I'm really delighted to see so many of us here today. It kind of demonstrates that kind of clarity of thought and reasoning and these kind of issues are still in fashion. Um my name is Tommy Lee and I I will be hosting hosting this afternoon's event. For the next one and a half hours, we will be talking about big issues like where does my responsibility start and the society's end? How should we change the way we produce services when we are dealing with a more diverse population? How much are my success or my misfortunes my own making? Does having a choice make us freer? Should should government really be telling us how many hours to work and what to eat and whom to sleep with? Is equality about giving everyone the same or giving everyone what they need? And do we actually know what we need? Is our welfare state too big to just name a few small issues? I feel very fortunate for the opportunity for all of us to make sense of these issues and and the world around us with a with a thinker who's known for her clarity of thought. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Professor Martha Nusbam is one of the sharpest minds of our time. Martha Nusbam is an American philosopher and the current Erns Fry Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. Her bibliography demonstrates of a strong work ethic. In her work, she has covered issues such as women's rights, the role of emotions in society, the arts, multiculturalism, social justice, decency, human flourishing to just name a few. Her most recent book is called Anger and Forgiveness and I hope we get a chance to dive into that as well today. She's however best known for the capability approach or capabilities approach a theoretical framework for good life she has developed with economist Amitia Sen that is going to be the core of our discussion today. The event will run as follows. I will first interview Martha we've we are on a firstname basis. So um for an hour after we will be after that we will be opening the floor for questions and comments and I welcome them warmly. Our discussion will focus mostly on the capabilities approach and we look at it from two two angles the role of government and the role of the arts. The hashtag for the event can be found there. Um, this event is put together by the city of Helsinki, the University of Helsinki and the Arts Equal Research Program. I hope you will join me in welcoming Professor Martha Despon. Welcome. Well, welcome. I'm happy to be here. I And I must say I I want to thank Tommy so much for organizing this event and for getting this large group of people here. I I'm quite amazed on a beautiful day and so on that you're all here. But anyway, thank you very very much. This is not the first time you're in Helsinki, is it? Oh, no. I mean, I come here pretty much every year. uh basically uh the work that Ammartia Sen and I did which led to the formation of the capabilities approach was done at the wider institute in Helsinki and it was in Helsinki only because the UN took bids from different countries and the bid from Finland seemed to them the best. So we had no knowledge of Finland when we came here but I grew to love it. And then I formed a collaboration with UAS Civa where we felt that we should give some conferences to bring young Nordic philosophers into contact with people from the rest of Europe and from from North America. And so every couple of years we would give a conference and although sadly UHA is no longer with us, we still have that and we we give had a conference last year and we're going to have another one next year with Sara Hanima and Sami Pilstrom. So I'm a regular. There's nothing we Finn love as much as hearing a foreigner say what you love in Finland. Well, I guess what I love is the I guess the commitment to social equality is the thing that strikes me most. In fact, my students, my graduate students once gave me a Finnish flag because I talked so often about Finland and the interest in equality, but you know, that's that's only part of it. I love the the the m the commitment to music. I'm a great lover of music. I love the the warmth and sincerity of Finnish people and the beauty of the landscape and and running through the forest. So, so lots of lots of things. Let's move closer to philosophy and your work. Um, as a philosopher, how do you decide which theme you dive into? How does that thought process go? Well, I guess there are certain themes that I've always been pretty obsessed with having to do with human vulnerability, human emotion, how we deal with the fact that we're finite and that we have so many way in so many ways our lives are influenced by luck that we don't control. And there's one side of that that's investigating the emotions. That's one big part of my work. But the other part is the political part. What does politics do to remove baneful types of vulnerability like hunger and uh susceptibility to sexual assault and violence and so so it's these two sides cultivating an openness to others that is a form of good vulnerability but closing off the bad forms and then asking which is which and and where the line falls. So, I guess it's all forms of that, but often I respond to things that my colleagues are doing. I I sometimes co-organize or co-author. I'm writing now a co-authored book on aging with a colleague of mine who's an economist. And so, you know, I get led partly by the people I know and and what they're doing in in the anger book came about because I was asked to write an op-ed for a newspaper in India about revenge and reconciliation after the Gujarat genocide. And I changed my mind along the way. So, if you looked at that oped, you wouldn't see the same view that I have in the book. But anyway, it made me think, ah, here's a rich field for further work. What's the what's the perspective you have as a philosopher? What's your kind of what's your perspective on the society? Do you are you an like external observer or are you an active participant? What's the what's the role you take? Well, I guess um you know it partly is dictated by my country because I have to say the United States it's the hardest country that I know to get really directly involved in politics. I mean, no no politician wants to talk to me. No politician wants to hear from me. Even the president who was a colleague of mine, it's impossible to talk to him. Um, so, you know, if I'm in other countries, and I think Finland being a small country is is much more open to the direct participation of the philosopher in politics. I've been recently in Colombia where I had a public discussion in a room like this with the governor of the province of Antiochia and I thought this is like a dream because in my own country I could never do that and they would never want a philosopher. So I guess I would like to be a little more directly participatory but but I think my main contribution is ideas and and writings. It would be nice if those ideas worked their way into the public domain more used to be the case. John Dwey, for example, had much more direct role in the public discussion. But uh but anyway, for whatever reason, it's just not a possibility for me. So I I the substitute is that I formed this human development and capabilities association which really does channel the interface between academic work and public policy. a lot of our members from 80 different countries. So then they go out and they influence policy in their own country and and then I also teach a lot of law students who are going to go out and be politicians and clerks for judges. So through teaching I and I mean all kinds of other students of mine end up in politics. One just won a congressional seat in California, you know. So it's through teaching that I have some some kind of effect. I guess we agreed that you would we would kind of kick off the discussion of on the capabilities approach by a fiveinut kind of introduction to the to the subject. Yeah. Okay. So, so the problem was this that in the old days when international agencies were measuring welfare and asking the question how well is this country doing? How do we compare welfare in this country with this country? They used this very crude measure which was gross domestic product or GDP per capita. Now that was kind of easy because you could get it quickly. You could measure it accurately but it was really very defective because first of all it was an average and so it just gave one number and it didn't show you the inequalities within a country. So countries with huge inequalities like South Africa under aparate used to shoot to the top of the development tables by by that measure because there was a lot of stuff around and it didn't register the fact that vast majority of the nation's people couldn't access it. The other thing that was wrong is that human life has many important aspects that it is the job of government to protect life, health, all the things on that list. But you know we were thinking about how increasing gross domestic product does not translate into improvements in health in protection against violence in education. And so you know you need to study each of these things independently and ask how people are doing. Some of them require direct targeted government action if people are to be doing better. Then one step up in level of slightly greater adequacy was the utilitarian approach which is still very popular where people instead of asking about gross domestic product they asked about satisfaction of preferences. How what's the average number for the satisfaction of people's preferences along uh different areas of their lives? How happy do they feel? Well, of course that's better because it's at least talking to people and it's at least asking them how they feel about their lives, but it has some great problems. Once again, the problem of distribution, so it's just an average, so it doesn't talk about inequality. Second, it doesn't disagregate the different aspects of of life. But then it has some further problems all its own. First of all, it doesn't talk about agency. It asks how do you do you feel pleased? That's a state and it's not being active. And there's a policy difference between promoting a feeling of being satisfied and promoting people's active involvement in their lives. And this doesn't really capture it. I mean, you can give some people food and make them feel satisfied, but that's not the same as giving them active control over the sources of nutrition. And then finally, people who have been persistently and traditionally deprived often form what we call adaptive preferences. That is to say, adjusting your satisfaction to the level that your society tells you, you have a right to expect. So you would find that if women are asked, how satisfied are you with the education you've received? In many countries where women are told, oh well, an educated woman isn't marriageable. It's not proper for a woman get to get too much education. women would report satisfaction prior to a process of consciousness raising and and yet that wasn't the end of the story, the the feeling of of of satisfaction. So so for all those reasons, we felt that what we really want and it's something that activists were already doing. You know, I always feel like I'm a a lawyer being retained by the activists in order to argue their case theoretically in agencies like the World Bank. So I I think those people are always asking what am I able to do? What am I able to achieve? What are my actual opportunities? So the capabilities approach is a a kind of formal theoretical way of capturing that very basic human question. And the last thing I'll I'll say in this brief introduction is it has two very different uses. One use which you see in the human development reports of the United Nations development pro program is simply comparative. So you've got 175 nations, you want to compare them along different parameters and so you take different capabilities and then you compare and that's very useful. It changes the space of comparison. Instead of just comparing by GDP, you're comparing now in a much richer way. But I decided to go to the next step and to think about justice because every society wants to ask not just how high up are we but what must we be doing if we are to lay claim to even minimal justice. And so um you know it's like the process of making a constitution. Whether you have a written constitution or not every society has a conception of basic entitlements that people really have a right to have. So very closely linked to ideas of human rights. And so that's what I did. And therefore I needed to introduce two things that the purely comparative approach doesn't introduce. First of all, content because you can't have a constitution that just says everyone has some basic entitlements. Have to say what they are. And you might get it wrong. But anyway, the list in its fuller form that you have on the handout is is my attempt to say, "All right, here are some good things that would be good to put into a constitution." It's actually quite informed by the constitutions of India, South Africa, and other recent nations. But the other thing you have to have is the notion of a threshold. And we'll talk more about that later. But you have to say, well, yeah, but but how much is enough? And of course it would be better perhaps to be above the threshold. But what is the line that you have to cross in order to lay claim to even minimal justice. So so those two things had to be added. What what are the main components in the in the capabilities approach? The capabilities and can you kind of talk through the capabilities and functionings? Okay. Well the idea of capabilities as you see is the idea of a a substantial opportunity. So I analyze it as having three parts in and of itself. First of all, there's what I would call basic capabilities. That is the equipment that people come into the world with that makes it possible for them under favorable circumstances to attain some fuller level of capability. But then there are what I would call internal capabilities. That is if you're going to be able to speak freely in politics, you need education. Long ago, Adam Smith observed that children who are thrust directly into factory labor without having any chance to have schooling really cannot take part in the issues of the day because their inner faculties, their ability to read and write for example and read a newspaper and so on haven't been uh developed. So th those are the internal capabilities and those of course already require work from government, work from the world and so on but they're Once it's formed, it it's in you. But you might have the internal capability and still not be able to exercise it because your country has put certain things off limit for you. So people in many parts of the world have the internal capability for religious expression, but it's denied them by the form of life, the government, whatever that they're in. Freedom of speech is another obvious one where you might be able to speak but you're not allowed to do it without penalty. So that combination of the internal formation that's already social with the favorable external circumstances that's what I call a combined capability. Now then functioning you ask about now why don't we just say the goal of society is certain human functionings. Well, that's what Aristotle does say, of course. But what's wrong with that? I think what's wrong with it is that people have a right to choose. Uh and and there's an importance of freedom that both Amario Sen and I emphasize. People ought to have the option to say, well, you know, that particular one, although it's available to me, that's not where I'm going to go. So, for example, certain religious groups think you shouldn't participate in politics. uh the old order Amish think you shouldn't even vote. Well, I'm in favor of respecting that and just saying we're not going to make people function. We're not going to draon them into some kind of functioning. Again, religious freedom. There plenty of people who really dislike religion and they don't want to have anything to do with it. But it's one thing to function in a religious way. It's quite another thing to have that opportunity. And I think we could agree that having that opportunity is part of a decent society. Even though many of us would not value that functioning at all. Now there are people in our association who think that it would be good to shoot for functioning in some areas and that is a big discussion. Richard Arnison for example thinks in the area of health government should be quite paternalistic and try to make people live healthy lifestyles. I don't agree. I think once you make the capability fully available and of course that means having recreational facilities nearby it means not having what we call in the US a food desert that is but having healthy food nearby and available to you then after that you know it's up to people to choose and uh choose the food they want and that really is their choice but anyway that's a big discussion I am um in favor of functioning for children and I think uh I mean there's a big discussion question again about how you are in favor of let's say compulsory education. I'm in favor of compulsory primary and secondary education. There are people who think that children should be treated much more like adults once they reach teenage years. So once again there's a discussion should children have the right to vote and so on. But I guess I think that making children function at a certain age is part and parcel of making them fully capable in later years. And if you don't have compulsory education as in England of Adam Smith's day they didn't well I mean even if the children thought they're choosing to go work in the factory probably they had no idea what the options were they were not going to have adult capabilities so so th those are sort of the basic idea then there's the threshold is is the other theoretical conception and there I guess I am very respectful of the internal political processes of each nation. So we would have to talk about the role of the nation at some point. I do think the nation has ethical and philosophical importance for the reasons that gcious said in the 17th century that it gives people the opportunity to make laws of their own choosing and that's a very important human capability. Now, of course, to some extent that might be achieved through a super national body such as the EU, but I think to the extent that happens, then the EU begins to look more like a federated nation like India. So, anyway, I don't think that a world state or certainly not the United Nations could ever play that role because it's not accountable enough to people and their voices. So, so I do think that what's on the list is a a blueprint for international discussion. I'm prepared to provide some pretty strong arguments that countries should adopt something like this list, but in the end they got to do it themselves and therefore the threshold has to be set in terms of their resources and their opportunities. Now then there's a big discussion about transnational obligations because if a country would like to have a pretty high threshold let's say compulsory primary and secondary education but they can't afford to do it because of economic constraints what are the responsibilities of richer nations to help them achieve that and we could talk about that more later but but I just want to flag that as an area of very uh difficult discussion but I do think the moral goal should be in the end that all world citizens have all these opportunities but the threshold for reasons of respect for each nation's autonomy and for people's autonomy needs to be set within the nation is the the ultimate goal of in the capabilities approach is it is it freedom or autonomy or what what would you say is the is the well the ultimate goal of course I want to emphasize that this is a partial goal it's for political purposes only And people will always be adding things that are not on this list because they have a more comprehensive conception of human flourishing that they're pursuing in their personal lives. And deliberately this list is thin. It's not expressed in terms of deep metaphysical concepts like human nature or the nature of the soul. But it's expressed only in sort of a a thin ethical language that we hope would command broad uh consensus. And it's also narrow. It doesn't contain things like preparation for the life after death, meaningfulness, mindfulness. But it's the part that we think it makes sense to turn over to the basic political processes of a nation. And because nations contain many many different comprehensive conceptions, some of them religious, some of them secular, and we want to respect that and leave room for that. It's deliberately thin. So I I guess I think that if we just focus on the political part, the goal is to give everyone these opportunities and then let them choose, let them see what they do with it. And of course, it does partly depend on their comprehensive conception, which ones they want to actualize. If you are an old order Amish person, you're happy to live in a country that allows people to vote, but you're not going to vote. And so then that's up to you. Let's continue on that issue. Finland was recently ranked number one on a nanny state index, a league table of the worst places in the European Union to eat, drink, smoke, or vape. Fin was followed by Sweden, the UK, Ireland, and Hungary. What is your take on regulating the things we eat, drink, smoke, have sex with? Well, I want to separate smoke because I'm a person with tremendous number of allergies, and I suffered greatly in um classrooms, in public places, in restaurants, and um just wasn't able to enjoy my own air, you know, because everyone else was smoking. So, I think that's different. That's what Mill calls an other regarding activity because it has implications. So we count but but with respect to all the others you know I guess I think the the important thing is to realize that respect for the equality and dignity of persons requires giving them spheres of freedom and not just any old freedom but freedom on a basis of equality. Now, I think that most people would would agree that if you say, "Oh, we give we'll say we give Muslims some religious freedom, but it's not equal to the freedom that we give to Christians." That there's something wrong with that. Some freedom isn't enough, but equal freedom. And to me, that means no established religion, but that's a long discussion. I think, you know, I always use Finland's established church as an example of the most benign establishment, but even then, I think it's a it's a mistake to announce that one religion is the preferred one. But anyway, um, in general, I think equal freedom is the right option. Now, what that would mean is take sex. It's not enough to say, "Oh, well, if you're a same-sex couple, we'll give you civil union, which will give you all the financial benefits and the the welfare benefits that we give to straight couples." But that's not an equal freedom because it's a a kind of secondass status. We're refusing you a name that has great expressive power. It's as if in my own country's terrible history with the laws against interracial marriage, it's as if we had said, "Oh, we'll create a special category of transracial union and we'll give them certain benefits, but we won't let you get married." Well, of course, we could easily see that that's unacceptable and it's not an equal freedom. And I think the same was true with the era where we where some people in the US thought that you could substitute civil union for real marriage. You've also said that the capabilities need to be created in such a way that people can count on them in the future as well. Why is that important? Yeah, actually I want to acknowledge two people who who wrote really well about this and that is Aar Desalit and Jonathan Wolf have this wonderful book called Disadvantage and I realized reading that book that there was something I had left out. I I kind of always meant it but I didn't say it. So I do feel they've made me do something better than what I had done before. What they say is that then then they studied empirically new immigrants in their two countries uh namely Britain and Israel and they found that what immigrants really want is not just to be able to do something today but to be able to count on it for the future. So they have this concept called capability security which is extremely important and of course it you have to then start going into the different areas and think about that. I mean, I think everyone can see that if you have freedom of speech today, but you have a government that could arbitrarily intervene and snatch it away tomorrow, as is now the case in India, you know, where students are sometimes allowed to speak freely and then one day it turns out they have a peaceful protest and they're all thrown into jail. Well, that's not they haven't guaranteed that capability. That's part of the Indian Constitution. And I have written about that. So you can know if you look up my piece on freedom of speech in India in the Indian express it's on online but um you know that's one example but in the environmental area I think we have to think much further ahead we have to think not just about ourselves but about our children and our grandchildren not just having clean air now but what about counting on that for the long future but not just clean air but of course a diverse bio environment So those things are important that kind of forward directed thinking. And if you just think about capabilities here and now, you wouldn't get to the heart of those issues. We we've been um kind of using the the capabilities approach in the in the way we look at young people's well-being here in Helsinki. And what I noticed with the list that we see here um is that when we start from the top, people are like life, yes, budly health, yes. And then we when you move downwards and you get like the latest when you get to play you have people saying h does that really belong to the same list as life? How do you like why is play in the on the same list as as life and bodily health? Um, you know, uh, a lot of this comes out of my experience as a feminist thinking about what women lack. And I think you can easily see that when women feel sort of empowered, namely they can go out and work and earn an income. They can vote and so on. But at the same time, they have to do all the child care, all the elder care, all the domestic labor. So their lives are very burdened. They have no time for themselves, no time to cultivate a hobby to enjoy themselves. Play is the general rubric for that space for yourself that you can use in any way you feel like and and thereby enriching your inner world, enriching your friendships and your love relationships. And I think it's the case that poverty all over the world removes that. So we want to talk about that. But I I I do think it's a gender phenomenon too that that women even women let's say in a nation like Japan where when my book was translated into Japanese the Japanese translator said she didn't understand the capability of play and I thought oh yeah that that's no surprise to me because Japanese women although they're doing well on most of the things on the list they really do very badly on that one. very stressed out and they were really because there's been no attempt to relieve them of those all those responsibilities. It's thought, oh well that's a woman's work. You'll do it out of love or whatever. Are are all the capabilities of equal importance. Well, I would say that they're all of intrinsic value and they're all necessary for the sake of achieving a just society. So you can't say well you know from right now we're going to we can't do health so we're going to buy that one off by having an extra amount of education. That doesn't work. But I do think that in any context there might be better intervention points. Uh this is another thing that Wolf and Deshelite write well on. They have this concept of what they call corrosive disadvantage and a complimentary concept that they call fertile functionings which I I think really they should say fertile capabilities. They were kind of betrayed by the the alliteration in fertile functionings. But um anyway, what what they're saying is there are certain functionings that generate or certain capabilities that generate other capabilities and there are some disadvantages that are corrosive meaning that they remove others. Now that's a contextual matter. I think we can understand corrosive disadvantage often through the example of being vulnerable to sexual violence. That's something I mean this is something you can have when everything else looks like it's in pretty good order. So like my graduate students right now because we've had three instances of sexual violence during the past year in my philosophy department. Uh my female graduate students do have that corrosive thing hanging over their lives. E either they've suffered it themselves or they fear that they might suffer it from largely other students. and um you know for that reason there are a lot of other things it harms their health it harms their work it harms their sense their practical reason their sense of their future we could go on and on so that's the example of a corrosive disadvantage there might be many others if I had to start thinking where to intervene I would think about that fertile capabilities on the other side are the ones that let's start there because they create a lot of other ones. I think education is a very obvious thing that's fertile because once let's say women get the primary and secondary education that gives them exit options from a bad marriage it makes it possible for them to go on and get employment to participate more in politics and so on. So um so in many contexts that would be a good starting point if you can't get them all at once. There's been some critical voices saying that that the capabilities approach or the or the list is is a western concept of good life. How do you answer that criticism? Well, you know, I mean, of course, it's just factually false. It was made up by an Indian namely a Marty San and in our association um we have people from 80 countries and the large the intellectual leaders have also come from many many countries and we deliberately have them meeting in in different countries. the chief economist of the World Bank right now. Now Koshikbasu is a capability economist who is Indian again a lot of South Asians just because that discourse was especially well developed in Bangladesh in India in Pakistan Mabuhak who created the human development list was a Pakistani economist uh so you know that just happens to be a particularly large home for that and I I think there's a a very clear reason for that because in the Bengali enlightenment Rabbindra Tagore was a leading theorist who already had these these concepts well-developed I think much more than any western philosopher but so so it's factually false but it's also important to us to constantly seek out new inputs from other places and this is why let's say we last year we had our meeting in the US that's the first time in ages we've done that because it's very difficult for people from other countries to get visas to come so it's not a good place to have a meeting but anyway this year it's in Japan next year in in South Africa. We've had meetings two meetings in Latin America. We've had meetings in India and there so we move around and we really really try not to stick to Europe and North America. The other thing is that now that criticism I think is not correct even about human rights and you you hear it much more often with the human rights approach. Martia has written very well about how the idea of human rights has its roots in Indian traditions in Chinese traditions and so on. But the idea of capabilities is is even more obviously not tainted in that way because it's it's just this human idea. What am I able to do? In what country may I ask? Does somebody not ask that question? You know, and it's a question, you know, I go around and I talk to to women in development of projects, women who haven't learned to read and write. they couldn't be influenced by any particular kind of philosophy but they they of course they want to know what they can do and what good activists typically urge them to do is I mean this is pre- theoretical entirely because these activists themselves are not trained in philosophy they ask them to draw a map of the power structure of their village and you know showing where they what they can do and what they can't do and that's just a very natural human question do sense that you are slightly frustrated by by this criticism. Well, I mean, I don't think it's a very helpful criticism. I mean, the further thing to say is that if something originates in one place, that doesn't mean that people shouldn't borrow it and and adapt it to their own cultural context. Obviously, a lot of our ideas are Indian and Rabbindrath Dor was a particularly large source of inspiration. In fact, for the handbook on capabilities, I'm writing about that. And you know in so far as Aristotle comes into it, it's Aristotle is mediated by the humanist Marxists and by Toore and lots of other people in different countries. But why not borrow something if you think that it's good? And I certainly do that all the time. So I don't really know. I think no one really believes that it's right for people to use only those ideas that their local culture already has. Even to the extent that they would try to say that. Of course, most cultures have a lot more ideas than you would recognize if you only read the dominant male writings of those traditions because women's voices have not been recorded. Poor people's voices have not been recorded. And so before they could even phrase their objection, they would have to try to hear all the voices and then they would get a tumultuous debate, they would not just get a single view that looks very different from the western view. The this kind of the standard or the dominant kind of approaches to well-being that dominate our politics in most countries put a lot of emphasis on, let's say, health services and social services. You've talked a lot about the arts and the importance of the arts. Um, how do you how do you think that the the arts create capabilities? Well, I think any political culture needs human beings to care about it if it's ever going to come into being. And once it comes into being, if it's ever going to remain stable over time, and I think you can't even say that this is a good political conception without showing that it has ingredients in it that make it possible for it to sustain itself over time. And so this is really what my book political emotions is about that all decent societies need a need to attend to the emotions. Now it's obvious in a context of coming into being let's say Gandhi's freedom movement that the arts play a huge role. I mean Gandhi knew you didn't just give people little sermons but you engaged with them in singing. Uh dance was not his particular thing but he he did turn to Tor for the songs that the people on in his movement used. D Gore believed that dance was the great source of empowerment for women because they until they could move their bodies freely, they wouldn't be able to be free citizens. And so he wrote very well about that. In fact, Amarusan's mother was one of his leading dancers and she wrote a whole book about that which is only available in India. So I try to quote large chunks of it in the things that I write. Um yeah, so the arts in many ways now there are lots of different arts that play a role and obviously uh music is great because everyone can join in near and far and um it's it's possible to to go outside the local culture and everyone is singing the same song. Um, visual art obviously has spatial limitations, but I talk a lot in the book about how cities particularly can use powerful examples of public sculpture and public art or festivals that bring people together and use the arts in order to sort of affirm the values of the political culture. There can be national holidays like making Martin Luther King Jr's birthday a major national holiday when everything comes to a stop and we hear the words of King's very poetic speeches. Uh that that too is a very important source of emotional empowerment. So I think there really just so many different ways in which the arts can play a role. Some of them of course are not in the political culture. I'm just focusing on what can government do and I think there's quite a lot that government can do. Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that in the New Deal you had to whip up support for those welfare policies in some emotional way and and luckily he had all these unemployed artists. So he put them to work for the welfare projects that he had in mind and used photography, used fiction and so on to generate support for the New Deal. There's actually at the Finnish National Gallery now an exhibition of Alice Neil who is one of these artists. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, of course, some of it is informal some of it is governmental. The two do a lot together. I think often you find that the informal civil society sector can use appeals, for example, appeals to religion which the government should probably not use. And so, for example, in thinking about violence in the city of Chicago, people really resonate to Christian hymns and to gospel, but it would be a bad idea for the city of Chicago to hold a well, they they can hold a gospel festival that everyone could choose to come to, but for them to have the police engaging in singing Christian hymns is problematic because it it does involve the establishment of one particular religion. But certainly for the church groups to reach out to the police and say, you know, come and join with us. And so that's that that is happening and it's quite good. Yeah. There's kind of a hype in the in the arts field around the well-being effects of the arts and and some some artists at least who I've met kind of see risks in in in in that we see them too narrowly that in a way the well-being effects would be interpreted in the same way as as let's say it makes you happy. What's what's your take on this discussion? Well, the discussion that focuses on the idea of happiness I have real problems with in the international development arena. Now, that's a very popular notion and it comes from the work of Daniel Conamoran, the Nobel Prize winning. He won the prize for economics, but he's actually a psychologist. The problem is that his notion of happiness is very narrow. It's like how do you feel momentto moment? And you're supposed to just say, you know, I feel on one a scale of 1 to 10. Now, I mean, first of all, it's just too it has some of the same problems that I talked about before. It aggregates all the parts of your life. If you were to really sit down and think about your life, you would be likely to say something much more complicated than, oh, I'm at eight now. You would say, well, I'm very feel my work is going well. my children are doing well, but I'm worried about an elderly relative who's ill and I think my country is in a terrible mess and so on. So, you'd have all these different things and it doesn't allow you to do that. And the second thing which comes from the last thing I just said is that sometimes it's good to feel upset. If you're a decent person, you will be unhappy about the way the world is. And that's good. And it's not it's so to shoot for happiness in the sense of contentment is not a good idea. You should shoot for meaningfulness and richness of life. Now the word happy in the English language used to mean that. Werdsworth had a poem who is the happy warrior by which he meant the one who's leading a flourishing life and he includes risk fear you know pain things that you get into if you care about other people but nowadays and in conan's work the word happiness has this cheapened definition and and I don't think that we want that in fact very early in our project at wider there was a Finnish great Finnish sociologist Eric Allard who participated in our project and he has this book which in English is called having loving being it's written in Swedish and and he was pointing out that in Nordic culture the idea of happiness as contentment is not a particularly central value but being active and being involved with nature involved with other people these are much more central values. Um let's let's look at kind of one of the um the more more difficult u capabilities. Let's say like for instance the senses imagine imagination and thought. Why is that essential that we we kind of develop that capability? Well that one of course as stated it's much too general. You just couldn't put into a nation's constitution that we want to have development of senses imagination and thought. And if you look at the list, I break it down and it quickly gets much more concrete, including freedom of speech, freedom to cultivate your imagination in artworks of your choice. So artistic freedom, academic freedom, freedom of religion. But yeah, I mean these are very important human capacities and the imagination I think is a key in so many ways to being a good citizen because how can you how can you relate to other people in a highly diverse society if you're unable to take up in imagination their position? Now, of course, all human beings from birth have some rudimentary form of that ability and it's something that we share with dolphins, with chimpanzees, with elephants, this capacity to see the world from the perspective of another creature. But most of us develop it very unevenly. We learn to how the world looks from the point of view of our parents because we want to use that to get something that we want. And uh most of us are very narrow and we can see how the world looks from the point of view of somebody pretty much like ourselves. But how it looks from the point of view of a racial minority or a Muslim or something, we haven't done that. And that's where education becomes crucial. And so in my book on education not for profofit I say that a key assignment of a decent education system including elementary, secondary and university is to broaden and enrich the imagination by making us more fully capable of assuming in a a meaningful way the positions of diverse other people. If we're going to vote on policies that affect their lives, we better be able to do that. Your your most recent book is called Anger and forgiveness which looks at anger in personal relationships, daily inter interactions and in politics. Why why did you choose a subject like anger? Well, okay. So historically speaking, I had to give the John Lock lectures at Oxford University and I was thinking about what topic it would be and I was thinking of writing about the fear of death but I didn't really I'd written an long article about that and I didn't know whether I had knew things that I wanted to say but then I was invited to write this oped for the Indian Express about how should one feel when these people who perpetrated genocide in Gujarat in 200 2 were finally convicted and sent to prison terms and I there in the op-ed I did praise the spirit of justified anger but then later I mean so I thought thinking about anger thinking about forgiveness these would be very good topics for a series of lectures because it was one emotion that I'd never written about but when I got down to it and I was really sitting in my study and thinking what anger is and how we define it I became became convinced that anger at least as most common forms of it that Aristotle and the whole philosophical tradition not just the western tradition but the Indian tradition too were correct in saying that anger always contains in itself the hope for the suffering of the perpetrator. So it includes the thought that you've been wronged, that you've been damaged in a way that was wrongful, but it also includes the thought that it would be good to pay that person back. And I came to the conclusion that that thought was flawed, deeply flawed. that number one the the the idea that you achieve something that you really do what you want by paying the other person back is deeply confused because changing you don't change the past as Ecolus says when a man's blood has been spilt on the ground what can call it back again you know so you kill the person who killed your child what good does that do and that to the extent that any thing is done by that you have to test it empirically and you have to think what forms of punishment actually can be shown to produce good results going forward. Now, we might be able to justify many forms of punishment by thinking about the good that they do. But we have to have to do that work and most people don't. They're in the grip of an idea of cosmic balance that makes them think, "Oh, it's the wrong has thrown the balance off. Now I'll write the balance again by a proportional pain inflicted on the victim." and and I just came to the conclusion that that's very muddy and confused thinking and that it it it stops us from all kinds of useful forms of thought. For example, in the area of crime, I think one has to first think what do we do before the crime takes place? Because actually to wait around, oh, bad act then we'll push you down. That's stupid because you want to stop the crime from taking place in the first place. And as Jeremy Bentham said, that means you think about education, you think about employment, you think about the many things you would do to prevent a person from wanting to commit that crime in the first place. If you think about parents, they don't wait around till their children have committed some terrible act and then say, "Oh, now I'm going to, you know, hit you," or something. Maybe parents used to do that, but they tend not to do that now. Instead they think well how should I prepare the child to be a good person how should I support that child's developing capacities through nutrition through inspiration through affection through education and so on but a good society should do that too so I really did feel the more I thought about it that the whole idea behind retributivism was deeply confused and that's what the book is in large part about you um you talk about in your book also about anger in politics. Yes. Seems to be a very current theme. We don't need to name a lot of a lot of other names than Trump. Um and we've seen also here in the in in in Europe how anger kind of is stirred up by the by the unpredictable things that happen with with um the refugee crisis or economic uh issues or or terrorism and so on. Where do you where do you find hope? Well, I guess I think we have to step back and ask why there's so much anger now. Now, I think one reason is that people are feeling helpless. And it's human beings have a hard time being helpless. And when they feel helplessness, whether in the personal sphere or in the political sphere, they would like to take control. And one way of seeming to take control is through some kind of retributive project. So let's say my mother has died in the hospital. It's a very common thought. I'll sue the doctors. At least that's what Americans tend to do. Uh because it just makes you feel like you're doing something. You don't have to mourn anymore, which is very hard, but instead you can sue somebody. Again, in the divorce context, I'm afraid people think, "Well, I'm helpless because I've lived for 35 years as part of a couple. I have no idea how to go out to dinner and not as part of a couple. I don't know what job I want to do and so on." And instead, they think, "I'll litigate against my ex and I'll have that retributive project and it will take over the center of my life." No, in politics, I think what's happened in the US is that white men who used to be just the dominant group and they used to have good life prospects across the board, they've been hit by circumstances in a way that really does deserve our our thought and our concern. First of all, because jobs in construction and manufacturing have gone, and often these lower middle-class white men don't have the education that would enable them to get the jobs that do exist. But second, there are new people. I mean, they were prepared for a world in which women didn't work. All of a sudden, women are demanding equal access to employment. And then, not to mention all these Latino immigrants, legal and illegal, coming in and taking the jobs. and the African-Americans who have the gall to demand that they could even be involved in in employment and politics. So they displace their search for solutions onto the politicians who have fostered the equality of these groups and onto the groups themselves. Now of course the problem is really really difficult and we we know Angus Eaton who won this year's Nobel Prize in economics is now working on the health of white men in the US and the decline in longevity is extraordinary and the rise in prescription drug abuse and opiate abuse is is frightening. So that certain states like Maine and Vermont that you don't think of as terribly depressed states, they're largely white states, they've declared a state of emergency because of prescription drug abuse. So there's no doubt that these are real problems and that they need very hard thought before we could solve them. But instead of getting together and trying to solve them, people just it's easier to convert it into anger and blame. And that's what's happening. We will be opening the floor shortly for questions after after this. So so please be prepared. Um if you if we take it kind of on a personal level, the issue of anger and helplessness and feeling helpless. Um in my work working with with young people, I see a lot of parents who feel helpless about the future. um they don't know where the world is going. Um everything seems unpredictable. What would you they they kind of cannot guarantee a good life for their children. Um what would you say to a parent like this? Well, of course, I think that a government that's decent ought to guarantee a minimum living standard. So, that would be the starting point. Now whether that includes employment or not, I think that's up to each nation to discuss because I don't believe that employment is an essential ingredient of the human good. I think that it's a means but maybe other people don't agree with that. I mean, of course, I come from the the ancient Greeks thought if you had to work, that was probably unfortunate, whereas Marx has made us think that that employment is the central arena within which we define our humanity. And well, so we'd have to have that discussion. But in any case, um, we have to think about how to what what are the things that decent government can do, should do in order to make a minimum living standard available. But then um after that we have to ask what are what are the problems? I mean how do we understand the problems and how could we solve them and how can we solve them preferably as I said before not just for today but but but in a stable way for the future and that means thinking about environmental quality in a more than short-sighted way. I think a lot of Americans think, oh well, if we just pollute some more, then we can have some more employment in the short term through the coal industry, but you know, that's not a good solution if what you want is that your grandchildren should have also a decent living standard. So, so you know, just good hard thought and research is what we really need to do. I've been interrogating you now for an hour. Um, so let's give her like the mid applause and then Please be brave and unfinish and raise your hand and and uh ask questions. It would would be nice if you tell who you are while you while you ask the question. I think there's now are you passing around those? There's a microphone going around going around. Okay. Yeah, there's one there. Um so introduce myself first. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I'm in Hari Mah. I'm studying philosophy also. Um I very much appreciate the way that you defended art and space and society. Um and I think it very neatly relates to many points in the human capabilities especially number four, five and nine. Yeah. Um but I was a bit unease about um the specific examples of how the government could take a part as part of its function. Um in the beginning they really thought about the difference between capabilities and function and how um there's too much perhaps function sometimes promoted and that government should be more about uh about the capabilities. Now in the context of art you mentioned things like uh the government having public statues in place uh to promote the political values. Um now I see that there might be a danger there that just in the case of religion if we make one religion the religion of Finland we have promoting one over the other. Now in the same way in that case we might be putting one aesthetic top the other. Now do you think that in art there should be um more uh the function of government as opposed to for example religion um or how do you see overall the relation between functionities in the context of the aesthetic and the art? Well yeah that's a great question. It's a very hard question. Um the first thing to say is that the core political values have a centrality and a status that the parts of people's comprehensive conceptions outside that don't have. So let's say our society is committed to racial and gender equality. Then we can have a festival celebrating that and that does not have the bad nature of having let's say a Christian festival because our society has said nonracism is for all of us a central core value. I mean if if it's right that we've said that and then then it's right to have a holiday that celebrates that. And now of course it would be wrong. I mean so then we have to ask what can we do to do can we make people take part in that no I think we really shouldn't and there have been some really uh so in my chapter of political emotions on that I say we have to always protect the freedom of disscent even in the context of public celebrations that we think of as really connected in a core way to the political institutions so for example when people thought oh we'll have a the American pledge of allegian allegiance to the flag was invented by some Christian socialists who thought that instead of celebrating capitalism we should be celebrating uh liberty and justice for all is what it says. So that was the origin. But then people thought we should make all school children recite that every day. And there have been many years of struggle during which children whose religions and whose other comprehensive doctrines forbids them from saluting an object and so on would try to get out of that and it was I think shameful that dissenters were not allowed to opt out. Now then the question is what is it to opt out? And boy, the history of the Supreme Court cases on that is fascinating because there's one question like if you have some sort of meditative exercise at a school graduation and everyone is standing up, does that ostracize the denter? that very fact that everyone is standing up at that point and the Supreme Court has said yes because peer pressure is so important for uh adolescence that we don't want that enforced conformity even to the extent of standing up. Okay. So we have many difficult discussions to have around that kind of thing but I guess I think what the government should be doing is to invite and not draon. But of course, in many cases, when it's the core political values you want to protect, you've got to be non-neutral and you've got to help um select artists who are going to express a message that is in a non-racist culture that's a non-racist message. If you take that um that British poster that's become so controversial now where they say where they show this parade of immigrants and they say um the breaking point. I don't know if you've seen that on TV, but it's a it's a by the people who want to leave the EU and it's trying to scare people about immigration. Of course, it would be totally disgraceful if the government of any country had a representation like that. I'm afraid that it has happened. I mean, this Swiss referendum about minouretes contains some really ugly posters of very similar kind and those were prepared by the government. So um so you know when Chicago is thinking what kind of uh sculpture should we have they're right to think we want a sculpture that affirms the worth of all the different racial and ethnic communities. And so in our Millennium Park which is on the cover of my book actually because I like it so much we have three pieces. There's Frank Garry's beautiful sculpture which represents peace. It's basically a helmet that's fallen on its side and it has plumes coming out of the top and it represents the end of conflict and the beginning of flourishing. It's a band shell but it's also a sculpture. Then we have Xiao Plansa's crown fountain where there are these two huge screens where at any given time there will be huge faces of Chicagoans of different races and different ages and they'll be moving in slow motion. So it's actually very funny. So you see this huge face and for them to raise an eyebrow takes like five minutes. So it's it is very funny. And then at the end of the five minutes that this face has has their time on the stage. Out of the mouth of the so-called face comes this jet of water and it splashes on anyone who's there. And of course, everyone knows that and old and young, they'll stand in the water. And it has a kind of deep um emotional significance because sharing swimming pools, sharing drinking fountains was forbidden in the Jim Crow South. And so here are the different races in front of pictures of different races, but sharing water and mixing together in the water. And um it's I mean Walt Whittmann already thought that it was a very powerful image of mingling, sexual mingling even he in his song of myself there's this line they do not think whom they souse with their spray and that's what I think of whenever I see that sculpture. So I think it's a wonderful idea that they created this and of course it's not neutral but it is a way of affirming uh the the core political values. Now you don't want Soviet realism. You don't want the government to think, "Oh, now I'm going to tell this artist what to do." So, you have to have a very complicated relationship between the true creative expression of real artists and the political values you want to support. And I think the way of doing this is a jured competition usually. So, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which I talk about at length, was the result of a jured competition with certain constraints. Uh, but Maya Lynn was unknown and then she won that. and she won it because that memorial is a powerful mediating and expressive um enactment of of grief and mourning in a way that brings people together. So, so yeah, I mean these are hard issues and of course then once again I want to say even though I like Millennium Park and I like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, no, if a school child says I don't want to go there, I don't want to take part, then that's fine. They should do that. And I would go one step further and say the government should actually dignify and give centrality to images of courageous disscent. So like Chicago has a book club where everyone in the city is involved if they if they choose to be in discussions of one book. The first book they chose was to kill a mockingb bird. And I thought that's great because that is an image of courageous dissent against authority. So you want to have that. Wonderful. Thank you. Um, are there other questions? I hope hope they are. Um, there. Okay. Hello. Um, I'm Leonard Rasari, retired um um professor in social work. Uh not only that but actually um the last um years I kind of specialized to communities and what you told about um um anger and communities is something that through the internet and what we call the hate hate pages um um is kind of very important question I haven't seen anyone to actually to right about it. But um I sort of um um have felt all the time that um because um the um ways how the communities act also in negative ways, how the anger is kind of uh um how it gets greater and so on and because there is internet, there is um social media and so on. So nowadays we have kind of seen a new way of of getting angry very very fast. I myself um were a little um time for example with in politics, but I noticed that it was kind of scary because it did take very little time to say something as a uh green red feminist because that was kind of red flag for uh some people who hated them. So and instead of uh me um being there with my name, so there were plenty of of people who didn't um have a name. So uh people came to say that okay it's not it's not um uh it's nothing they do nothing but how do you I know and now if we think for example the English case so uh we don't know if if people are for real but anyhow um what I tried to say is that um that um the internet has given a new kind of um media for this political hate to get heated and very fast. Um that was my point. Yeah, I I mean this is of course it is you're absolutely right issue. A couple of things that are have been written about this that I think you would find very helpful. There's one uh book by a woman named Danielle Citron Ci called Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. I actually reviewed it for the nation. So you can also find my review of it. You could get there a summary of what what she says. But then there's a an edited collection called the offensive internet speech privacy and reputation which is edited by my colleague Saul Levmore L V and me. Uh so we talk about this kind of abuse and and what can law do about it. One issue is anonymity because if you are going to try to sue someone for defamation, you can't do it because you can't find out who it is. And there are certain features of the communications decency act that we have in the US that immunize website owners and and and search engines from having to divulge any kind of identifying information. So we need to reconsider that and there's a a very difficult discussion there because obviously if you say they have to be able on request give the name that's going to inhibit some of the good functions of the internet political disscent functions functions of young transgender and queer people looking for other people who share their experiences but they don't want to give their name and so on. So we have to be very careful and Citron used to believe that we should really march in quite aggressively with law and penalize these as hate crimes even though they take place through speech. And she, you know, on reflection and she describes this in her book, she came out thinking, well, we can do that only in some areas like where there's a specific kind of revenge relationship that we can document. But she she backed off the more general claim that we should just penalize the speech as a hate crime. And and I think that probably I agree with that changed view. But it's very very difficult. It's not simple. And there are people who think oh free speech is an absolute value and then they make it too simple. And I think we can't make it so simple. There's a a lot of new work that needs to be done. The philosopher Susan Bryson, who's written very very well about sexual violence and written another very good book about free speech, is now developing a a collection about sexual violence in cyerspace. And in fact, I she invited me to write something and I said I won't do it because beyond the the little that I did in the volume I co-edited with Levmore, I don't know enough about it. I don't belong to any social media. And I think it's not just the internet by itself, but it's social media now where an awful lot of the problem takes place. And Facebook and Twitter, but also dating apps and so on where people are bombarded by nude photos. And so I think someone who has much more experience than I, and I've deliberately, as I told Tommy, I I just never even joined Facebook has to be doing that. But I do feel it's one of the most important things that the the philosophers and social thinkers in general should be doing. Anyone else? Here's one. Yeah. There's a you next performing arts theater on the university. uh you mentioned senses, fantasy, thinking and also play as some of the central capabilities. Uh now in in your view, what are some of the key social mechanisms that may hinder people from realizing these capabilities in their everyday life in western developed countries? Well, that that's a great question and I think it's a two-fold question because it's what I've always focused on is what can government do? But of course that's only a part of the more general social concern we should have for fostering these capabilities through civil society and through personal interventions. I guess I think the the biggest one is isolation and that even though the internet is a powerful mode of connection, it's very thin and it's not very aesthetic and especially as people age and as a growing proportion of the population is aging. there's tremendous isolation and in in the US probably more than most countries because we often move so much and the so the people live in a place that's far from their children and their grandchildren and they just they don't have this fabric of human connection and the way work has developed occupying more and more hours and taking away time from volunteer and leisure activities has also uh affected this. So Robert Putnham in his book bowling alone I'm sure you know uh that people aren't participating in these meaningful forms of social bonding. Now I guess I think at the level of the you know the particular workplace the particular community then you just have to think what in my community can I do to create a thicker network of human connection and I mean just as a maybe it's a silly example but it's the one that I've done in in my law school which can often be a very sterile and hard kind of community because people are really you know they're very tough arguers and they're engaged in a very technical discipline. Every two years we have a law and literature conference that talks about literature. So that's the first way the arts come in. But we also I've added to it theater and I get my colleagues to act and we put on a play together and um we also end up have music. The ones who can sing will sing. And now it's so popular that the problem is that everyone wants a part and they it's it's almost impossible to cast it. But the the last one we did was act three of Shaw's Major Barbara, but then we did part of the Orestia. So, you know, it humanizes the community and now we really think of each other in a different way. this is the one who was sort of so powerfully weeping as such and such and so in in fact we chose a dean this year and the dean we got to know him because he played the god Apollo in the orrestaya because otherwise people didn't know his full emotional range and what he was capable of and what his voice sounded like. So you know this is what I think we can all do this in different ways in our own environments and just have an improvisatory idea and see how it works and just build from that. Now what can government do? This is complicated. I think cities have much more capacity for this than than national government or even than rural communities because you know Chicago is a place where people mix and and they can go to this park and they can participate in some festival that you might hold. So it's easy. I mean, some I'm sure Tommy has wonderful ideas about how youth in the city of Helsinki can get together and I I guess I'd like to throw the question over to you to some extent and think how do you get artists and and and also young people to be their own artists because I've seen a film that he got young people to make for themselves. Uh so so what would you say in answer to that? Um we're I think a good example is we're doing this project now with six kind of leading museums in Helsinki. Um museums are by definition free pl free free of charge places for young people to go to but they don't go there. Um and kind of we see that there's a kind of a there's a transformation problem that this resource doesn't translate into into into something that young people would actually use. Um, so we're doing a project now where we hired teenagers to we gave them summer jobs in these museums and tomorrow they're doing events that would be interesting for young people in these museums in six in six museums in Helsinki and it's been really interesting to kind of um see how they challenge the the kind of arts professionals to think differently about what's interesting in their museum. There was an example from the design museum where they said that um your museum is interesting. You have a lot of interesting stuff, but everything says do not touch. Yeah. Yeah. But the Tate Modern, I just saw a program about the new wing of the Tate Modern in London where all of a sudden you can touch everything. You can lie down on a bed and take a nap and so so I think having more participatory art and of course theater is a wonderful instance. I've written about the Chicago Children's Choir which uses both music and theater to get children from different walks of life to participate. But yeah, the museums themselves have to become more open. So for instance, tomorrow at the at Tidal the Kunal in Helsinki, you can go and and and color of Finland drawings if you want. Um because that's what they decided to do. Um you had a question here in front. Hi, my name is a boo and I am a doctoral student here in the University of Helsinki and just starting my PhD on your work in education and in basic education and um because you're so well known and so influential uh and I understand that you've left your work and this list to be implemented and interpreted and to be continued and developed. uh are you ever afraid of it being like kind of interpreted in an ethically suspicious way or bad things done in your name? For instance, when I think of education, there are so many ways to start implementing this list and what if states or policies start to focus on like marketable and like easy capabilities or capacities that are not necessarily for the well-being of the whole society. Do you have has that ever happened? Are you afraid of that? Well, I guess it's a of course a wonderful question. One thing we've done, in fact, it was not even Ammartia's idea and mine, but the of the younger people start this human development and capability association so that we can have more pluralism and more debate. And I really want different understandings and different interpretations. I don't want to be regarded as some person who has a church, you know, where there's this Orthodox text and now we all have to obey that text. Uh I mean, I'm happy to have people who take issue with my views. Now, of course, what I'd like is that they would say, "I'm taking issue with your views and this is why I'm taking issue with them." And there are plenty of papers every year where we we we do that. And um right now, my daughter is taking issue in a way with some of my views. She's an animal rights lawyer and she she and I are writing things about animals that really force me to extend what I have said about animal welfare beyond what I've said before. So that's great. Now if somebody ascribes something to me that's not what I think of course that can easily happen. And it it it happens with every philosopher and thank god um we have the texts of Aristotle so we know something about what Aristotle said but it has no resemblance to what a lot of people have said in Aristotle's name. One time I taught a seminar on neoaristilian political thought and the hilarious thing was that you had every possible thing from Catholic conservatives and Catholic relativists and Catholic liberals and then you had of course the Marxist humanists. You had the British perfectionist socialists. So okay, I mean up to a point a text is a space and people can should cultivate it in their own way and I would probably be not too happy with a lot of it what what people do but I if I become aware of it I can say something but I don't go around you know searching out every possible misunderstanding. I it it does irritate me sometimes because I do feel that people are pretty careless readers and one of the things I find is that with a big book like upheavalss of thought which has many chapters and I say very very explicitly that chapter 1 is a crude sketch that's going to get modified and developed and changed in subsequent chapters. So many people, including very well-known people, stop at chapter one and they say there's no view. But so that they shouldn't do that. That's just not right. But they do. So I guess if that if that comes to my attention and I'm in a seminar with one of the people who does that, I would say now so and so, that really isn't my view. But you know, I I think you would go crazy if you started searching around for every misunderstanding. And if we have a meeting, an international meeting, the chances are someone is going to correct them. One of the things that everyone forgets and it's not malicious in any way, but I to me it's not good is they forget my commitment to Rossian political liberalism. And so even friendly critics have who have reviewed creating capabilities interpret it as a comprehensive conception of the good life. And so yeah, I mean if I hear that I do want to correct that just because and but the way I do it is by writing more and more about that. So it would be very hard to miss that. You had a question here um in the Yeah. Thank you. My name is Thomas. I'm a geographer so I'm one of the scariest readers. No, it's the philosophers who are the worst really. Interesting introduction. It was very nice to hear. I have a more um how to say um you mentioned that the that that this list has an intrinsic value. uh in in a way I interpret that as being a form of a kind of economical value in a way and I was just thinking and uh let's say in a hypothetical situation where you would have a society who would have you used the word thresholds reached all those important thresholds. So we would be um very high up on that list or as high as you could you know um conceivably get. What if um you make a unison choice of of of reducing one of these? Let's say we'll take the the the standard democracy paradox. If you democratically uh choose to abolish democracy, what is your take on these kind of of issues? Thank you. Well, you know, the first thing is let's see the arguments. Let's see whether they convince me that I was wrong to think that that's an indispensable ingredient of the good life. Now there are people who think democracy has intrinsic value and I am one of those but there are other people who think it has only an instrumental value and that the welfare things are the important things. So, you know, let's hear that debate. But then I guess if we go through that debate and I'm not convinced and I still think democracy is of intrinsic value, then well, okay. So, the next thing I would try to do is to see whether some of the good points that the other side made could be satisfied by adopting a conception of democracy that's more representative rather than direct. that I mean Socrates already thought that you shouldn't have direct democracy like Athens. You should have representatives because there would be more room for expertise. But I'm particularly fond of judicial review. And I do think that one characteristic flaw of democracy is that it doesn't give secure enough protection to minority rights. And so I favor a form of democracy that does have courts and judges that review legislation and are capable of striking that down if it is not in accordance with the basic values of the constitution. Some people say, "Oh, that's not democratic." I say, "No, it's a it is. It's a different conception of dem democracy." Obviously, those justices don't get appointed by God. They get appointed by process of legislation. And uh so they they are accountable, but they have a life term and they have a different structure. So that they are able to play a kind of checking function on some of the excesses of majoritarianism. So I would talk to the opponent and see whether that person's concerns could be satisfied by something like that. When India was being formed, there were a lot of people who were worried about empowering the masses because most of them were illiterate and how would they be able to decide what was good? But one of the more that was not a good worry but one of the good worries they had is 85% are Hindus. What about the 15% who are Muslims? Are they going to be safe? What about the lower casts who are always dominated by the upper cast? And so the architect of the constitution, Ambedkar, said, "Well, we we've got to make the constitution uh along the US model where we have a secure place for judicial review of legislation to protect the rights of minorities." done. So, uh, you know, I think that would be fine because I think that's a more intelligent way of realizing democracy because it protects equal respect rather than allowing it to be undermined by majoritarianism. But if somebody then said, "Oh, well, we just want to do away with voting rights." Well, then I would say that that just does you haven't really um you're you're throwing out something extremely precious and intrinsically valuable and that and that's wrong. We're approaching unfortunately the end of our session. So my my my last question to you would be that let's say that either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton would pick up your creating capabilities book. What would you want them to do with it? Well, one of the interesting things is that in America the term European social democrat is a term of abuse. That there was a judicial nominee named Goodwin Leu of whom the Republicans said he's a European style social democrat and that was so much of a stigmatizing tag that Obama withdrew his name right away. Now Obama was never very courageous in standing up for the people he nominated. Uh, so I think that would be, you know, that's always the problem with my views. They're pegged as too far to the left of the political spectrum. And so Obama, whom, as I say, was my colleague, he would never want to be seen reading a book of mine. I think that Hillary would would want would be happy to be seen reading the books on women. She's really interested in women in developing countries and I've had good discussions with her on that. But um but you know so the first fantasy question that you pose is that they would actually take an interest in the view. I think Martia has been astonished that coming from India where he's a central political voice uh in America no one invites him for anything because uh you know it's just too far to the left. So I think obviously Hillary would be interested in the area of women and I would probably want to make common cause with her on those issues. I think that Bill Clinton would have been much more genuinely interested across the board just because he likes reading and he likes philosophy, but that's not so common in America. Martha, thank you so much for taking the time with us. Thank you. Thank you. joining us this afternoon and have a great Thank you for coming. I really enjoyed