couple of weeks. Usually I kind of try to be more even handed, but I’m not in the mood for that, which is kind of weird for me. Like I kind of pride myself on it, but trying to be even handed. But I’m not there right now. I think this is just hideous behavior. So.
Ross Kenyon: I feel similarly, if there’s one criticism someone listening could make of this show and I would be like, touche, it’s that there’s more generosity to ideas that do not deserve them sometimes. Being too charitable, too much steel manning is happening and hard, hard, but necessary questions do not get asked. And it might look like politeness, but it could be cowardice as well.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Is it actually worse than it has been historically? I don’t know what the data show about this, but are we actually more polarized and suspicious of each other? I think the divide also splits between progressive and conservative broadly. Maybe you would frame it differently. But have these factions always been so strong?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: No. I mean, what’s interesting is we’ve really only been measuring trust levels via surveys and For the past, say, about 60 years, the political distrust measures are actually a bit older, go back into the 50s. So the survey data only goes back about 50, 60 years. So we don’t really know if there were periods of lower trust. My suspicion is that growing up in World War II, where we worked together to defeat an obviously evil foe and didn’t see any real damage to our own country or division over this, was a big trust increasing event for us.
However, there’s also been trust declines in a lot of European countries, but not very much. We’re weird. We’re the only established democracy that’s seen this big, big, big decline in social trust, for instance. But have things been worse? So with trust, it’s hard to say. It’s the worst things have been since polling began. But there’s been a slowdown in the collapse over the last decade or two. Political polarization, however, is something that we can measure a little bit better, but primarily at the elite level. So there’s the nominate index created by Nolan McCarty at Princeton that looks at congressional votes and measures polarization based on that and roll call votes.
So we were this politically polarized during the Civil War and just before it, but we haven’t been this polarized since then. So on the polarization index at the elite level, we haven’t been this polarized. But then the question is, what about most people? And it turns out that issue-based polarization decreases, I think, as your education level decreases significantly. But the highly educated, highly connected are very politically partisan and very politically engaged. And from what I can tell, the more that people get into politics and the more educated they are, the more this phenomenon hits them.
So, you know, probably the maximally polarized people in high political office with the decrease in moderates. I mean, it’s I think McConnell may cooperate with the Democrats simply because dealing with Trump for four years was psychologically traumatic in various respects for a politician who’d been used to so many such differences. And he’s known Biden a very long time. I think that helps. But generally, I think at the elite level, people in D. C. , politicians, peoples in politicians’ offices, very wealthy people, very, you know, people in the academy, people in Hollywood, you know, the high cultural elites.
Those are the most polarized. So what I would say is... To the extent that you’re elite and high level, you’re polarized and highly educated. There isn’t that much issue-based polarization in the average American, but they can be polarized very easily.
Ross Kenyon: I have thoughts as a layperson on why polarization has increased, and I want to say them, and I want you to tell me why they’re wrong or incomplete. Will you do that for me? Yes. I think I’ve said this before on the show, but Tend to be pretty favorable towards markets. I think they’re important and worth preserving in many ways. But I think the way that media is monetized breaks this dynamic in a really dangerous way, where the best way to keep us engaged is oftentimes to Get us angry. And you can look back to the origins of right-wing talk radio and Rush Limbaugh.
And I feel like that trend has gone through Fox News and social media. I’ll look at something like a Vice article and they’re almost scientifically designed to make everyone mad. And the whole comments are all meta comments about how mad everyone is in watching this disaster. I think that’s the only way to get attention is to piss everyone off. And I think that has just been a bad capitalist feedback loop. I think that’s part of it. Am I onto something or no?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Oh, I think you are. I mean, the biggest regret I have in the book is that I couldn’t get very much into media distrust. I talk about it in the empirics, but I wanted to talk about ways of restoring trust in media with liberal institutions. And I don’t know how to do it without violating the First Amendment. So I didn’t have a chapter on it. I talked about the liberal institutions that I thought could be employed or somewhat reformed or extended to increase trust and reduce polarization. Those include associations, freedom of association markets, some aspects of the welfare state elections and parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.
I had to cut the federalism chapter. I think it would help, but there wasn’t enough data. But with media, it’s just so difficult to think about What you would need to solve the problem because they do feed outrage. But the bigger issue isn’t so much that people are outraged now. It’s that they have manifestly false beliefs. And I think this is a much worse problem on the right than the left. I’ve become very convinced of this recently. I read this nice book, Network Propaganda. And it made the case that the right wing media circuit is a lot simpler, like there are far fewer outlets and it’s easier for them to be a closed system.
So then it’s much easier to propagate lies and false beliefs like that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or well, they did find a few radioactive holes out there. But nonetheless, believing just falsehoods like that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11. So that was that’s when a lot of the really false beliefs started to take hold in the media. But Trumpets just started. On a whole nother level, promoting all kinds of conspiracy theories and then punishing media that don’t propagate it. So Fox News got critical of him. He started attacking Fox News and their ratings have gone down quite a bit, actually, since he started doing that.
Ross Kenyon: I went to like our American network and YouTube and one America.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: And yeah, I mean, they’re going to be who knows where they’re dispersing towards. It’s very disturbing. Just one of the reasons I hope that Trump is barred from future office by the Senate.
Ross Kenyon: You’re getting real spicy. The show, huh, Kevin?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, no punches pulled. Sorry, I should pull some, maybe I should pull some punches. Speak for you, it’s fine. Well, I mean, I just think that he’s just such a master manipulator that he’s able to take advantage of the media.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think anyone would dispute it.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: No, no, no. And it’s his ability and willingness to punish reporters in such a public way. I mean, he destroyed Megyn Kelly, for instance. And I suspect he’ll start to set his sights on people like Chris Wallace here not too long. So who knows what’s going to happen? I think he’s too lazy to start his own party, but he’s been talking about it. But yeah, so he’s been a lot of the problem. Now, a lot of people say, oh, all the problems predate him. Yes, yes, they do. But he has made things, personally has made things worse deliberately to benefit himself.
I just want to say that because I think it’s manifest. But It is more important in general to pay more attention to institutions than to individuals because institutions place enormous limits on what individuals may do. But so do social norms. And if you have someone who I think never feels guilt or shame, they’ll flout norms. And so when people try to punish them, they don’t feel remorse. And so they don’t stop. But that makes Trump a bit of a unicorn because the vast majority of humans feel guilt and shame. And so they can be reined in.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Well, maybe we should talk about institutions then if we should be focused less on individuals. We don’t even start to talk about institutions.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah. So, I mean, there’s two kinds of institutions I think matter, formal and informal. Informal are things like laws, constitutions, administrative rules and regulations, stuff that, you know, there’s usually some kind of like written code that’s enforced by courts and police. Informal norms are things more like social norms where there are expectations that people follow the norms and there’s some kind of usually social sanction or punishment when people don’t follow them. You know, we all think we ought to go along with them. So, you know, there’s a lot of well-known destructive social norms, you know, things like Chinese foot binding or this is the most neutral way to use the term, but female genital cutting where a lot of people do it, but they don’t want to do it because they’re worried about being punished if they do it.
We keep a lot of order with good social norms, even though we often have bad ones. We have developed some new norms like punishing people who use racial epithets that reinforce certain kinds of racial stigmas. But they usually involve society responding with punishment. Now, I think social media has made it easier to over punish, which is why a lot of the people doing the punishing don’t understand cancel culture because they’re like, I’m just like chastising people who deserve it. But because it gets amplified and coordinated, the person being attacked, it’s disproportionate.
But it’s a spontaneous, it’s disproportionate by a spontaneous order. It isn’t just one actor. So formal and informal norms, I think of them both as kinds of institutions. There’s a number of different things going on, but a lot of the polarization I think has to do with The way that congressional rules and the way our voting for officials and official voting, like when legislators vote, is structured. So actually polarization creates a lot of problems with things like gridlock and a lot of really basic stuff can’t be addressed. But then there’s also just the institutions of the media and their attempts to monetize things and to violate social norms, like against lying, which has decreased trust in media a lot.
But they’re still doing just fine in terms of numbers. People think one side can’t be trusted, so they start trusting the other side, which is fallacious, but nonetheless, it’s what happens. And then you have just a lot of informal democratic norms that are being violated that Trump has been violating about, you know, not trying to get another country to dig up dirt on your political opponent or lying about the integrity of the election process and so on. And those aren’t, you know, Necessarily illegal, but they’re violations of informal norms. They’re things that we all think no one should do and that no one actually does do until Trump does them.
So anyway, I’m just trying to give examples. I don’t want to get back too close towards Trump. But yeah, there are informal norms and formal norms. And I think we’re seeing decay in both. And I think the media outrage is people are willing to violate social norms to make money and then those norms degrade. And so everyone feels like they can be mean to each other. Because all the high status people are being mean to each other. And then particularly Twitter acts as a wild amplifier of social punishment, such that it just builds and builds and builds and can ruin lives.
Like, I would rather go to jail for a couple days than be the subject of a Twitter mob, maybe longer.
Ross Kenyon: Brief tangent here. Have you read John Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: No, I haven’t. Tell me about it.
Ross Kenyon: I think he would very much like it. And it gives examples of both the left and the right and the sort of gallows culture of the public execution and ways in which it’s been used inappropriately. He also has some examples where maybe it was justified too, but just sort of like the gleeful destruction of someone’s life that people maybe read like a single tweet. And I’m like, cool, well, we should cast this person into outer darkness then.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: And you’re like, wow, you’re way too eager to do that. But he’s a journalist, actually. He’s covered a lot of weird conspiracy cultures, fringe subcultures. It’s a good book. I think you’d like it. Oh, great.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, that’s very interesting.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, okay. Actually, real question now, though. I think now that our listeners have an understanding of what you mean by institutions, formal and informal, I think we should back up even further and explain how you view liberalism because a big part of this book is you sort of offering a vision of what liberalism is slash could be and why it’s important, why we maybe take it for granted and how our institutional thoughts that you just laid out might fit inside of that container. So what exactly is liberalism?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Well, so I’ll start with a very general account and then get more specific in stages. So the very, very most broad account of liberalism is that it is a political philosophy which says that persons are naturally free and equal and should be treated as such by government. And what that means is there’s no natural hierarchies of authority, meaning that everyone’s in a sense born free and not under the authority of anyone, but say their parents. So they can make up their own minds about how to live and they’re to be treated equally.
Right. So that people don’t aren’t naturally ahead of each other. And so those notions of liberty and equality don’t actually conflict because originally in liberalism, there wasn’t a liberty equality conflict. So very, very most basic form is natural freedom and equality of persons. Now, it’s equality in the moral sense that everyone ought to be treated as equals or everyone has equal dignity, not that people are equal in capacities or talents or anything like that. So a lot of libertarians will say, well, people aren’t equal, but that’s not what the people saying we’re equals typically mean.
Ross Kenyon: Is it more like a Christian equality before God, something like that?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, because it starts off that way because liberalism evolves out of Christianity, but it doesn’t have to be. So you can be an atheist liberal or a Christian liberal. But in terms of origins, yeah, I think Christianity contributes greatly to the idea of equal moral worth. So that’s the very broadest notion. Now, there’s a divide among liberals, historically, between those who think that certain liberal values like freedom and autonomy ought to be actively promoted by the states. You find this in the European continent where a lot of liberals want to suppress the Catholic Church or suppress organized religion because they think it undermines freedom.
And this is more of what we might call liberal perfectionism. So on this view, people are free and equal, but the state shouldn’t be neutral. The state should promote liberal values, sometimes by force. But then there’s another kind of liberalism that I call at the very most general way, liberal neutralism. And liberal neutralism says, look, if people aren’t actually free and equal, if we’re going to be fair to them, we can’t just decide that one view is correct and impose it on the rest. So this started off with religion, where the thought was, or at least with variants of Protestantism.
Where the thought was roughly that, you know, look, you know, we can’t agree on religion and we seem to have different views that aren’t going to go away. And over time, they kind of start to look like different but reasonable views. And so the thought is that, you know, look, the state shouldn’t take a side on religious matters. And then, you know, it became a question about whether the state should take the side of religion at all or try to be secular. And then liberalisms and liberals disagree about whether neutrality implies robust forms of secularism, like getting religion out of the public square, like French and France and laicite, or a much more kind of open public square where the state doesn’t coercively establish religion, but allows all kinds of other religious expressions like in the United States.
So there’s liberal neutralism and perfectionist liberalism. I’m a liberal neutralist. And then you can get even more specific with kinds of liberal neutralism. So there’ll be like a natural rights based liberalism that says you have these natural rights and establishment violates those rights. Or you can go in for the contemporary variants of social contract liberalism. Try to justify the state based on a free and equal agreement between persons, maybe an actual one, maybe a hypothetical one, but actually kind of beyond the consent analogy now, where basically the thought is that because people are naturally free and equal, you can’t coerce them if the coercion isn’t justifiable to them from their own perspective.
So the thought is that all coercion, state coercion or power needs to be publicly justified. That is that it needs to be justified to each person by their own lights. And so this is what’s called public reason liberalism. It’s a variant of neutralist liberalism because it says the state shouldn’t coerce on matters of reasonable disputes. Instead, there has to be justifiability to multiple perspectives. Rawls is an example of someone who has this view. My advisor, Jerry Gauss, had a version of this view that’s very different than Rawls’s. So we’ve got liberalism, neutralism, and the perfectionism distinction.
And then we’ve got the more... Well, a contemporary version of liberal neutralism that’s called public reason liberalism. And I’m a public reason liberal. So there’s your taxonomy. Hopefully that’s helpful to people to some degree. Or at least they know what to Google if they want to go further.
Ross Kenyon: We have detailed show notes. Yeah, we actually know each other because I spent a year at Arizona, which is your alma mater for your PhD.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yep.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and I decided against continuing, but was still very influenced by the public reason thinkers there and post Rawlsianism. I’m curious how much I want to give listeners, but I imagine from the good place, they at least know some basics by this point. But public reason, actually, I want you to explain in greater detail what exactly it is and the original position and sort of like the 101 of Rawls. And then I can explain what hurt my brain about it and one of the reasons why I left. And then ways your book answers some of my concerns.
Would you be willing to do that for us?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me see how fast I can do it.
Ross Kenyon: So this is a gigantic question, Kevin.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: I’m sorry. It is, but I think I can do a sequence of explanations. So the sort of standard sort of social contract liberalisms of like law Rousseau and Kant fell out of favor in the 19th century in favor of, you know, more like communitarian and nationalist views in England to utilitarian views and to Marxism and socialisms of various varieties. And this was even true to some degree up until 1915. The Second World War, you did have kind of liberalism, socialism, liberal democratic socialism that gained in power, whereas libertarianism, classical liberalism contracted greatly.
But one of the things that had happened in philosophy is that people had kind of moved away from making moral claims at all, thinking that they were, say, just expressions of emotion, that any sensible philosophical disputes were based on things that needed to be able to be empirically verifiable. So political philosophy had fallen on hard times. And even when people did political philosophy, it was done in a kind of British utilitarian vein. So along comes John Rawls starting in the 50s as he’s finishing up his education, late 40s. And he wants to create a systematic alternative to utilitarianism for a variety of reasons, but one of which is just that he thinks that very simply that utilitarianism does not respect what he called the separateness of persons.
So he wants to develop a kind of, he wants to develop a more general theory of social contract theory, but getting at what he thinks is really important about the idea. And what’s really important about the idea is that justice is a kind of fairness. And it’s not just a fairness to people of different races or nationalities. It’s also a matter of fairness to people who have different faiths and what he called conceptions of the good in general. And so how would you figure out how to treat different perspectives and different people fairly?
Well, one thing you could do is you could ask what principles of justice they would choose if they didn’t know those divisive or potentially divisive features of themselves. And so Ross constructs this idea of the original position and the veil of ignorance. And the original position, you have a whole bunch of abstract people that are in some sense taken to represent real people, but in a much more complicated way than people typically know if they know anything about Rawls. And he says, okay, look, we’re going to make people instrumentally and more than that rational and choosing not just means, but also to some degree choosing ends.
But to make sure that their choice is fair and reasonable, we’re going to deny them factors that would bias them that are, as he said, irrelevant from a moral point of view. And he thought not just our race or nationality or whatever was irrelevant from a moral point of view, but so is our conception of the good. And so we shouldn’t know those factors or the parties to the original position shouldn’t know those factors when they’re trying to figure out what justice is. The result would be a theory of justice that comported with our ordinary moral intuitions about justice.
It would be non-utilitarian in character. That ultimately would justify both extensive protection for basic liberties, but also equal opportunities and lots of respects, and that all social and economic inequality should be organized to maximize the position of least advantage. So it’s a very, very left-leaning liberalism that says that it’s very hard to justify inequality. It has to benefit everyone and the least advantage to the maximal extent.
Ross Kenyon: Can I jump in here, Kevin?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yep. So that’s Rawls up through 1971. So that’s the bits that we can start with.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s a great place to start too. And my understanding of Rawls, and surely you know much, much more than I do, is that he was pretty conservative with how he thought people would choose within the original position. He thought if you didn’t know which person you would be in You would choose egalitarian distribution. You wouldn’t want there to be a lot of rich people, a lot of poor people, because you could be one of the poor ones. But a lot of what came out of Arizona and sort of what is deemed post Rawlsian was that actually rational people in these Yes.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, actually, that’s a very nice way of putting it. So one of the points that Jerry Gauss made, who was my advisor and you took a course with, and I think you did take a course with him, right?
Ross Kenyon: I did. Him and David Schmitz taught it together. Yeah.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: And one of the themes that he was stressing then, and it’s still a theme of his work as his last book will come out in July that we’re getting through. And one of the things that he says is, Is that social contract reasoning in itself is inherently indeterminate. And the same thing is true of all contractarian theories of justice, including Rawls’s. And that Rawls actually understood this early on in his papers in the 50s. But he tried to resist it in a theory of justice by building in a whole bunch of controversial assumptions into the choice scenario.
Stuff that, you know, many of his critics not only disagree with, but mock. And sometimes he would say stuff like, well, if we get the wrong answer that’s counterintuitive out of the original position, we should just change the original position. So it’s like he was trying to arrive at his own particular answer by rigging the system. That’s just bait for critics.
Ross Kenyon: It’s such a track of bait.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yes, it is bait. Yes. And so one of the things Jerry said was, well, actually, look, there’s going to be reasonable disagreement, not just about like You know, what’s good. And so there’s going to be reasonable disagreement about justice. And so people are going to be able to have different conceptions of justice, rank conceptions of justice differently. And so the original position reasoning will be what Jerry called indeterminate, indeterminate. Now, Jerry still kind of likes social contract theory. And so a big thing of his work was how do we resolve indeterminacy after we realize that impartial moral reasoning isn’t going to tell us what justice requires?
And in his own work, what he does is he keeps this idea, Kantian, Rawlsian idea of morality and justice being about some kind of impartial moral reasoning, reciprocal reasoning. But trying to find ways that real social processes and social interactions could lead us to coordinate on one of those options that would be acceptable. So you try to delineate the set of Potential agreement points. And then you say, okay, well, how do social institutions and social evolution lead us to arrive to actually practicing one of those agreement points? And that’s how I started to introduce Hayek and Hume into the thought of Kant and Rawls by saying, look, you know, a big part of justice is how we concretize the thing.
How we bring it to earth, how we institutionalize it, because the original position will help us something like it, will help us to reason impartially, but it doesn’t get us to a real actual morality that can, as Rawls says, resolve our competing claims. So yeah, that was one way that the later project of political liberalism broke down. So one of the things that Rawls realizes in the interim between A Theory of Justice and then his other big book, Political Liberalism, Is that he had assumed, so one of the things Walters wanted to argue is not just that you come up with justice, but that justice should structure a well-ordered, what he calls a well-ordered society.
And the reason he cared about this is because it wasn’t enough for justice to just be justice, to be justice. It had to also be able to organize society in a way that would be compatible with people’s good, their own personal good. And he also wanted to show that justice would be self-stabilizing, like that if you established it, it would keep itself in effect.
Ross Kenyon: Do you mean something like in contradistinction to something like, let justice reign, though the heavens fall? That’s not a viable option.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Right, no. So his Kantianism is consequence sensitive. So Rawls developed this idea of a well-ordered society in the last third of theory of justice, which people don’t look at. But in it, he assumed that people would agree about a great deal of what was good. And he later comes to be dissatisfied with that assumption, that he thinks that even in that model, people are going to come to disagree about what’s good. And so the whole theory had to be recast because people would have to agree to his theory of justice, what he called justice of fairness, from different perspectives about the good.
And so he said, OK, well, look, I mean, people are going to disagree about the good, but maybe they can still agree on on justice. But this creates this problem, which is that if we agree on justice from different perspectives, it’s not going to be obvious to each other whether we’ve all endorsed it. And we’re going to need some public way to communicate that to each other. And so in order to stabilize a diverse society with different perspectives on the good, different religions, and to coordinate people around justice in the way Rawls wanted, you had to be able and be willing and prepared to exchange what he called public reasons.
And these are reasons that are in some sense accessible or shared and that would exclude in ultimately a quite subtle way, not a hand-fisted way, religious reasons or private reasons or reasons for what he called comprehensive doctrines. So from this, he developed this idea of public reason, which there are doctrines of public reason earlier in political philosophy, but he gave the term sort of currency. And so the thought was that the justifications for state power and state action had to appeal to different perspectives. And that would only work if you appeal to reasons that were shared by those perspectives in some sense.
So this is the way that public reason starts to impact the role of religion in the public square because it says that we should tend to keep religion out of it in various respects. And that created a gigantic controversy in the 90s and the 2000s, and it’s what I ended up writing my dissertation on.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it keeps philosophers employed. It’s great.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, well, you know, not only that, but it keeps people in religious studies, political theory, and constitutional law employed. So it’s a really big kind of interdisciplinary debate. It’s pretty interesting. So the doctrine of public reason in Rawls kind of starts off that way. But what really matters, I think, for Rawls in the end is that principles of justice and principles for organizing society are justified to multiple reasonable perspectives. Now, another theme that took off after you left, that really took off after you left, what was still going on when you were there, when I was there, was the idea of what we might call pluralism about justice or Where, you know, yeah, people can not just disagree about the good, they can disagree about justice, and so they can reasonably reject Rawls’ conception of justice.
So if you want a society that’s stable and well-ordered, you can no longer maintain that Rawls’ theory of justice is the best way to do that. Rawls admits this towards the end of his life. And essentially, Jerry’s picking up on that theme where, look, reasonable people can disagree about justice, so, you know, we can’t just... Insist on a procedure for determining what that is. And Rawls kind of basically admits this. In fact, in his letter to his editor before the last edition of Political Liberalism, he said that his theory of justice, justice is fairness, now plays at best a small role.
And his broader thoughts on these topics, which is a remarkable admission. So we get to a liberalism that says, look, people are naturally free and equal. So we have to justify things to their diverse points of view. And then there’s, and that events is in a kind of neutrality requirement, because you’re not going to be able to justify a regime that takes a coercive side on something controversial to the people who don’t accept it. So you end up with something kind of neutral. But one of the interesting questions is, what is the status of capitalism in an order of public reason?
So one place that Jerry Gauss and John Rawls disagreed about is how large the state should be and how much it should interfere with markets, whereas Rawls thought it should interfere an enormous amount, just a staggering amount, much more than the People will make this obnoxious remark that Rawls is trying to justify the Democratic Party platform of 1968. That’s false. He was much more left wing than that. Much more left wing. But then Jerry’s got a kind of classical liberal view. And so that’s another interesting dispute among public reason liberals, which is how to regard markets.
But Jerry thought they were essential to any free, equal and mutually justifiable orders.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I think you’ve given us a super helpful baseline for understanding the rest of your book, Trust, where we might have difficult conversations about climate change and beyond. But how exactly does liberalism work? It takes for granted that it is legitimate for reasonable people to disagree about things that are important to them. How are we supposed to live together if we don’t actually agree on a lot? I’m sure people feel that a lot listening right now in America.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: The way the books, the two books, trust books I’ve done got started was kind of reflecting on the Public Reason Project and particularly Jerry’s version of it. Because one of the things that Jerry says that Rawls does not make so clear is that one of the things we really, really, really care about in society broadly isn’t just social cooperation, bare social cooperation, but of being able to have what Jerry called moral relations between persons. Those included things like love and friendship. And so the thought was that, you know, in a free society, one that’s governed by the norms of public justification, it is easier to form and sustain those moral relations.
It’s easier to have relations of love and friendship across differences. A liberal society, you can make an interfaith marriage work, right? You can be friends with people who have wildly different views than you do. I mean, Jerry and I disagreed in terms of metaphysics about everything. But we still worked very well together and were friends. So the thought is that a liberal society affords people the opportunity to form moral relations in a stable way with a very wide range of people. And that one of the things that just about anyone says really matters in life is close, successful personal relationships.
So I got to thinking, well, love and friendship are incredibly important, but they’re not going to be the basis for an entire social order because we can’t have intimate relations of love and friendship with everybody. Can’t have a civic friendship. But Jerry had kind of developed theories of love and friendship in some of his very early work. But he didn’t have a theory of trust. And so my kind of thought was, well, you know, maybe if we disagree about justice and we disagree about the good, the most intimate social relation we can expect to have with one another is just to be able to trust each other to generally do good.
What we think to be the right thing. So there’s a core of goodness and justice that we can agree to, but almost everything else is going to be controversial. And so the question is, can we land on a system of norms that allows diverse people to trust each other when we follow them? So my thought was, well, look, norms that can be justified to each person’s perspective, informal and formal institutions. Are those that will all have reason from our own perspective to follow. And so when we see one another knowing our differences, following the same rules, we think, okay, now we can count on them.
We can trust them. And they’re doing this out of some kind of concern or respect for our well-being or something like that. So I develop in the book, Must Politics Be War? The purely philosophical predecessor to this very empirical book. I didn’t account or trust for the right reasons, arguing that a liberal society is unique and being able to provide a rational basis for trust for people with diverse perspectives. Any society or state that takes sides was going to engender reasonable distrust between those in control and those who are controlled, between the hegemon and the suppressed group.
Because they don’t accept each other’s values. So the suppressed group will disagree with the hegemon, will be, quote, untrustworthy with respect to those values when they can get away with it. And the subverted group won’t trust the hegemon because, again, they’re not following the kind of common norms freely from their own perspective. They’re imposing alien values. So then I thought, OK, well, this really needs to be two books because there’s two questions. One is... Can a liberal society in general sustain trust in principle so that you could even have a stable liberal order?
Right. But then there’s like the eminently practical question, which is that can liberal institutions create real trust in a reasonably clearly just way from where we are? And the aim of this book was to synthesize the empirical trust literatures in political science and economics with the public reason tradition so that we can actually bring social science to bear on trying to figure out when our institutions are justified. So a very kind of Gaussian theme, a very kind of theme within the new movement of philosophy, politics, economics. What I’m trying to contribute is the integration of the study of trust into liberal political thought.
And so what this book does is it tries to argue that liberal institutions can create real trust in the real world and in fact do and have been. So I run through a lot of the trust literature and I look at the institutions that I think can help to establish trust even under highly polarized conditions. So in essence, what I’m saying is the liberal order, if we rely on liberal institutions and the policy tools within liberal democratic capitalism, that we can restore trust and we can reduce polarization. There are a lot of complications, though, when this comes to policymaking.
And I was just talking with someone last night about how a public reason view would approach carbon tax or carbon emission restrictions. It’s complex. I think you can publicly justify them, but it’s sort of complicated because there’s so much we don’t know about. I mean, I can run through it for you because I know you’ll be interested, obviously, with the name of the podcast, but different people model the world differently economically and socially. And so they develop different models and they have different predictions for outcomes. And this makes it difficult to publicly justify policy because people think the same policy will have really different effects.
And they have models of complex systems that are decent, but that usually don’t have a lot of predictive power because we’re dealing with macro level complexity and it’s just extremely hard to model and predict such systems. Sometimes it’s impossible. And in climate change, you might just say, well, people disagree about how bad the warming is and what the consequences will be. But I think there’s a pretty compelling argument that all perspectives should be worried about it, particularly libertarian perspectives, because a lot of climate change is going to violate a lot of property rights or lead to a lot of property rights violations like wars and conflicts.
Now, the reasonable libertarian position is, I think, the kind of Matt Ridley’s Well, I think libertarians should basically be where the natural scientists are. But if you wanted to get on the outer bounds, you’d be a lukewarmer like Matt Ridley and think that we are causing some climate change through human activity, but it’s going to remain under two degrees Celsius. Here’s the problem with that argument. Suppose there’s an 80% chance that it’s true. Suppose there’s a 10% chance we go over four degrees Celsius in warming. That’s going to be a catastrophe.
We have no idea how bad it’s going to be. Even if we see the clouds, we’re going to have massive ocean acidification, thinning of permafrost, methane, you know, explosions, massive extinctions of animals. People still maybe... So the thought is that there’s a massive risk aversion argument for restricting carbon. Plus, libertarians tend to be very optimistic about innovations on the market. So their anticipated costs for carbon taxes and carbon emissions should take that into account. It might be the case that we’re able to innovate around it, not unlike we did with CFCs.
Right. So, you know, we were able to bring that problem under a lot of control. Now, reducing carbon emissions is going to be tough. But, you know, suppose we tell Exxon, hey, we’re going to replace, you know, your corporate tax rate with a carbon tax. And the less carbon you emit, the less tax you’ll pay and get all your scientists on it. Because, you know, if you figure out how to get to zero carbon, you’ll never pay taxes again or something. You won’t pay taxes for a generation or something like that.
Just give them the dang incentive to figure out how to do it. And I think that can clearly be publicly justified because carbon emissions are a negative externality. There are threats to property rights from a libertarian perspective. Every other perspective is open to carbon emission controls and principle. There may be some cost to growth, but if we go over four degrees Celsius, they’re going to be big cost to growth because, you know, we could even have really massive death, heat waves, more natural disasters, the destruction of a lot of, you know, being able to have viable sea life that can survive in areas where people were reliant upon it.
So basically, you know, kind of where I am. Is arguing that you can publicly justify restrictions on carbon emissions. You can justify it to multiple perspectives on the ground of avoiding massive risk. So even if it’s low probability, so maybe the libertarian could say, well, 10% chance we go over four degrees Celsius. Nightmarishly bad if we do that, right? So I think that’s going to be sufficient reason to be able to justify it even to libertarian perspective.
Ross Kenyon: So there’s my public reason argument for Well, you backled a little bit, but I’m glad you did because I wasn’t sure we were going to make it to climate change. And sometimes this show runs the risk of not, sometimes I abuse the name of the show a little bit, but okay. I do want to talk about this climate stuff. But before Before it gets too far away, I still want to ask foundational questions about liberalism. Is it actually neutral? For instance, I think of Marxian scholars making the claim that liberalism presupposes neutrality, but it smuggles in things like property rights This is a way of protecting the bourgeoisie.
It’s a society dominated by moneyed interests. This isn’t neutral. This is a lie. This is sort of a, and anyone who doesn’t believe it is a victim of false consciousness. That’s maybe a classical Marxian interpretation of liberalism. What do you say to something like that?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Well, I mean, the difficulty that Marxists have is the status of moral theory in their view. So if you’re really classical Marxist, you’re going to have to be a kind of moral relativist and a moral constructivist and even maybe a moral nihilist. So when you push Marxists to actually give moral foundations of their view, they oftentimes will go perfectionist. So they’ll effectively say, well, socialism is about promoting human well-being. But then you can just ask the question, well, Marxists, you’re all about equality. So what do you do when people disagree about well-being?
And then they could say one of two things. If they say, well, We’re going to go ahead. Then you can say, well, that’s some dominating others even by your own lights. But if they say no, then we got the liberal hook in them and can bring them over. And so then the question is, well, what about, you know, if you decide that you’re not just going to take a sectarian stand for one doctrine, can you be completely neutral between views? No. No liberal has ever said we can be completely neutral.
In fact, it’s not even clearly coherent. And I know a lot of critics of liberalism says, yeah, you can’t be maximally neutral. So it’s an incoherent ideal. That is wrong.
Ross Kenyon: Critics on the right like to make this claim too.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: That’s correct. And it’s an exaggeration of a liberal state. When I say that I’m a neutralist, I say that I’m a contextual neutralist. So what you do is you look at the series of views that you think are respectable exercises of practical theoretical rationality, right? People are kind of part of a tradition of thought. They’re thinking this through in an honest way. They’re living by the norms and values of their communities or groups. And the idea is you try to find institutions that are neutral between those groups. Not that are neutral in every sense of the term, but that can be justified to each perspective, but that’s going to vary based on the society.
So, you know, what public justification is going to look like in a society where everyone’s a socialist is one thing, or everyone’s a libertarian is going to be the other. People are not going to agree about whether libertarianism or socialism is true. I’m sorry, libertarians listening. I’m sorry, socialists listening. You’re never going to convince everybody. You will probably never convince a majority. Marxists came to power through minoritarian revolt and rule and foreign oppression. And libertarians have never come to power at all in any significant way. In the modern era, maybe Gladstone was like kind of libertarian or something.
So if we’re never going to agree about the good and we’re about, you know, the divinity of Christ, we’re never going to disagree about agree about natural property rights. We’re never going to agree about, you know, this class based analysis of society, whether history is a history of class struggle or something like that. How do we resolve our differences? Well, one way to resolve our differences is to have democratic choice. We just get together and we vote. But the problem here is that it’s pretty clear that sometimes the votes go wrong and we do have some kind of standard for saying when we got the vote wrong.
And the other problem is just incredibly difficult for democratic deliberation to lead to agreement. And so to find a way to kind of govern our collective lives so that we are respecting our freedom and equality and the norms of public justification. So one of the arguments Jerry makes is that the way that we actually resolve a lot of insuperable collective disputes is to devolve disputes to the individual and group level, to have what he called jurisdictional rights. So instead of, you know, collectively deciding on how we’re all going to live in our houses, you know, just having one big government-owned housing complex, right, and fighting over what the rules are, whether we can smoke or not or what kind of carpet we can have, right, we decentralize those choices, right?
And the key to decentralization and to people being able to reconcile with their different uses of their partition of social space is the institution of private property and exchange. So the rationale for democracy and the rationale for private property are basically the same, which is that there are ways of reconciling people with different perspectives. Sometimes we have to make collective decisions. Sometimes we can make our own decisions. And so democratic capitalism is actually kind of neutral because it’s the way of resolving disputes between those who disagree about the good and who disagree about justice.
It’s not maximally neutral. Nothing is. But that’s fine because that wasn’t the point.
Ross Kenyon: What do we do when we do disagree, though? I imagine the idea that we should decentralize and allow a group like white nationalists to have their own private Idaho, just like the Gus Van Sant movie. I guess that works. Is that allowed? Should we allow something like that? Or how should we disagree in a productive way?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Another thing that’s important is that even if certain abstract rights are publicly justified, like say freedom of speech, the details of how those apply are going to be controversial. And so that’s why in many cases we have to use democracy, you know, or the judiciary to resolve disputes about rights. And that’s how those institutions get publicly justified is that we have reasonable conflicting interpretations of our basic rights. And so those have to be resolved through some kind of collective decision procedure. There’s also the option of using federalism just to allow people’s polities to vary.
Although federalism is very, very, very under discussed in the public reason literature. Hell, even I had to cut that chapter out of my book. Boy, did I want to talk about it.
Ross Kenyon: I know you have a line in there about how like, oh, I wish I could, but there’s just not enough data. Something like that.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. So that’s kind of the story. I mean, I know there’s a number of different steps, but I think they connect. We can publicly justify abstract rights when we’re aware that we disagree about justice and the good because we want to be able to trust each other anyway because the benefits of social trust are staggering. And The result is that some institutions that people don’t think are ideal, even ideally just, but ones that they can live with, ones that they can live with. That’s what’s key, I think.
Ross Kenyon: So you’re thinking that the type of federalism I describe would not be publicly justified and we shouldn’t accept it?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah. I mean, if we think that decentralization is going to lead to a majority violating the human rights, the basic human rights of The minority, then that’s a reason against decentralization. So like one of my views is this, like we should have way more states rights, but racial policy should be federal. So the big worry in decentralization is that a lot of the southern states in particular will just go back to racist mores very quickly. But that doesn’t mean we can’t decentralize drug policy. Doesn’t mean we can’t decentralize health insurance policy.
Doesn’t mean we can’t decentralize education, which we already do to a large extent. It just means that when it comes to racial equity, maybe the feds have to step in and securing voting rights and those kinds of things. So that’s what I would say. In the United States, we do have a systemic racism problem. It is hard to know exactly how much it is because these are very difficult questions. Measures are controversial. But if we’re worried about bigotry in a small part, and we think that the big part can correct the bigotry in the small part, then You know, you can keep those things centralized.
And I think in the way that the United States works is that the federal government tends to be less bigoted than the state governments. It might be the reverse, right? I mean, potentially, in which case then we would want to decentralize to protect racial minorities. But the circumstances in the United States are such to where that just hasn’t historically been the case. And indeed, Black Americans trust the federal government more than they trust most people. 17% of Black Americans say most people can be trusted, as opposed to 46% of whites.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, that’s quite a statistic.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: It’s very, very sad. And it’s something we’re going to be studying empirically, because it’s both to some extent justified, but it’s also very, very harmful. Because when you’re low trust, there’s a lot of opportunities you miss. So there is a kind of what in philosophy we call epistemic injustice against the black community because there are grounds for distrust, but the distrust harms them in a way that’s unjust. Yeah, it’s a double bind. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: So for listeners, we’ve been pretty highfalutin here talking graduate level philosophy, Rawls in some degree of detail. If they care about rebuilding trust, what are some avenues that you think might be productive?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Besides the generic stuff of trying to allow for more freedom of association, to have stable protections for markets in lots of areas, of making sure that the welfare state is efficient and is addressing very deep set need, trying to preserve the integrity of the election process, reducing corruption in the legal system, particularly in the police. So that’s at a fairly high, restricting kind of rent seeking and stuff at the federal level. But those are very high levels. So maybe we could talk about, I’ll talk about some more specific stuff. One of the things I’m banging on about a lot is housing reform, of making housing cheaper to build.
Primarily through markets, but there are some ways maybe housing vouchers could be used for that well, but really ending a lot of the not-in-my-backyard zoning that makes it impossible for people to live in cities. Here’s why. A lot of trust in government is based on two different assessments. How much economic inequality there is, because a lot of people on the left think that’s just on itself a sign of unfairness, so do some on the right. But also economic growth. People think it’s one of the functions of government to make sure that they’re economically prosperous and increasingly so.
So you want more broad based growth. But housing restrictions are really, really bad for growth and inequality. One, for growth, they hold back the division of labor because workers can’t move into cities and further extend the division of labor in cities. You know, a lesson we’ve known since Adam Smith, at least. But it’s also the case that it hurts economic equality because rich people essentially redistribute upward by controlling land and who can build where. Probably Matt Rogley estimated in response to the Piketty stuff that about two thirds of the increase in equality in the United States was due to real estate, not due to income.
So if we lower the price of housing, we had zoning reform, real estate zoning reform, we could increase growth and increase economic equality at the same time. That’s very hard to do. But it’s something that I think would strengthen trust in institutions for multiple perspectives.
Ross Kenyon: Do people just feel like they can’t get a foot on the ladder because of this? And then there’s no reason to support?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: That their government is not being responsible. And I even think that kids oftentimes can’t prove this yet. That kids feel like their parents’ generation hasn’t done their job by leaving them with huge amounts of debts and expenses. So I think one source of distrust is, I think, that millennials distrust boomers.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, although there’s so many express attacks in the culture. I mean, it is from a place of resentment and mistrust in the sense that the boomers lived it up and ate the seed corns.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Do you think the more basic quotidian, join the Elks Lodge, go to your neighborhood church, know your neighbors’ names and their kids’ names, stuff like that helps too?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, I do. Particularly passing on your children. So, you know, I like to think of this analogy, you know, the image of someone, you know, coming to talk to a parent and the kids kind of hiding behind them because they’re shy and not sure how to react.
Ross Kenyon: That happens in my backyard sometimes, yeah.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah. So, you know, it happens with my three kids, you know, they, someone new comes in the house and they hide and, you know, until they see how we interact and they gradually come out and warm up. So kids learn to trust from how their parents interact with strangers is a going theory. And if you’re interacting with strangers a lot and you’re interacting with people they don’t necessarily know a lot, like in an association, like a church or a lodge or something like that, and you’re particularly doing, say, service work through a church or you’re interacting with the poor and things like that, that can be trust building for kids and that can over time raise trust.
So the practice of freedom of association, not just the bare having of it, but the exercise of that right. Particularly with institutions that are integrated and networked in the community can build social trust. And I think it also build trust in government as people learn to interact with it and learn to affect it for the good. So, you know, I think that is very, very important. I think that probably has a pretty big effect on kids. It doesn’t look like it has an effect on adults, but social trust doesn’t seem to be that affected by anything among adults because social trust attitudes tend to be things that seem to be fixed in early adulthood and childhood.
Ross Kenyon: I know you have to run here pretty soon. I’m wondering if you could take the temperature of the country. Do you think there’s good reasons to hope for increased trust or are you still pretty grim?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: I’m grim and hopeful. So I’m grim in the sense that I think trust is going to remain pretty low. I’m hopeful. And then I think Biden is going to slow its decline or maybe pause it. Restoring it’s going to take a long time. Millennials are extremely distrusting. So we’re going to have to build circumstances where the next generation can become more trusting because falling trust is like a cohort effect, like the silent generation is more trusting the boomers, who’s more trusting the Gen X, who’s more trusting the millennials. And those attitudes tend to lock in adulthood.
So we have to create a more trusting younger generation. And I’m not quite sure how we’re going to do that. So that’s difficult. However, if there’s less manifest corruption and people who are powerful getting away with a lot of garbage, that will help trust in the system. So one of the things I’m hoping will happen is that I think that even though people who are fans of Trump We need to punish powerful officials for basic moral violations. We have to punish elites for violations so that the sense is that everyone’s following the basic norms.
Because if elites stop following the norms, they erode the norms. And that makes trust harder because then it’s, well, people aren’t following the norms that exist, so I can’t count on them. So one thing I think that’s going to be important in an immediate term is simply punishing those who violate basic norms to reinforce those norms so that those norms are the basis for people learning to trust each other. Because if the powerful can just do whatever they want, I think it’s a problem for trust because it erodes the basis of trust, which is norm compliance.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Tentative, nuanced answer, but seemingly justified. If you wanted to steer someone to your work and to follow up, I think this this new book is where you would want them to go. Yes.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yes, that’s right. That’s right. I’ve written it so that it can be read by non philosophers. So the more philosophical stuff, there’s an asterisk next to those sections. So I think a lot of people, you know, any I think anyone with a college degree. Can get through it pretty easily. If you’re in a graduate program, it’s not hard at all. So I think anyone can benefit from it. I would say everyone could benefit, I think a lot from the, I worked really hard on the second chapter, which is an overview of thousands of papers in the trust literature.
Not all of which I’ve read, but I’ve read meta-analyses in different areas. I’m very proud of that chapter. I think people would like to be able to just see that chapter. It’s just pretty big, but it’s a great reference. The beginning of the book, I talk a lot about trust and polarization. In the epilogue, I talk about how to restore trust. There’s discussions of trust in institutions throughout. So it’s not just a work of philosophy. It’s also a work of political science and economics. So I think a lot of different perspectives could be interesting.
Ross Kenyon: I think so too. It’s an amazing literature review. There’s the bibliography here, the works cited, massive, useful. If you care about this topic, if you made it this far, you probably do. It would help you. It would sit well in your library. And thanks for being here, Kevin.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Oh, thanks so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.
Ross Kenyon: We got a little bit of climate change in there. I’m really happy you just went for it and maybe we should talk more about it in the future. There’s still a lot more to do. And if we don’t have trust, I don’t think action on climate change is really going to work very well. That’s right. That’s right. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience.
If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up We are also now on Patreon at patreon. com slash noripodcasts if you’d like more content, engagement, and community. And thank you so much for your support.
