How Definitions Change Debates: Freedom, Rights, and Equality with Rebecca Lowe
Philosopher Rebecca Lowe joins me to do an ideas-only deep dive: what freedom really is, why it matters, how it intersects with equality, and how to tell coercion from choice. We talk charitable argument (steelmanning), the social value of clear definitions, and Rebecca’s agent-focused view of freedom—plus why doing something freely can have value even when the act is bad.
Read the transcript.
Juliette Sellgren
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliet Sellgren and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote- named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www.AdamSmithWorks.org. Welcome back today on October 31st. Happy Halloween 2025. I'm excited to welcome Rebecca Lowe to the podcast. She is a philosopher and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center. She does multiple things of note including having been a space philosopher, which I do want to ask about, but she writes a Substack called The Ends Don't Justify the Means, which is wonderful, and she hosts a podcast which is enlightening called Working Definition. You should check both of those out. Today we're going to be talking about freedom definitions, mixing the philosophical stuff with the real life stuff because that's really complicated and even though I've been doing this for a really long time, it's still not always super clear. So I'm really excited about that. I hope that you learn a lot. I surely will. Welcome Rebecca to the podcast.
Rebecca Lowe
Thanks so much, Juliette for having me. Big fan. Keen to be here.
Juliette Sellgren
Ah, thanks. So first question, what is the most important thing that young people should know that we don't?
Rebecca Lowe (1:41)
Yeah, I mean as a philosopher these kinds of questions make me anxious. Questions with the word “know” in knowing some things are super high bar, I'm pretty skeptical about the kinds of things we can know, but I do get that you're not asking me, probably not asking me to give my theory of knowledge. So I'll try and give an easy answer, although I'll, I'll do one more bit of couching also, which is something like my guess is you are saying what's a bit of advice that I think would be useful for younger people than me in terms of maybe pursuing a good life or things going better for them or something like that. Some bit from my hard won 40 years that I can pass on. The first thing I'd say is something like I strongly believe that there are many ways to live a good life.
So what's important to one person might not be important to another, and that's not just a subjective thing. I think it's the case of the matter in some important objective way. Nonetheless, if I were to have to think really hard and I did this morning think hard about whether there was something that I could remember some moment when somebody told me something or I realized something and I thought, man, if only I'd known that sooner and if only the education system had some way to impart this, I think it would be something my dad told me when I was a kid. So actually I wasn't so much of a kid. I was a teenager and I was reading some complicated book. I actually remember who it was by, I don't remember which book it was. It was by Edward Said. He was this very complicated thinker and I was getting very frustrated because I was trying really hard and I just couldn't work out what the argument was.
I couldn't work out really how he got to his conclusions. I just was getting very frustrated and I happened. My dad was there and I said, look, I just can't work this out. Have you read this? Do you know what the answers are? And he said, look, I'll talk with you about it, but just remember sometimes when you've worked really hard on something and you've tried to work it out, maybe it's not you. Sometimes it just doesn't make any sense, and I think we all know that as kids about certain things. We know when someone's talking complete nonsense. But it can be harder when you're a kid to feel like you've got the authority when you're reading something, particularly some scholarly tome, you're happy to say the novel is rubbish, but the scholarly tome when you're a teenager, oftentimes if you can't get anywhere with it, you think I'm not smart enough. I haven't worked hard enough. No, sometimes it's just not. It just doesn't make sense. I think that's really, really important advice.
Juliette Sellgren
Me with Hegel.
Rebecca Lowe
Yeah, absolutely. Life is too short to read Hegel. I tried. It's too short. Even the good exegesis of Hegel, people like Brandon, it's too long. It's too long. There's too much of it.
Juliette Sellgren (4:26)
Okay. I mean given that you study in part what people have thought and what people have written and you do analyze the merits of people's arguments as part of what you do from day to day, I kind of wonder about this where I want to say as easy as an idea, as easy as it is to communicate something as much as you can distill it, that is the merit. The more people there are that have to study what someone said in order to be able to effectively translate it, even if it's not a language to language translation or it's so complicated that even though it is in English, it is actually its own language that that's just a very clear sign that it's not worth doing. But then you read something like, I don't know the Bible and there are so many people who study the Bible or Adam Smith and to me those things are pretty simple to read on their own, and yet it still helps to have people to help further distill, translate, explain, make colloquial, what is the line there.
Rebecca Lowe (5:42)
So I think there's some easy things like look, if you're reading a book in a foreign language that you're not very good at speaking, imagine you've got some aptitude but you're not very good at it, then you might need more help. Or there's a book where it's in a language you just don't speak at all, then you're definitely going to have to appeal to a translator unless you want to miss out on it. Similarly, something which has some high degree of technical knowledge from a field that you just don't know that much about. There are those kinds of simple cases where that kind of translator work you need to outsource or you need to bring in some mediator. I think within philosophy, I'm a big plan of clear, simple prose, people making their arguments as clear as possible. I have a bit of a funny position on this stuff largely in that I do try to take arguments separate from the people who made them.
I tried to, I guess, so for instance, I thought quite a lot about locks arguments when I was back when I was writing my PhD thesis, but I was very clear to make it the case that keen to make it clear even that I wasn't really that interested in [John] Locke as a historical person who lived. I was just interested in his arguments. So I try to be as a historical as possible I guess is what I'm saying. But that still doesn't really answer your question because it still, if I want to think about his arguments or your arguments, there's some sense in which I have to understand those arguments before I evaluate them. So I do think an important part of doing philosophy is working out what the argument is that you are evaluating perhaps making some objections to, and I think it's important to do that clearly and charitably.
So I work really hard to, particularly if it's an argument I disagree with, to come up with a charitable formulation of it. Although then again, that might not actually have been the intentions of the person I'm engaging with. So it's a complicated one, but for me, I'm most interested in considering arguments about important things. I'm probably a little bit less concerned about who made them or whether I'm really presenting them as they intended them. I want to engage with the most, the strongest version of the argument, and I'm happy to pass that off as an act of charity, but sometimes it might actually just be me recognizing their argument isn't that good, but here's a better formulation of it.
Juliette Sellgren (7:53)
Steel manning is always I think, better than straw manning, especially the route of trying to figure out what the truth is. This is kind of somewhere where I struggle because I do really love this. Take the charitable version. You don't really have to think about who said it and why, but in the same way as there are multiple ways, as you said, to live a good life, there are multiple ways to analyze what someone said and why, and there's a point where you can't really take someone's argument without understanding where they come from or without missing out on something or it is just maybe a different method of analysis and I don't know, maybe there is merit to complicated ways of putting things that I just don't prefer, but there are multiple ways of doing it. It seems like it's kind of this mess as anything where it's easy to say there are multiple ways to live a good life. It's easy to say simplicity over complication,
But then when you get down to practically applying this, it seems really difficult to me because you have to put yourself in a box at some point where you have to decide, I am going to just take the argument. I'm not going to take the person or I'm going to try to blend those or I'm going to only look at the person. And it almost seems to me that we're always taking some approximation of what the truth is in what they've said, who they are, what the merits of their arguments are, what they mean, what the implications are, how do you actually get to the truth.
Rebecca Lowe (9:48)
I mean this on some level comes back to my skepticism about knowledge. On some level, there's a difference between believing there are truths of the matter and thinking therefore you have access to those truths. It also comes back to something you said at the end of, I think your response to my response to the previous question, which is if what you're doing is seeking the truth or something. So I think the truth that I would generally be seeking when I'm analyzing somebody's philosophical argument is whether there's some truth that they managed to reach through their argument as opposed to the truths about what their reasons were for making the argument or where they were at the time when they were making the argument. Those kinds of historically contingent contextual things, partly because I believe in a division of labor like the biographer or the historian might just be better at doing that stuff than me or maybe just we can't spend our lives doing all of the things.
So we come to some kind of coordination over these matters. There are many philosophies. You have totally different views on this. So actually if you think about the more kind of, and some of these distinctions aren't very clear cut, the more kind of continental stuff, particularly more postmodern stuff. There are many people who think that flowery complicated language, which you and I might just find, well certainly I think I sometimes find too much. I just want to know what the argument is, guys drop all the words, give me the argument. They're like, no, look, the thing we're talking about is really, really hard and we can't reach it that way or it's really hard to reach it that way. So here's an alternative way, which is here is a beautiful text, there's a beautiful text with complicated language, and if you read it and you're fully inside it, you're going to have some different kind of roots to knowledge a bit more kind of akin to seeing a beautiful painting.
I mean, I kind of get what they're trying to do there. It's not my preferred route to trying to get, certainly not to do any philosophical knowledge, but I can see that they're doing something different and they're happy about doing something different. So yes, to that extent, I agree with you that sometimes there are just different kinds of things going on and if you try to analyze it is the kind of thing which is doing X, when actually it's trying to do Y, you're setting yourself up for failure and maybe it's not being charitable. Maybe we just have to say it's a different approach and the methodology we'd use to analyze the first thing isn't so applicable to the second thing sad times.
Juliette Sellgren (12:13)
I'm going to bring in the focus of your podcast briefly working definition, coming to a definition of a concept or an idea or a word that's important in modern discourse, which I love. It's just so easy. It's like little bites of important things. Thank you. The thing that is complicated about this is in your example of using the flowery language, I would almost argue that that is not the same type of philosophy or it might not even be philosophy. I am a living contradiction because living, walking, contradiction, because I love efficiency, I love econ. I love things to be as simple as possible. We take the hypo news, the shortest path to get us from point A to point B, which usually is a long A to C instead of A to B, or I said that wrong, but whatever. Anyways, too complicated. Let's not do that.
But on the other hand, I love the existentialists. I think that phenomenology where you're using the language and the color and the descriptions of the mug that you're drinking coffee out of actually gets it something really important that cannot be distilled. So I guess since I agree with the people with the flowery language, except I consider those two fundamentally different things, and I don't know, maybe they just are differences in types of philosophy and methodologies and whatever you want to call it, but at what point does that become an entirely different thing? At what point does the adjective that you attach to anything change what that something is? So that what you're doing and what flowery text philosophers are doing, how different is that? When does it become different and when is it important to know why they're different?
Rebecca Lowe (14:20)
Wow. I mean, so on some level you're asking I guess this question about how do you define something? When does something count as a concept? I mean, so one simple answer, it is a big question and there are many different ways to do that. I mean, so one simple answer is just that these people are just doing philosophy in different ways. There is more than one way to do philosophy and the same as there's more than one way to live a good life. You could say still there's some central activity that's going on, some central goal that is being sought. Depending on whether you want to take a kind of stipulative approach or some kind of technological approach or something like that. You could say something like, Hey, all these people agree that philosophy is the pursuit of truth, which you mentioned early on. There's another approach though where you could just say, no, actually some of these people don't think philosophy is about the pursuit of truth. They think it's about making clever arguments or they think it's about getting a job. I mean, of course you could on some level reduce those things down to pursuing truth because it's like how do you find truth by doing those things or what are the truths of the matter about those things?
I'm generally just quite happy to take quite an expansive view about what philosophy is and what doing philosophy is. I find it quite funny sometimes there is this general view that everyone's a philosopher. People often say that, don't they? There's a very niche view within academic philosophy that some people hold, which is only about three or four people in the world are doing philosophy or our count as philosophers. They are at one or two universities. They focus on one or two subjects
Juliette Sellgren
And they may or may not include the people making those arguments in their mind.
Rebecca Lowe (16:13)
That's right. That's absolutely right. So I think that's a very good point. Some of that speaks to a deep self-consciousness amongst some philosophers because being a philosopher it sounds very grand. Some people have some anxiety about affording that status to themselves, but I tend to take a bit of a middle road. I think philosophy, doing philosophy, being a philosopher, those are slightly different things, but they capture something which is the same. I think it's about applying certain kinds of methodologies to certain kinds of questions in the pursuit of certain kinds of things, something like that. The specificity is at the level some degree to the methodology, some degree to the kind of question.
There's a history of philosophy, like you said, some work within being is thinking about the arguments other people have. So even though I like the historical thing, I think it makes sense for me to read other people's arguments if I'm trying to solve a really important philosophical question myself, I actually try not to read other people's arguments before I've come to some view myself if it's something I don't already have a view on, but nonetheless, if I want to be more efficient or if I want to check my answers, I'm then going to want to compare it again to things other people have said. So I have my preferences for sure about the styles of philosophy I like and indeed the kinds of philosophical questions I find the most interesting, but I'm relatively happy just to say those people are also doing philosophy, the flowery language people, it's not my preference I don't think is such a good route to trying to do that hard thing of searching out knowledge, but I don't think, at least on a practical level, there's much benefit to me saying they're not philosophers and in this broader sense of people addressing certain kinds of questions, even in certain kinds of ways, there's going to be some overlap which makes philosophy distinct from say economics or from say, sociology or political science.
Even though again, there are a lot of overlaps. I like doing what I think of as political and economic philosophy because interested in using philosophical methodology to think about economic concepts for instance. That doesn't make me an economist, but there's still a difference between what I'm doing, so I'm largely happy within all of these little tight distinctions I'm trying to make to be, or at least claim that I'm being sufficiently expansive, that I'm not going to annoy all of those people who like to do philosophy in different ways from me.