Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast for two friends who are also professors talk about philosophy and everyday life.

I'm Ellie Anderson.

And I'm David Pena Guzman.

David, I'm so excited to be talking today about this topic

because even though the word discretion might not immediately call to mind

fascinating stories of over bureaucratization,

indeed, that is what we are talking about.

We're going to be speaking later in the episode with Barry Lamb, who recently wrote a book about this.

And let me say I really enjoyed reading this book, Ellie, where Lamb essentially comes to the defense of the concept of discretion, arguing that sometimes we need to give people in positions of power discretionary

decision-making capabilities. And this is a thought-provoking position to take in a world where

we associate rule following and rule enforcement with justice, right? We tend to define in the West

justice as applying rules

sort of mechanically and equally to everybody. And so the idea that there could be a philosophical

defense for the exception or for giving individuals the right not to enforce a rule seems

counterintuitive to the way many of us think about why we have laws and

rules in the first place.

Yeah, though at the same time, I would say that even if abstractly, we tend to appreciate

that rules have an important role to play in a democracy, we find that people on both the

left and right are very frustrated with both a symptom and a cause of the

proliferation of rules, which is bureaucracy. And so Lamb talks about that. I mean, I think sometimes

we associate the removal of bureaucracy with a libertarian approach or maybe a more conservative

...