Generous Questions Episode 2: Jonathan Webber part 2 Joe introduces the episode. JM: I guess the complaint against existentialists or existentialism might have been something like this: the problem with accepting this claim that “existence precedes essence” is that it doesn’t give us an adequate moral framework because it seems to permit people to choose all sorts of things. An example there I was thinking of was Lady Macbeth, who makes a decision early--and again, this is you know, literature, right, so there's obviously a good illustrative quality here. Whether we think these characters are plausible or not is going to be useful. But Lady Macbeth chooses, or at least asks, for her character to change. So she says something like, 'Fill me up make me cruel...fill me with cruelty from the top of my crown to my toes. Thicken my blood.' There's a bunch of claims she wants to … In Milton, you get Satan saying something like, “Evil be thou my good.” So 'I now choose to subvert the normal way of valuing things. I want to not only endorse and adopt a new value system, but I actually want to have a character that goes along with that.' For example, ‘I want to be a cruel person, instead of being the person I am right now.’ Is that conceptually coherent, according to the existentialism that you're talking about? Is that a problem for them? JW: Is it conceptually coherent that somebody could do that, you know, as a kind of matter of psychology, as a matter of human existence, I don't see why not. I think the complaint that's usually made against existentialism is that it precludes there being any moral objection to doing that. JM: Right. JW: Precludes there being any kind of moral imperative, so, moral constraints on behaviour at all JM: That's what I was imagining: the idea that there's no constraint on what kind of character we choose or try to adopt, which undertakings we decide to say, ‘These are going to be who I'm going to be for the foreseeable.’ And that looks like something that--the idea that we might be critical of the kind of undertakings that people have--the question is where do we get to be critical from? What position can we occupy where we can say, 'That is a bad thing for Lady Macbeth to choose to do.' Now it causes her some unrest in the play-- JW: Yes. JM: --so she eventually goes crazy and you know, we see a scene where she's sort of very disturbed and kind of...’Will all the oceans not wash this blood from my hands?’ and those kinds of things. So it's supposed to be bad for her as a person to have adopted this path. It seems to cause her, I guess--and this is what Beauvoir thought--it causes, you know, she has a whole load of guilt and that's all of the inertia. Because she maybe hasn't fully transitioned into being this cruel person. But sooner or later she will, if she'd lived long enough and if Shakespeare hadn't killed her. She's gonna carry on, and hopefully eventually become cruel and then she won't have the anxiety, and you know, she'll be rid of the disturbance of her psyche that comes from the inertia of her old value system. She'll just become a cruel person, and why should that be a problem? One way of phrasing it: Who are we to judge? How can we say that she's making the wrong choice? JW: Yeah, good. I think that's--I mean, this is a really important question, and I think you get two lines of thought in French existentialism that try to respond to that. One is a kind of what you might call a eudaemonistic kind of ethics which responds in a way to what you were just saying about Lady Macbeth, you know. It causes her a lot of trouble, right? Her life doesn't go very well as a result. And this is a line of thought that Sartre seems very tempted by, 1943 and in 1945, where, you know, he thinks the denial of--so he thinks that authenticity is a virtue. In fact, I think he thinks it's the sort of fundamental virtue. What is authenticity? Well, authenticity is the recognition and respect for the structure of human agency. So it's not just true that existence precedes essence but recognising that and respecting the freedom of human beings is, he thinks, morally good. Morally right. JM: A moral imperative. JW: Well... JM: Like, I understand it if you say: it's important or useful or people do well, morally speaking, if they recognise that their existence precedes their essence, and that the same might be true of other humans as well. This is sort of 'generalisable'. JW: Mmhmm. JM: But does that mean that we morally have to recognise that? JW: Right. Good, exactly. So Sartre's, sort of--he has both lines of argument. The eudaemonistic is that--the idea is that inauthenticity causes your life to go badly in certain ways. 
 JM: Do you think--does he give an argument for why, for what would cause it to go badly? 
 JW: It's partly because your relations with other people will go badly because you don't understand or respect their freedom, which is essential to their structure and to their existence. And that's what he means in the famous line from the play Huis Clos, 'Hell is other people.'  
 JM: Yeah. 
 JW: What he means by that is not that other people are necessarily problematic for you but that if you view life through the lens of inauthenticity, that is, you fail to understand that existence precedes essence, and that people don't have fixed natures and that everything just goes from their own commitments and that that's true of yourself, as well…if you fail to understand that, then your relationships with other people will always be vitiated in certain ways. 
 JM: So your life won't go too terribly badly if you're a Lady Macbeth, alone. So you choose cruelty, you gradually become cruel, but there are no people around you where your life goes badly, so your-- 
 JW: Yeah. I mean, so you'll have trouble being cruel if there was no one to be cruel to 
 JM: Just squirrel and rabbits. 
 JW: [laughter] Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, that's part of the limitation of that line of argument, I think. But the other limitation is that just because something makes your life go badly, it doesn't follow that you're better off without it, because it might depend on how badly your life would go if you weren't doing it. 
 JM: Okay. JW: So you might think okay, yeah, this attitude of mine, it causes me a certain amount of trouble, but it's essential to me doing all these things that I really care about. JM: Yeah. JW: So I want to dominate the world, and I want to subjugate all these people and yeah, you know, it means they don't like me. But so what? I can live with that because I'm getting all riches out of it. So that's one of the problems. At most it can give you some reason to give up this inauthentic attitude. But it can't give you an overriding reason to do so. JM: Yep, yep. JW: And so it can't give you what you were really asking for there, which is a kind of moral imperative. Why must we? I think there's another line of argument. So famously in his 1945 lecture that was part of the existentialist defensive, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, Sartre gives some very Kantian sounding comments on exactly this, right? So, authenticity is a moral imperative, he thinks, and it's a moral imperative because it recognises the truth of human beings, and it's the only way for one's behaviour to be consistent with the structure of one's own existence which produces that behaviour. And all of this sounds a bit familiar in some ways from Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. JM: So the parallel there is that Kant says, 'Once you understand what a discursive intellect is, once you understand the kind of thing that a human is, you get a system of how you have to behave around those discursive intellects. There are a series of obligations or imperatives that just follow that follow from just being aware of the very fact of the nature of other humans.’ JW: Not even just being aware of it. Just the very fact that you are a rational agent entails the imperative to respect rational agency, Kant thinks. And he's got a long, complicated argument for that but that's, in a nutshell, what he thinks. And everything is very neat, right? So moral constraints don't come from--don't fall out of the heavens, right?  They're not divine commands. They don't grow up out of human nature either. They're not because we have, you know-- because we're inherently altruistic creatures or anything like that. It's just the very structure of rational agency commits you to respecting the structure of rational agency. That's what he thinks. And that's why morality--we are subject to moral rules, but cats and dogs aren't.  JM: Yeah.  JW: Because they're not rational agents and so on. It's all very neat. And Sartre seems to echo this in ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ but famously there's nothing in any of his published works that seems to give him the resources to back that up!  JM: Okay, right. JW: And so people have spent a lot of time digging around in his unpublished notebooks and things like this, trying to work out why he thought he could say that JM: Hmm. JW: What they've overlooked is that Beauvoir published a book that argued exactly that at great length a year earlier, in 1944! JM: So he feels entitled because he read it somewhere else? JW: Well, because what he's giving in that lecture is the existentialist outlook, not his outlook. The same as what Beauvoir's giving in an article written at the same time called Existentialism and Popular Wisdom, right? JM: Okay. JW: He's giving a statement of what he thinks is their shared philosophy. JM: Yeah, good. JW: Although it's inflected by his own theory of radical freedom, which she doesn't share, but nonetheless, when he says this is what the existentialist thinks, he means both of them, I think. JM: And is that controversial, to think of Beauvoir as a Kantian in this sense? Is that--I mean, that's not something I would have stumbled across previous to this. I mean, particularly, you think about The Second Sex and you think about the kind of radical claims that she makes there about what it is to be a woman and then you think about what Kant has to say about women and you think--it doesn't occur to me as very natural to think of her as doing something Kantian...but obviously these are slightly different topics. JW: Yeah, no. I think that's right. I mean, Kant's--yes. Kant's moral philosophy seems to be as very much a game of two halves. You get the groundwork for The Metaphysics of Morals, which gives you this very neat, very tightly-argued, very schematic abstract structure of how it can even be that there is such a thing as morality. JM: Yeah. JW: And why it is something which issues imperatives that we have to obey even though other creatures don't, and so on. And then later you get the book The Metaphysics of Morals where he just piles in all sorts of bizarre metaphysical and biological claims to draw all sorts of conclusions, some of which are rather odd. I think--I don't think the contents of The Metaphysics of Morals are that tightly bound up with the context of the groundwork of The Metaphysics of Morals. And it's the groundwork that Beauvoir's view reflects, I think. She thinks that authenticity is a categorical imperative and I think she thinks it's very much--it's very similar to what Kant calls ‘the formula of humanity’. Oh oh, I'm not sure that's exactly his phrase but that's what Kantian scholars all call it now in the groundwork. That is, that one should treat rational agency in one's self or another person always as an end in itself and never merely as a means, right? So it suggests the idea is that the basic of structure of human agency is objectively valuable, in and of itself and that that value has to be respected and that that value sets a constraint on what is acceptable behaviour. 
 JM: Good, okay. So there's gonna be something wrong with being Lady Macbeth and choosing cruelty because cruelty is precisely doing something which doesn't recognise this obligation that we have towards rational agents like other humans. 
 JW: Exactly. So it directly violates that obligation. Yep. 
 JM: I'm interested in this sort of maybe it's related what you were there saying about what Kant is doing in the groundwork. It sometimes strikes me that when people talk about existentialist thought, it's very hard to pin on them something that looks like a theory and particularly, what we might call a moral theory. At least as we currently understand moral theories and when we think about what moral theories do. There's quite a lot of talk, I suppose, in metaethics about whether we should have moral theories at all, and so there are these debates around whether there either could be such a thing as a moral theory which somehow gives you prescriptions or principles by which you can determine the right course of action in different situations. And yet the way that you're presenting Beauvoir here sounds like she does have something like a moral theory, so she has a metaphysics, which is gonna explain to her--I'm sorry, Metaphysics of Morals, something like that--which explains to us why we have to choose or undertake--why we morally have to choose or undertake certain things and not others. Obviously, we can undertake to be cruel, those can be our projects, but to do so would be immoral because it breaks with this kind of categorical imperative, as you phrased it. JW: Hm. JM: But I wonder whether that's a moral theory in the same sense that we think about moral theories these days, or whether you think that's not the kind of thing that she's doing. JW: So I think The Second Sex is a book which is an exercise in exactly this kind of moral theory that's applied, right? I think when she talks about the origin of gender and the origin of femininity, one of the things that she thinks about it is not simply that women are brought up to have a particular kind of outlook and a particular kind of set of expectations of their lives and set of skills and a set of values and a set of tastes and desires, but also that those are all aimed at producing a particular kind of result, which is that an adult woman will be--will accept a position of domestic life. And what's wrong with domestic life, as Beauvoir understands it, is that it atrophies human freedom and rational agency. Why? Because what rational agency is really all about is setting goals, right? Setting goals and pursuing them. But what domestic life is all about is responding to goals that are kind of already set for you by the household, right? You've got to keep the family fed. You've got to keep the place clean. You've got to keep doing the dishes. You've got to keep washing the clothes and you go round and round this cyclical set of activities which are basically just designed to keep everyone--to maintain the status quo. Keep everybody fed and clean. JM: And that impoverishes your own human nature because you're not exercising this ability to set goals. JW: That's right. Well, you're not--yes, exactly. So what that's doing is that it's violating the categorical imperative, right? Because it's failing to respect the human agency of the women who are living these lives. And so that's what's wrong with the feminisation of people, of girls through childhood and the production of femininity as a gender, she thinks. It's not just that it's true, it's that it's morally wrong for these Kantian reasons. JM: So you can take this quite fundamental, foundational ideas about the nature of wrongness, of moral evaluation, and from that you can work out what should happen in, should we say, applied local specific instances? JW: Yes. I mean, so, if what you want is a moral theory that's always going to be able to tell you what to do in any situation then it's not going to do that. JM: Okay. JW: You're gonna be faced with genuine dilemmas and they're gonna be of two kinds: there's gonna be dilemmas where it looks like you're morally required to do both of two things and you can't do them both. Famous example of that is Sartre's example in ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, of the student who comes to see him to ask his advice during the war. He wants to join the resistance and fight the Nazis but he also needs to, wants to, look after his ailing mother who is old and infirm and has already lost two sons and a husband in the war. And this is often misunderstood as an example, it seems to me. What's crucial to that example is that both of those things seem like morally admirable things to do, possibly even, they both seem morally required. And you can't do them both. JM: Yeah, yeah. So you are going to be left --the categorical imperative is not going to help you. That's Sartre's point. JM: Moral theory only goes so far. JW: It's not going to help you there. You're just going to have to choose. JM: Okay. JW: Beauvoir also puts emphasis on a kind of even more pessimistic version where sometimes you're going to find yourself--and again, I mean, this is hardly surprising coming out at the end of the Second World War, but you're going to find yourself in positions where you've only got two courses of action available to you and they both violate the categorical imperative. JM: Yeah good, no other alternative. JW: So that's going to happen to us. I mean, that's what in their minds in this problem of dirty hands. You can't keep your hands clean. So you are going to have to violate the categorical imperative. Is there any way of developing a moral theory that will help you to decide in those cases whether one violation of the categorical imperative is worse than the other or not? That's a problem they wrestle with for a while and I think ultimately give up on. But yeah. JM: I mean, and that's to recognising something like: authenticity is something like a virtue and it might be morally--there might be a moral imperative to act with authenticity, but that doesn't mean that it's always possible for some other reasons. The moral imperative can still persist even if it's not always something that you can follow through. JW: Right. JM: Yeah. So I guess these days we would talk about whether you would be blameworthy or not. We would talk about the idea that maybe you are in some sense morally culpable but shouldn't be punished for those things.  JW: Right.  JM: Those would be the way that contemporary debates go where we don't think that the moral theory, just because it fixes the terms of what's morally acceptable doesn't mean that also dictates quite the extent to whether we think someone is, shall we say, blameworthy or not. We can separate those two. JW: Yes. I think that's right. Yep. Absolutely. But also, I mean what this does, I think--those are the kind of--the dirty hands problem is the kind of more pessimistic point. The more optimistic point is in a lot of situations in life and when faced with a lot of decisions that you have to make, you have a range of options which are morally acceptable and you get to choose. There isn't--it's not like some forms of utilitarianism, where there's a calculation you have to do and only one of these courses of action is going to turn out to be the right one or the best one. In that sense it's--there's a lot of kind of elbow room. JM: Let me ask you about writing this book. So you've been interested in existentialism for a long time, you've done translations of Sartre, you've had sort of precursors to this, but this came together as a project where you had something that you knew that you could turn into a book. When do you know that an idea is going to be book-length? And which was the idea here that you made you think, 'This is actually a monograph'? Is there a thing that you can put your finger on in saying, ‘I had to write the rest of the book so I could get to this point in the book?’ JW: No, there isn't. It grew in a way quite organically. I was invited years ago to write a book about existentialism, a kind of introductory level book about existentialism for a series of books on introductions to different areas of philosophy, and at first I didn't really want to do it because there are lots of books like that that come out all the time. JM: Yep. JW: And unless I was actually going to be arguing for something new and original I didn't really see the point in just adding another one. So then I wrote a proposal which did, sort of, develop some ideas and I wanted to go through--I wanted to include, you know, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, to some extent Merleau-Ponty and to some extent, Freud. And to look at some, kind of, key issues that they all discuss and say something original and worthwhile about the way they discussed them in each chapter. JM: A good ambition. JW: Yeah, I thought so too, but it wasn't what the publishers wanted. [laughter] So they turned that down and then I thought, 'But I quite like this idea...' So then I rewrote it again as a different kind of proposal and then I thought about it some more and I thought, 'Well, as I'm no longer being asked to write an introductory book that has those particular kinds of constraints of fitting into the series and so on, why am I framing it that way at all? Why am I not framing it as a monograph, given that it is packed full of original arguments that I don't want to downplay?' And so that's where it came from, really. And then I managed to get a grant from the AHRC to buy me out for a semester which followed on from a semester's research leave from Cardiff University and together that gave me a year to sit and actually write it. And as I said earlier what came out through that process was not entirely what I had designed in the first place. JM: Wow, yep. JW: I intended to give Beauvoir and Sartre kind of relatively equal billing to see what happened, but what came out as I worked through it all is that it became clear to me that something happens in the late--somewhere around 1946, 1947--is that Sartre abandons that idea of radical freedom and adopts Beauvoir's view of sedimentation. JM: He was persuaded. JW: He was persuaded--well, yes. He was persuaded--he was a famously stubborn person so it may be that he sort of came to realise for reasons other than the ones that other people had been pressing on him. But it seems to me that it's something to do with his ambition of existentialism being a cultural theory. JM: Yep. JW: So in 1946 he publishes this book called ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’, about anti-Semitism and Jewish culture and it's in many ways a very unsatisfactory book. It's an account of the origins of culture, right, and the transmission of culture. In 1948 he publishes this preface to a collection of negritude poetry and his preface is called Black Orpheus and it's very, very different in outlook as a kind of account of cultural origins and cultural transmission. It seems to me that's what's changed is that by that point he's dropped the idea of radical freedom and he's been persuaded by The Second Sex that sedimentation is how acculturation happens. JM: So that's something like paying less attention to the role of choice and seeing a greater role for the idea that your projects start developing something of a life of their own as other people share them, and as you buy into a kind of inertia that comes from other people, the way that they regulate themselves and enforce themselves. JM: Yes. Exactly. And so then what you get in 1952 is his book Saint Genet, which might be the strangest book I've ever read, which is a biography of his friend. He was asked to write a kind of preface to a collection of Genet's poems and plays and what he wrote was a 700-page psychoanalytic biography which Genet--which reportedly is the reason Genet never wrote anything for another five years. [laughter] JM: “That's how I'm understood?” [laughter] JW: Yeah that's right. Well, never be a friend of Sartre's. But it seems to me that Saint Genet is really the definitive statement then of the mature form of Sartre's existentialism because what happens there--and he cites The Second Sex in a number of different places as a kind of crucial influence on the development of this book--for the first time he really takes childhood seriously. So he gives an account of why Genet ends up being the person he is--the particular kind of poet and playwright that he is with the particular tastes that he has, why he ended up being a thief and a professional thief for a while. JM: Hm. JW: And so on. And he traces all of this back through Genet's childhood development, though occasionally says although it's a biography, he also calls it a true novel.  JM: [laughter] it's a popular medium of the moment, I mean, that's sort of--yeah. JW: Yes. JM: That sort of seems to be popular as a way of fictionalising, “faction”-alising, people's real lives. JW: Right. So there are moments where Sartre sort of describes some event that happened in Genet's childhood and you think, ‘How can you possibly know that?’ And on the next page, Sartre says, 'Well, it might not have happened like this, but definitely something like this must have happened, because this is what resulted, right?’ [laughter] So he sort of fictionalising--so what he's doing then is, he's giving you again a kind of novel, a kind of character, how this character develops and an account of that one particular individual's existence and life and how their projects develop and get sedimented across their childhood. JM: And can seem like they're fixed to the individual though there's no reason that it needed to have come about this way. JW: Yes, that's right. And the interplay of the kind of social forces, the particular kind of moral climate that he's growing up in on the one hand, and his own choices and decisions about what to do in response to that on the other, and how they become kind of sedimented into his outlook. JM: Do you think there's--I mean, I wondered there are a couple of reasons for thinking this is quite timely as a book, as a study of, like you say, Fanon as well as Beauvoir. Fanon seems to have a kind of--there's a newly activated study of Fanon. People seem to be reading him more seriously than they've done previously. I don't know whether that's just because there's maybe more access or translation or something, but that seems to be in the zeitgeist at the moment. And then at the same time there does seem to be a much more--outside of, should we say, the academic circles--there's a kind of YouTube phenomena of people talking with 'public intellectuals'--maybe I'll put that in scare quotes--but 'public intellectuals' who talk about a return to essentialist ways of thinking, and are maybe giving new lifeblood to some of these ideas that--the idea that some things might be what could call social constructs or the products of culture. It's false and there really--you know, there are tenets or features of human nature which dictate the kind of choices and actions that you're going to carry out. That seems to be around at the moment. Some of that looks quite toxic, although the stuff on Fanon looks quite good--it's good that we're getting this revitalisation. Do you have a sense about where the current sort of situation of existentialism is? I mean, in some respects you might have thought it would have been in the doldrums for a period because of the next wave of French intellectual thought that came hot on its heels. Obviously, those waves of French philosophy and continental philosophy have had quite a rapid turnover and there's always something new to be reading, but it does feel like there's a return to existentialism, or there's debates about some of those ideas that seem to be newly revitalised. Am I right in that? Is that something that's contemporary, that there's new interest being sparked in existentialism? JW: That's the impression I get, yeah. Absolutely. And we see that--I think I see that in a lot of places so yeah these are good examples, YouTube and the other kind of online sources of discussion and debate. I'm the president of the UK Sartre Society, which despite its name is more of a kind of general French existentialism society. Our conferences over the last few years have gotten much bigger. We're attracting much more interest. We select papers from a--people submit abstracts and we review them anonymously and we now get, I think, five times the number of abstracts submitted-- JM: Wow. JW: --that we were getting five years ago. So yes, I think there is a revival of interest. I'm not sure exactly what's driving it. I mean, one thing is that the works of Simone de Beauvoir have been very neglected in the English-speaking world, partly because they were not easily available. The Second Sex was only available in a very bad and abridged translation for many years, until 2009 when a new translation came out. There's been a project run by Margaret Simons who had produced a lot of--a series of hardbacks of Beauvoir's early philosophical and political publications, many of which were never translated into English. The book I referred to earlier, Pyrrhus and Cineas, where she offers her argument for the Kantian categorical imperative--that came out in 1944 but was first translated into English in 2004. JM: Wow. JW: So yeah, Frantz Fanon as well. Black Skin White Masks, his first book, is what’s getting a lot of attention now. That was available for a long time in English in a decent enough translation, but there was a much better translation came out in 2008 and that I think has made a big difference. JM: Thanks. Does this resurgence of essentialism--I mean, I guess the things I'm thinking about are really--though we've had some great popularising books, like Cordelia Fine's book on gender... JW: Delusions of Gender. JM: Delusions of Gender, yeah. So we've had books like that where there've been--as ever, I mean, it seems like, sort of, every five or ten years there's some book that comes broadly from a range--an area that's cognitive science plus some social theory--that gets, you know, a very widestream readership, a mainstream readership. Very wide readership. Like a few years ago, Pinker's books about the Blank slate and claims about nativism seemed to attract a much wider audience than might've been anticipated and more recently, you know, books about language and those kinds of things. But it seems that following on from, for example, Cordelia Fine's book about gender, there's a bit of a popular backlash among--some of them are just men's rights activists and those kinds of people--and others who want to say, ‘No, there really is something about the differences between men and women which are biological and hardwired and really do explain our behaviour in some sort of deep and substantial way.’ I guess the popularisation or the popular conception of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary explanations for people's choices and actions in psychology--the fact that that seems to be quite a mainstream way of thinking about people--seems to have brought a return to that kind of essentialism, if you will: the idea that there's something that you can't get away from that is built-in or innate. And for that reason, I wonder whether there's gonna be a kind of renewed interest in this sort of existentialism, because it does open up that space to say, 'Well, look, even if you have bodies that work in certain ways, that doesn't mean that your choices are constrained in those ways.' Is that kind of take that you've thought about or come across? Is that on your radar? JW: It is now. [laughter] That sounds very plausible to me as an explanation of this kind of renewed interest because certainly something is happening. People are--I mean, the only thing that I had previously thought was the other thing that you said, you know, existentialism was very popular for some time but then kind of got buried by the next wave of French philosophy which largely defined itself in opposition to existentialism. JM: Yeah. JW: But to some extent, it--kind of unfairly, right?--caricatured and over-exaggerated its differences, particularly with Sartre, as Foucault and Derrida admitted later, because you had to, because otherwise you couldn't get heard, because existentialism was so dominant. But I think now interest in those kinds of philosophy is waning partly because it's been so thoroughly explored across the arts and humanities. I think people are looking for other sources of inspiration and analysis. But yeah, I think you're--what you say there about the, kind of, 'scientised' analyses of culture that we see, and of the individuals' development that we see, could well be part of the story too. Because there's something about that kind of scientific explanation which looks--you know, it's already built into the project that what you're looking for is a causal explanation of the outcome, which then lends itself very much to being understood as a deterministic explanation. JM: Yeah. JW: Even though it doesn't strictly follow that it is. JM: Yeah, that's right. So that strikes me as--there's space there for philosophers to be able to say, ‘Even though we can be totally at home with the idea of natural science giving decent explanations of many things and generating knowledge--we can be quite thoroughgoing naturalists in lots of areas--there are still philosophical questions, like this one about what it is that accounts for me making the choices that I make and for me being the kind of person I am.’… which I guess philosophers tend to recognise aren't going to be easily dissolved into some sort of causal explanation for why we do the things we do. At the very least, we're going to be up against some of those foundational questions about free will and determinism, and those aren't easily settled by something like science. JW: And also questions about rational decision-making in the light of information and evidence which is, you know, pretty central, I think to the development of individuals' outlooks and particularly to their re-development in adult life.  JM: Yeah, okay. We should call it a day there. That's a lot of stuff! Thank you so much! JW: That is a lot of stuff. Thank you. —- Joe closes the episode. Generous Questions is a podcast about philosophy made at the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Belfast. Use the website www.generousquestions.co.uk to find more resources relating to this episode. Contact Joe using the website or on Twitter at www.twitter.com/drjoemorrison All content is covered by a Creative Commons licence BY-NC-SA https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Amazing transcription work by Becci.