I don't like being boxed in by labels, but I introduce myself very simply: "I'm a philosopher." Often when I say this to somebody who's outside of academia, or outside of philosophy, they act like it's the weirdest thing in the world.
ævum: How would you describe what you do?
Rebecca Lowe: I don’t like being boxed in by labels, but I introduce myself very simply: “I’m a philosopher.” Often when I say this to somebody who’s outside of academia, or outside of philosophy, they act like it’s the weirdest thing in the world. But both of my parents were philosophers. To me, it is the most ordinary job I could imagine.
ævum: What do you make of the abundance movement?
Rebecca Lowe: There’s a simple answer, which reflects that people on the center-right in countries like Britain and America have been trying for a long time to get other people to understand the benefits of economic growth and the costs of over-regulation. On this simple answer, the abundance movement consists in some people on the left who are starting to understand that economic growth is good in many ways. And that over-regulation can hold people back: not just in terms of financial opportunities, but in terms of general welfare, and getting to live their lives in innovative, exciting ways. I believe strongly in the benefits of economic growth, and also that over-regulation can prevent it. But I’m not sure how interesting it is for me to repeat why economic growth is a good thing, or why the best kind of economic growth is when places become more productive through innovation. And, of course, not all things that lead to economic growth are good things.
ævum: What is progress?
Rebecca Lowe: I think progress implies tracking against some standard or moving towards some goal. It doesn’t always have to mean moving towards a goal, because it could just be that things are getting better than they were, in some sense. Regardless, progress doesn’t come down to consensus opinion; there has to be something objective. Progress typically involves accessing basic human goods – things that are irreducibly and objectively good for humans. In this sense, progress means accessing achievement, but also often knowledge, and likely fulfillment.
Generally, progress also implies furthering the good – or at least not furthering the bad – in some moral sense. This doesn’t mean it makes no sense to say, “he progressed in becoming a better hitman.” That’s an ordinary thing to say. But when people talk about progress in the general sense – like people in the ‘progress movement’ – I think they imply the involvement of morally permissible methods. Of course, people have different views about what counts as morally permissible. You might get the consequentialist who thinks a method is fine as long as it brings about more good, or you might get someone like me who thinks that if rights are being violated then it doesn’t count as permissible. But when people say “America made progress” or “humankind made progress,” I think they imply morally permissible methods. Progress in this sense is moralized, as the philosopher might say.
ævum: Why do so many people feel the world has stopped progressing?
Rebecca Lowe: The people who say things like “I’d rather live in 1450” or “I’d rather live in 1890” – I think a lot of that, I’m afraid to say, is just bad counting or bad awareness of history. If you think back over even the last 20 years, there are so many ways our everyday lives have gotten better. You look at things like medical advances, which mean we all can live happier and healthier lives, and that’s right across the world. Yes, of course, this isn’t distributed equally. But across many, many important markers of what we might think of as human progress, from our health to our access to goods and services, it seems insane to be in denial.
I would say, however, that I do have some sympathy for the idea that we are seeing regression on certain political or social levels. Politically, if you look across Europe, for instance, there has clearly been a rise in the far right. But it’s a misconception to think that because things aren’t all equal, therefore no progress has been made. Even the person in the world who has benefited the least from the technological progress we’ve seen has benefited.
ævum: And with artificial intelligence?
Rebecca Lowe: I have great hope for the opportunities people will access through AI. One of my hopes is that the baseline level of educational attainment will rise. That’s not to deny that the smartest, best-educated people will get the most out of AI in terms of learning more. But my hope is that, even if only by a teeny bit, the floor will rise. And I think that’s the most astonishing thing, in terms of the value of knowledge as an intrinsic good, and also the knock-on effects we’ll see.
I firmly believe, for instance, that quite soon we will effectively see an end to disease and aging. That’s probably one of the most radical things I believe, in the terms of the good AI might bring about. I’m not going to say it wouldn’t be complicated socially and culturally, but this just seems like the most astonishing time to be alive. I think this every day, multiple times a day. My friends are probably bored of me saying this. I think the good that will arise – for humankind, and hopefully animal-kind, and, you know, even the aliens – makes this a very exciting time to be alive.
ævum: Why is space the most underrated policy area?
Rebecca Lowe: I’m pretty sure if I asked 40 policy people in DC and 40 policy people in London, they would not put space on their list of the top 25 policy concerns. But space offers amazing economic opportunities. And amazing opportunities to access knowledge, and so much more. On the other side, we‘re also already seeing the involvement of space tech in wars, and I think a lot of people aren’t aware of this.
To me, as a philosopher, space policy is jumping right out as important. Philosophers are interested in wonder and the unknown, and space is paradigmatic of those things. Though maybe I’m a bit biased, because I think space is very cool.
ævum: What about the opportunity costs of space exploration?
Rebecca Lowe: For a start, I don’t think it’s zero-sum. The progress we can see in space can have Earthly benefits. Satellite technology enables us to learn about the Chinese government’s rights-violating labor camps, for instance. It can also help us understand more about climate change.
Beyond that, the opportunity cost of the billionaires spending their money on furthering space progress usually isn’t spending more money on charity, or whatever your personal favorite project is – it’s probably spending more money on super-yachts. If they want to splash their cash on furthering human knowledge in space: good times. Also, a lot of those people already do give to charity. Plus, you know, any economic activity comes with knock-on benefits. Space companies are just like any old company on that level: they employ people, those people go and spend money in the economy, and there are benefits for companies in the supply chain. So I just think, again, some of the criticisms are bad maths.
I’m not denying, however – even though more and more space activity is happening in the private sector these days – that the state is still heavily involved, particularly with large procurement contracts.
ævum: Do you worry it’s state dominated? Do you think space exploration expands the boundaries of humanity?
Rebecca Lowe: It’s important to note the number of very small companies, startups, scale-ups that are involved in the space economy. These companies are hampered by overly burdensome regulation, which is often outdated. To this end, it’s already a policy matter. I believe quite strongly that innovation is generally overly held back, though that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in any kind of regulation. So, I want more liberally and philosophically minded people to get involved in this policy area.
And yes, I think space is a special source of human achievement and human progress. There are certain things we can only know if we’re in space. There are certain kinds of experience and fulfilment we can only get if we’re in space.
The fact that we have many different kinds of living creatures on Earth, and that humankind has managed to create machines that can take us out into the universe is astonishing. It’s a testament to human ingenuity and commitment and innovation.
I also think space exploration may well give us the opportunity to learn about other kinds of living things in the universe. I’m very excited about this. I’m a very optimistic person. One of the things I’m most excited about – and maybe this just makes me sound overly cute, as the Americans would say – is the idea of having friendships with other kinds of living things, and sharing our technological advances. Maybe we can help them with the alien cancer that they have. I can’t really think of any real-world thing that is more exciting to the moral philosopher than “oh my goodness, there’s a whole new potential category of living thing.” In many ways, space is a special source of many kinds of human goods, and potentially the goods of many other living things.
ævum: What about property-rights in space?
Rebecca Lowe: I think, quite strongly, that humankind has a very small amount of time to go about working out what an effective and morally justified property-rights regime in space would look like. Otherwise, we’re going to see land grabs, people making claims, first-come, first-served. If it’s the case that, because you, Sven, arrive on Mars first, you and your kids and their kids and their kids always have the control of the whole of Mars, that has moral implications and economic opportunity cost.
I made an argument quite a few years ago, in a paper for the Adam Smith Institute, that we can learn from Locke and Henry George and come up with a better way of doing this. But if we don’t get there, we’ve probably only got, what, one year, two years, before people start land-grabbing. America’s doing this through the Artemis Accords. This is a very exciting opportunity for political philosophers, legal philosophers, people who are interested in property, and law, to think about what this means, and potentially there’s a whole load of extra value to be derived in a morally sound way. Good times!
ævum: What can this real state of nature teach us about property on Earth?
Rebecca Lowe: Most political philosophers across the last 400 years who’ve thought about property have been very interested in this idea of initial acquisition: the idea of owning something that nobody else has ever owned. But for years there hasn’t really been anything on Earth like that. Whereas in space, legally you can’t own stuff. The Outer Space Treaty prohibits national appropriation, at least of the physical domain, although the lawyers have arguments about what this means. And it’s hard to claim that anybody has a moral right to anything in space, beyond some small instances of “so-and-so’s landed here, they might want to make some claim.”
For those of us who are interested in social contract theory, and in the idea of property rights as arising from certain kinds of activity, and in the relevance of who’s been where, space is like a blank slate: an opportunity to think again about how some of these great philosophical theories about property apply.
ævum: Are you still working on your book about utopia?
Rebecca Lowe: I’m still working on that, but I’ve put it slightly on the back burner, because another project came out of that: I’ve pretty much finished writing a short book about free speech. I also think the Substack age means that writing regularly, writing well, writing short pieces of publicly accessible philosophy is a very valuable thing for me to be doing at the moment.
My general view on utopia is that we can’t know very much about it, because the utopians have the right to determine a lot of the stuff that happens in utopia. But we can rule some stuff out and rule some stuff in. Some of the topics I’ve thought about, like property rights or prisons: one answer might be “you can’t have this kind of thing,” but “here’s the set of options that the utopians should be able to decide on.” In terms of property rights, my most ambitious argument is: if it’s morally permissible for you to eat an apple, then there’s some sense in which you can permissibly exclude everyone else – you have exclusionary access to it. Exclusion gets us to the heart of what a property right is. And I move to concluding that if you’re allowed to eat an apple, you have some property rights in the apple. It’s philosophically dense and ambitious, but I think it’s one of the most comprehensive arguments I make. Somebody might say, “well, that doesn’t tell us very much,” but I think you can build on it.
Another thing, on my democratic leanings: I think that if comprehensive private property-rights systems – the kind which enable people to access many of the things they want, as well as the things they need, like eating the apple – if such a system is morally permissible, then the utopians should have the right to opt for that. My guess is it’s highly likely that at least some of the utopians will opt for that kind of thing, because we know that private-property systems come with massive benefits, in terms of being productive and allocative. And regarding scarcity, I’d say even if you had infinite instances of all the things you might want, you still have need for allocation. Say there are infinite cakes, but my granny made a cake. That’s the one you happen to want, but I want it because my granny made it. We’re going to have to come up with some way of working out which one of us gets the cake. And private-property rights systems help to enable productivity and to determine matters like adjudicating between claims. So, I think it’s highly likely, and it’s permissible, and it’s almost — because of my apple argument — inevitable that there will be property rights in utopia.
ævum: What about human life in space?
Rebecca Lowe: One of the beautiful things about Earth is that – and we can argue about which way the causal arrow flies – it feels very well designed for us as humans. Maybe God designed it that way, or maybe we just came up with these preferences because that’s what we have. But I can go and swim in the sea, you can go and climb the mountain, there’s space for the kids to play in the green fields. We know that there are none of these things, at least in the nearby places in the universe. And doing any of the ordinary things is going to be costly in many ways, not just financially.
I’m a big believer – I’m a big techno-optimist, whatever that means – in thinking we can solve for all those problems. So, I’m less concerned about “are we ever going to find a way to breathe on the moon?” I’m not a scientist, but I firmly believe in human ingenuity and innovation. If we’ve managed to get into space, we can probably manage to cultivate it. I still think the natural constraints would mean it might be highly less preferential for humankind to spend their time in space. I’m more interested in things like learning more about the universe, and doing medical experiments so that we can improve life on Earth.
One final thing I’d mention is the rise of aggression using space technology. As the need for space defense goes up, this implies there’s space aggression. One reason good liberals should get into space policy is to counter the aggressive nature of a lot of space actors. And I don’t just mean authoritarian leaders – there are some implications that sometimes billionaires want to go into space because they want to create their own society and block people out. I don’t want to chastise, but I think we should counter the more aggressive space technology, and I have no interest in dominating, or humankind dominating, the universe. I have interest in us making friends with other kinds of living things in space. And I am very interested in the epistemic opportunities of space progress. So, I want to separate out the desire to dominate from the desire to learn more.
The interview was conducted by Sven Gerst, edited by Marius Drozdzewski.
