139 | Elizabeth Anderson on Equality, Work, and Ideology

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2021

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Imagine two people with exactly the same innate abilities, but one is born into a wealthy family and the other is born into poverty. Or two people born into similar circumstances, but one is paralyzed in a freak accident in childhood while the other grows up in perfect health. Is this fair? We live in a society that values some kind of “equality” — “All men are created equal” — without ever quite specifying what we mean. Elizabeth Anderson is a leading philosopher of equality, and we talk about what really matters about this notion. This leads to down-to-earth issues about employment and the work ethic, and how it all ties into modern capitalism. We end up agreeing that a leisure society would be great, but at the moment there’s plenty of work to be done.

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Elizabeth Anderson received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. She is currently the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. Among her honors are the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was named by Prospect magazine as one of the top 50 thinkers of the Covid-19 era.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:02.4	I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:04.2	And increasingly, one of the things that people are talking about in the political and economic
0:08.3	realms in the world today is the problem of inequality or the problem of inequality.
0:13.0	I should put it that way.
0:14.4	We live in a world where inequality is growing in poor countries and in wealthy countries.
0:19.3	We have a bigger and bigger gap between the ultra-rich and the very poor.
0:24.1	And some people will say, you know what, that's just how it should be.
0:27.8	No, Jeff Bezos is just that much more talented than you are.
0:31.8	He deserves all of his money.
0:33.7	Other people will say, well, you know, he deserves to earn as much money as he can, but
0:37.4	we have the right to tax him.
0:39.7	There should be a little bit of redistribution because the flow of wealth does not exactly
0:44.8	match on to merit in some sense.
0:47.5	So we should be able to use the wealth of the very rich people to help out those who are
0:52.0	less well-off.
0:53.6	Maybe we'll be good in other words to decrease the amount of inequality in a financial
0:57.6	sense.
0:58.6	But all that's just about the equality of resources, right?
1:02.0	The equality of stuff of wealth.
1:04.9	Almost nobody thinks that you should have exactly the same amount of wealth in every person.
1:09.7	There might have been some sort of utopian thinkers or small-scale communes, but it's not
	...

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