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Our discussion begins with observations about isolation. The beautiful losers consider how oddly comfortable life is under quarantine for those who haven’t had to struggle, but deeper existential fears draw them back into the every day. Can we measure our lives simply by the number of sourdough loaves we bake? Does virtue ethics run out of gas when excellence is achieved and no great revelation appears? How does time dilate during the lockdown?

An important theme emerged that will shape much of the show’s methodology: identifying and disentangling the broken binaries that shape most worldviews today. Specifically, we discuss the practical limitations of using “left” and “right” as identity categories that are meant to coordinate a certain set of beliefs. Neither category seems especially meaningful or useful, beyond the rhetorical tactic of creating an antagonistic other.

These opening thoughts lead us into discussing two recent examinations of the government lockdown from philosophers Peter Singer and Giorgio Agamben. While provocative, Seth and Alex found both responses wanting. 

Singer is a well-known representative of utilitarianism; his piece considers the point at which “the cure is worse than the disease.” Your beautiful losers consider the limits of utilitarianism and hypothesize ways that Covid-19 reveals some of the limitations of utilitarian thinking. 

Under special discussion is Singer’s use of “identified victim effect,” or the way in which a first-hand knowledge of victimhood often influences a person’s moral outlook. For Singer, no ethics is possible unless one can abstract from these first-hand accounts of victimhood into a larger, more abstract population. Seth and Alex are sympathetic to the argument, but skeptical about its efficacy. The political situation today seems more and more entrenched around de-legitimizing victimhood rather than expanding it. 

As a possible example of a “beautiful loser ethos,” Seth and Alex consider the ways that a perception of feelings informs utilitarian thinking. Does Singer’s “moral calculus” erase a rather simple ethics of feeling happy? 

Concluding this conversation about utilitarianism, your beautiful losers lament the melancholic state of being stuck within a utilitarian frame, while not having access to any reliable form of measuring pain and suffering. It appears that both business and state are forced to default into an impoverished and unsatisfying version of utilitarian thinking. It seems to us that the limitations of abstract thinking around a more robust ethical theory and the immediacy of an economic toolkit create conditions where policymakers and business leaders must rely on a rather limited set of options, all of which present solutions in diminishing returns. The tradition of progressive political theory that we hail from is limited in its ability to successfully move from the register of the theoretical to the practical and we consider the implications of this limitation.

From that happy thought, we turn our considerations to one of the preeminent theorists of biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben. Agamben is famous for the concept of “bare life,” a form of political subjectivity that is most acutely formed when the state enacts a “state of emergency.” More foundationally, Agamben’s work “made it OK” to read the work of an ultra-conservative thinker like Carl Schmidt and acknowledge the fundamental truth it describes regarding sovereignty and state power. Agamben, by way of Schmidt, asserts that true sovereign power lies in the ability to suspend the law. To live under the law makes one a subject; to be able to suspend or ignore the law makes one a sovereign. Agamben’s thesis observes the way that the temporary suspension of the law can becoming an ever-present strategy for modern statecraft. 

Your beautiful losers consider a few articles where Agamben raises questions about the intentions and implications of Italy’s response to Covid-19. While this crisis represents another opportunity for Agamben to work out his thesis regarding bare life, this particular response falls flat. We consider Agamben’s response as both a buyer and a seller of a “boy who cried wolf” effect that has plagued the broader response to this crisis in the media. Agamben’s incessant critique of states of exception may blind him to the conditions which require a state of exception. We also have to take a moment to laugh at the way that Agamben’s biases toward public spaces reveal a certain European cultural formation. At the end of the day he is an elderly Italian man who misses drinking espresso in the public square.

The episode concludes by considering how these political theorists set the stage for an ethical and practical discussion regarding the use of personal data. It seems that effective disease management will require a degree of data-driven contact tracing. Given our cultural trend toward “big data” and population management and optimization from the vantage point of tech-innovation, does a certain philosophical tradition of solitary reflection and contemplation wither? Are we worse for this, or does that question betray our own status as Luddites? These questions touch on how our desires are monetized and repackaged for us without our consent. While these questions are prescient, we end this discussion by acknowledging that the very intellectual traditions that help us understand these questions often cannot deliver on a pragmatic set of solutions or methods for moving forward.

Thanks for listening! We started to get into a good groove for this episode and it will show in episodes 3 and 4. We’ll be following up with episode 3 in the next few days; our hope is to release these episodes more quickly after recording so that we can more deftly respond to current events. 

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