Peter Brian Barry, "George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of NewBooks Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm here with a very special guest about a very, very interesting topic, which I guess is getting more traction these days. The topic is George Orwell, and I'm here with Dr. Peter Brian Barry. Dr. Peter Brian Barry is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Ethics at

at Saginaw Valley State University. He has recently published a book with Oxford University Press called George Orwell, The Ethics of Equality, and the book came out in 2023. And I'm very honored to have Peter here to discuss the book with us. Peter, thank you very much for accepting this invitation. Pleasure to be here. Looking forward to talking about it. Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself and

Tell us about, also tell us about the idea of the book or how the idea of the book came to you because you're a professor of history. It's usually a professor of philosophy, sorry, literature or political studies might be drawn to Orwell. But tell us a little bit about your background and why you decided to write a book on Orwells.

So I'm a professor of philosophy. That's what my academic training is. I've published a couple books previously, really on the topic of evil, the sort of moral concept of the thing, what distinguishes, say, just a very bad person from a full blown evil person.

My second book was titled The Fiction of Evil, and that kind of used some literary texts, some more familiar texts from literature to kind of illuminate and elucidate the philosophical concept that I was interested in. I started regularly teaching a class called Philosophy and Literature. And so just through research, but also through teaching, my institution is very much a teaching institution, I just became very attracted to using literary texts to explore philosophical problems.

Now, my interest in Orwell, I would love to tell you that I was one of those young men who grew up reading just a bunch of Orwell and loves him, you know, from from my very early days. And I certainly did read the familiar things as a younger man. I'd certainly read 1984 and Animal Farm, but it had been years since I had read any Orwell texts.

until a fellow who was editing a collection, the Cambridge Companion on 1984, by the name of Nathan Waddell, who kind of approached me out of the blue and asked if I maybe wanted to contribute a chapter about Orwell on evil. Well, I was sort of looking for something new to do and who wouldn't want to contribute to something like that. So I started refreshing my memory on Orwell, started reading some of the biographies and reading some texts that had evaded me over the years.

And I just started seeing philosophy in Orwell everywhere. Just a bunch of stuff resonated. And a lot of stuff that I thought either had maybe been misunderstood or not sufficiently discussed and thought that maybe philosophy could help a little bit to explain some of those things that I thought are worth talking about and really important in Orwell's thought, but then maybe needed a little bit more discussion and clarification. Right. And, uh,

I've read a lot of books about George Orwell, and I've done a number of podcasts on him. This book, when I read it, it was quite different from others. You're approaching, you're a professor of philosophy, and you're approaching him differently. So I'm interested to know, I mean, our listeners, I know because I read the book, but our listeners are interested to know, how is this book different from other books about George Orwell? Is it a philosophical reading of Orwell's oeuvre?

Very much so. So I have no training in English or literary theory or anything like that. What I'm essentially doing is taking some concepts, some theories and some methodology from philosophy and reading Orwell. So it's very much first a philosophy text itself.

And still hopefully of interest to people in literature, still of interest to historians and biographers. But I'm very much aiming to give a philosophical reading of what Orwell is up to. Sometimes that means using contemporary theories and terminology that, of course, Orwell couldn't have been familiar with.

but it might help to bring out some of what it was that he was discussing either because he was really, really onto something and this theory or this concept can help us understand it, or perhaps because there's something underdeveloped, perhaps there's a challenge to his view and talking about this thing might help us understand that as well. So very much, yeah,

Trying to use philosophy to just help us better understand Orwell's work quite generally. He has a reputation for being wildly inconsistent, sometimes asserting contradictory things. I don't want to explain that away, but I think one of the things that philosophy can help us do is find the center, the core of Orwell's thought, especially his ethical thought, and really bring that to light. And...

And like I said, I think before we recorded the interview, I told her that to me it was really fresh reading of Orwell because exactly because you were not a professor of English. And that helped me even when I was reading it and said, okay, that's quite interesting. I never thought about Orwell in this way. So that also helped me to...

I haven't started rereading Orwell, of course, but I started to think of his works a bit differently. And I'm sure that's something we'll pick up as we go ahead. But you also make a good point in your book when it comes to Orwell. And, you know, he was a canonical writer, but he was also, he is also, well, he was, he's lucky to gain a huge, huge popular reputation.

readership as well. And anything politically radical happens anywhere in the world, again, I guess there's a new interest in Orva. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected. I remember there was the sales of Orva's book against Skyrocketed. And interestingly...

I think it was a couple of days ago, there was another article. I didn't bother to read it. It was one of those journalistic articles. Is it time to read 1984 again? I thought, oh, God, one of those. So I didn't read it. But I can imagine, again, people becoming more interested in 1984. But, you know, all the people who read Orwell, they usually read him from a political perspective or a literary perspective. But why is it that he's usually...

Not ignored, but why is it that people don't tend to think of him as a philosophical writer? It's not the same with Albert Camus, for example. You read him, you read the work of philosophy, but not Orwell. So why is this aspect kind of ignored?

It's a good question. It's interesting. In the philosophical community, I have yet to talk to a fellow philosopher, especially someone who, say, does ethics or political philosophy, who doesn't think that Orwell is a deeply philosophical thinker, invariably, especially in the States, but also, you know, in Europe, invariably.

In Australia, any number of the philosophers that I've spoken with have made it clear Orwell was a very significant influence on them as a younger person, maybe even inspired them to get into philosophy and do the work that they're doing. So certainly in our community, he's very much regarded as a philosophical thinker.

And my impression from talking to folks, say, in the Orwell Society, they very much like the suggestion that he – obviously, he's not a professional philosopher. He didn't go to graduate school. He didn't even go to university. He doesn't have a graduate degree. But he certainly discussed matters of philosophical significance.

and sometimes quite frankly as well and certainly more clearly as some professional philosophers. If he has a reputation for not being philosophical, this probably comes from some of his biographers including some very influential biographers. So Bernard Crick

I should say Sir Bernard Crick, I believe, who wrote one of my favorite biographies of Orwell and one of the sort of early biographies. I believe he was the first one to have access to the Orwell estate when he was working on his biography. You did an interview with Peter Stansky. He and his co-author put out one of the very early biographies, a two-volume thing on Orwell, but I don't believe they had full access to the estate. And so that put some limitations on their really excellent research goals.

Crick did, and again, it's a great book, but he very early in that book offered up the suggestion that Orwell, according now, would have been incapable of writing a contemporary philosophical monograph, scarcely of understanding one, suggesting he lacked the philosophical ability to resolve a philosophical problem.

So there's this kind of professional reputation that Orwell's really taken on that at best he was disinterested in academic philosophy or maybe philosophy generally and opposed to it on an especially bad day. It's certainly true Orwell was no professional academic at all.

And he certainly liked his philosophy practical. He certainly liked it apply. He wanted to be able to do something with it. There's almost an American strain of pragmatism in his thought, right? What's the cash value of this? What's this philosophical reasoning going to do for us? But, you know, coming from my world, again, when I read through Orwell's corpus from all 20 volumes of the collected works, I see this stuff everywhere. Sometimes it's hinted at and sometimes it's pretty explicit.

It's interesting that you just mentioned that in the community of philosophers, your colleagues, they're not really surprised to think of Orwell as a philosophical writer.

And I'm sure even those who study literature may not be surprised if the idea is raised, but that's not something that they would immediately think about or they would immediately associate Orwell with philosophy. Before talking about some of his philosophical ideas, do we, from reading his biographies or the available evidence documents,

Do we know if Orwell read any work of philosophy in a serious way or if he collaborated or communicated with any philosophers at his time, of his time? We do, actually. And part of his reputation for being anti-philosophical actually, weirdly, comes from his relationship with some professional philosophers. Especially notable is Orwell's relationship with Bertrand Russell.

who was very much a leading figure in, you know, England and the, I mean, everywhere, I suppose, in the 1940s and before that. Orwell was not especially familiar with, probably wouldn't have even tried to read Russell's, you know, very influential work in logic and philosophy of language from the early part of the 20th century. But he regularly read and reviewed some of Russell's more popular works during the 1930s and 1940s. We know that he wrote very,

book reviews of some of Russell's works, um, and said really good things about them later on in their respective careers, Orwell and Russell kind of collaborated, um, on a project. And, and the project kind of died on the vine, but they did actually produce some written work together. Um,

They would exchange pleasantries. They would go to lunch to one another – lunch with one another. Orwell famously wanted Russell to write a blurb and a book review of 1984 in particular and actively sought out Russell's opinion about the book. So he definitely had correspondence with Bertrand Russell. He was also at least friendly, very friendly, another lunch companion with the British philosopher A.J. Eyre, usually associated with logical positivism. Yeah.

I mean, it's actually an anecdote from Ayer that it convinced a lot of people that Orwell just either was indifferent to or hated philosophy. Ayer did suggest that Orwell had very little interest in academic philosophy, very little interest in abstract philosophy, which, of course, was the kind of thing that interested in Ayer. But it's consistent with that, that Orwell was very interested in, say, ethics, political philosophy, normative thought.

Um, you had mentioned Camus before, Orwell was not very impressed by the French existentialists. He, um, he famously called Jean-Paul Sartre, um, a bag of wind on at least a couple of occasions, but he was hoping to meet up with Camus. Um, they wound up sort of being ships in the night. I don't think they ever actually met or had lunch. I'd be happy to be corrected on that, but he was certainly was hoping to make, um, Camus company. So something in his work clearly inspired Orwell, um,

and let him to gravitate. It's interesting too. One of the things that Orwell's biographers and archivists have been able to do was make a list of the books that he owned in 1950 when he died, or at least the books we think he owned books that were in his collection when he passed away.

you won't find a lot of, say, English philosophers like John Locke or Thomas Hobbes or John Stuart Mill, but he had several books by Bertrand Russell in his collection. Quite interesting. And that's an aspect that we in the English departments don't really think about a lot when it comes to Orwell. Let's talk about some of his ideas. You earlier said that he was interested in pragmatism, maybe. And you talk about Orwell's humanism, right?

which is based on a pragmatic reading of a Greek philosopher, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, Protagoras. I'm interested to know what you mean by always humanism and humanism in that regard, based on this pragmatic reading of the Greek philosophies.

Yeah. So taking a step back, one of the things that any reading of Orwell needs to begin with, whether biographical or historical or ethical, Orwell was certainly by the mid 30s, an adamant democratic socialist. So famously in his essay, Why I Write, he explained that every line of serious work that I've written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism.

and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. He always spelled it with a lowercase d and a capital S, if that's interesting. But so Orwell was very much a democratic socialist. He also explained in some other works that the basis of socialism, as he understood it, was humanism. So Orwell's politics, his ethical thought is dependent clearly on getting clear about what he means by humanism.

Now, when he sometimes tried to explain what humanism is, he famously declared that humanism assumes that man is the measure of all things. And this is the famous dictum from the Greek philosopher Protagoras, man is the measure of all things.

This is sometimes surprising to some of Orwell's readers and quite understandably so, especially if you focus on books like 1984. So famously, it's the party, right, the bad guys in 1984 who say that reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else, that whatever the party holds to be true is truth. This might sound a little too much like man is the measure of all things.

So a lot, if we're going to get clear about Orwell's thought, depends on getting this reading and his understanding, his clear sympathy with Protagoras' right. I think the best way to understand Orwell's humanism that's inspired by this claim that man is the measure of all things –

is to understand Orwell not as claiming that whatever we think is true is true, but rather as a kind of human-centric conception of what's good. And I think there's some text to back this up, and I get into this in the book. Goodness for Orwell is really understood as good for human beings, that quite generally, if we want to know what's morally good, we have to think about it in what's good for human beings, what makes our lives go well, what makes us flourish, what

what makes our lives go better or worse. If we understand man as the measure in the sense that what affects us well is good, then we can avoid some of these kind of unfortunate connotations with the party. What's good for Orwell is not what we think is good, right? That's the problematic party view. Instead, what's good is simply what makes the lives of human beings go well.

This is something that he comes back to on more than a few occasions. And especially when he's developing his own thoughts about socialism and what socialists should be aiming for, he has some pretty concrete ideas about what makes a human life go well and what makes it go poorly. That's where we should be looking for Orwell's understanding of Protagoras. And I think, as you mentioned, 1984...

Thinking about these ideas also gives us a new perspective towards those novels in 1984. I'm, for example, interested really in your exploration of his ideas of free will, moral responsibility. And you can also see that

I see that enactment of these ideas in 1984. So can you talk about those? What did he think about the idea of free will, moral responsibility to humans? And again, how does it play in 1984?

Absolutely. So this is really interesting. One of the first things that we think that Orwell wrote when he was at school was a short one-act play titled Free Will. And it's supposed to be ironic. It's a family debating about whether they're going to attend a cricket match or something like that. And they never quite come around to a decision. Okay, ironic. Okay.

But so clearly that was in his head pretty early if he's using the words as a title. And it's a concept that's obviously present in 1984, but it shows up in a bunch of other works as well. Sometimes he simply mentions free will by name. Sometimes he's really quite explicit. So, for example, in a lesser work, The Lion and the Unicorn, which was very much a piece of propaganda, Orwell says something like, let me get my notes so I can get what's...

Just right. He says, and this is going to sound like Samuel Johnson for some people, all the arguments are on one side and instinctive knowledge is on the other. That is about free will. So he seems to have at least been aware of some arguments that free will doesn't exist. And again, this is something that shows up in a few other minor works. But two things that I think are really worth emphasizing and also to talk about its relevance to 1984.

One of the things that Orwell consistently says in his work, sometimes in essays, sometimes in personal correspondence, he repeatedly comes back to the thought that there's something that he could not but have done. Sometimes he uses the expression could not have done otherwise.

And yet he still blames himself or he holds himself responsible or he thinks he's got something to apologize for. In that essay, Why I Write, for example, he suggests he's giving an account of his origins as a writer. And he suggests at one point that he was using very flowery descriptions in his early novels, almost against my will. It was a kind of compulsion for Orwell to write when he was reflecting on his own

piece of reportage, homage to Catalonia, he was considering a reader's complaint that he had put too much unfortunate stuff in there and Orwell explained, well, what he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. In his famous essay, Shooting an Elephant, it's very much an essay where free will and responsibility is a central theme. Orwell initially decides that he shouldn't

shoot this poor elephant who had been maybe rampaging but had come to rest. But he winds up under the influence of the crowd, but also given England's colonialism at the time that he could not help himself. He had got to shoot the elephant. But he still seemed to think that this was a problem, that this was something he needed to apologize for. So he's very much working at the intersection of, on the one hand, sort of suggesting that he wasn't free,

but still holding himself morally accountable. It's a really interesting philosophical position. And as you note, the theme of free will, I mean, 1984 is a book about a lot of things. One of the things it's clearly about is free will. From the very beginning of that novel, Winston Smith, of course, the protagonist,

He gets himself into trouble with the party because, of course, he gets his hand on this paper, this journal that he starts writing in. But he talks about this involuntary thought when he first starts, the involuntary thought that led him to get the thing in the first place. He explains that he was not conscious of writing in his diary for any particular purpose.

He's trying to write. And of course, he's scrawling over and over again, down with Big Brother, down with Big Brother. But he says he lost the power of expressing himself, that he was only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. There's all these references that sort of suggest from his own perspective, he certainly didn't have this robust, full control over what he's doing. That's in the very beginning of the novel.

And of course, at the end of the novel, it concludes with the tragic lines, he loved Big Brother. But of course, this was only after serious torture and manipulation. So whatever his emotional profile at the beginning of that novel, it seems like he didn't, there's certainly a case to be made that he didn't come to love Big Brother freely, whatever that would mean. Yeah.

So these elements of control and repression that are so very obvious in 1984 have not only political analogs, but they have relevance to the philosophical debates about free will and moral responsibility. Orville winds up with a really tremendously complicated and nuanced position. It requires some construction and reflection.

But this is where I think philosophy can actually be really, really helpful. And this is one of those things that's really unappreciated in Orwell's thought, just how much he had to say about free will. There is another philosophical term in the book, and I had to do some research myself to better understand what it meant, consequentialism. And your argument is that Orwell was an anti-consequentialist. Can you tell us what consequentialism is and how do you interpret Orwell as being anti-consequentialist?

Absolutely. So consequentialism is a view about ethics. Call it an ethical theory. It's the view that the right thing to do is whatever would maximize the good. So the right action is the one that yields not just good consequences or better consequences than bad consequences, but yields the best consequences available better than any alternative action.

So what all consequentialists agree about is that the end of the day, the right thing to do is a function of the consequences of our action, nothing else.

Not social rules, not say what God commands us to do, but the consequences of our actions. Now, consequentialism was certainly an in vogue ethical theory during the mid part of the 19th, during the 20th century and has a long tradition in English ethical thought and British ethical thought quite generally. The

A lot of Orwell's readers are pretty opposed to the idea that he was a consequentialist, and maybe for a couple different reasons. There were certainly some communists of Orwell's day who were willing to do anything for the communist cause, including things that would seem otherwise unethical.

really terrible, clearly morally wrong. Think of some things that Winston tells O'Brien he's willing to do in 1984. Anything for the sake of the revolution, anything for the sake of the brotherhood. Orwell was certainly aware that there were members of the Communist Party in his day that would do anything for the communist cause. They would say things like the ends justify the means, and Orwell was clearly uncomfortable with that kind of thinking. That

That said, I think the best reason to suppose that Orwell is not a consequentialist has to do with some of what he says about ethics in other areas. So, for example, he has a very famous essay called Reflections on Gandhi, where he's in some ways sympathetic, but in some ways critical of Gandhi, but adamantly rejects the kind of underlying ethical theory, underlying ethical thinking that Gandhi endorses.

One of the things that Orwell was opposed to in Gandhi's thinking was Gandhi's worry about having close friendships. Gandhi on Orwell's reading was opposed to having close friendships, but thought that we should minimize them, have few of them, have none of them possible because friendship loyalty makes it that much harder to love humanity as a whole. Friendships mean we're going to have to give preferential treatment and consideration to some people rather than others.

Orwell was repelled by this aspect of Gandhi's thinking, and he was very explicit about this. Indeed, he suggests that this kind of represented the difference between his humanist way of thinking, his humanist approach to life, and Gandhi's religious approach to life. He would say things like, you know, for human beings, the essence of being human is not just that we're imperfect, but that we're willing to show loyalty to some people rather than others.

So for Orwell, and this is going to introduce some philosophical terminology, an awful lot of our ethics comes from, let's call them agent relative reasons. Agent relative reasons are just those reasons that make a specific reference to a particular person.

I have a reason to call my mother on her birthday. I don't have a reason to call mothers on their birthday quite generally. My reason to call her is that she's my mom, right? It makes a very specific reference to her. That's an agent relative reason.

For Orwell, our friendships and our close relationships with other people give us these very specific reasons to do things for them, to show them preference, to show them a kind of loyalty that we might not show to humanity as a whole. This is the disagreement that he had with Gandhi.

And it's also relevant to Orwell's socialism. He thought that the goal of socialism should be human brotherhood as opposed to like seizing the means of production or something like that. Well, if I'm pursuing human brotherhood, then I'm trying to increase those friendly relationships between you and I. That's a particular kind of loyalty that I'm trying to engender.

So this is really important to Orwell's thought. But here's the important way to answer your question. Famously, consequentialists have trouble with agent relative reasons. The rule, the moral rule for consequentialism says maximize the good.

Do the thing that would yield the most happiness overall, for example. But if that's the case, that doesn't make a reference to anyone in particular, right? It just says do what has the best consequences, not the best consequences for you or for my mom or my friends or my university or something like that.

That is the fundamental obligation in consequentialism. For Orwell, our fundamental obligations had to do with our relationships with other people, these things that give rise to these agent relative reasons. And again, that's something that consequentialists have a really hard time as the story goes to make sense of. So I think that the pretty near consensus that Orwell's not well read as a consequentialist has got to be right.

But for maybe a different reason, right? Certainly his opposition to communism and the ends justify the mean stuff is part of it. But again, I think there's even deeper things going on in Orwell's thought that are worthy of our attention. When we speak about Orwell, what comes to our mind is...

We normally associate him with authoritarianism. So apparently the biggest problem of our time is authoritarianism. That always is highlighted, and that's something that persists because during the Cold War, again, that was the case maybe, and it was popular. And as we go along with the rise of more...

radical politicians, then we all tend to think, well, Orwell was right. But you're a philosopher, and I guess it's part of your job to kind of rock the boat and come up with a completely different interpretation of what the mainstream understanding of

Orwell is, and you do the same here, and you argue that he actually, personal immorality or the decay of, in the belief of personal immorality was the biggest problem of the time, according to Orwell. Can you tell us what you mean by that? And why do you think this is the most important issue that he highlighted in his works? Yeah.

Yeah. So the best reason to think it is because he kind of said it. So, for example, in his essay, looking back on the Spanish War and, of course, Orwell famous. The reason 1936 is such an important year for Orwell is that's when.

He went to Spain to fight against the fascists, right? That's when he joined the anti-fascist movement in Spain. Of course, he carried a gun, went to war, got shot in the throat by a Spanish sniper. But in any case, in his reflection, looking back on the Spanish war, he says the major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality.

He says this in a couple of other places as well. The major problem of our time is this loss of the belief in personal immortality, something like survival after death.

Now, why he thought that was such a problem, he does sometimes talk as though what was keeping a lot of people in check is their fear that in the afterlife they would be punished, that some terrible things would happen to them or that there was this great reward rating for them. And that's what was getting them to lead decent lives and doing the right thing. You lose that belief and you might worry all bets are off. That constraint on our behavior is simply gone.

that would be a problem. Now, to be sure, Orwell was a religious skeptic, probably rightly described as an atheist. And he did think that belief in the immortal soul needed to go away. He was especially worried that it was being used in a kind of exploitive way. If you remember in Animal Farm, one of the characters, maybe a minor character, is Moses the Raven.

who keeps showing up on Animal Farm and kind of whispering to the other animals about Sugar Candy Mountain, which is waiting for them just over there after they're done working. And the pigs let Moses keep doing this because he winds up being kind of an opiate, right? He distracts them from revolution, from organizing. He pacifies them. Famously, Marx had this expression, religion is the opiate of the soul, right? Orwell was maybe sympathetic with that thought.

And he was very clear that he thought that the belief in the immortal soul needed to go away. It was being used to exploit the working class and regular everyday people. We have to get rid of it. But again, he wanted something there to get us to act decently, to act rightly.

something to put a check on our behavior. So part of his search, especially in the 1940s, was for something to replace that belief in the immortal soul. Because again, otherwise, we risk losing people, say, to the fascists who are probably promising comfortable lives and an elimination of all your problems and stuff like that. We need something to supplant that belief in personal immortality. That's why it was the major problem of this day.

So it's that if there is a very popular view that Orwell thought the major problem of his day was authoritarianism or totalitarianism, that's perfectly reasonable, right? Because what he was worried about is absent this belief in personal immortality, we might be overrun or perhaps willingly overrun by fascists, by communists.

you know, the really nasty kind of communist party stuff, and that we would accede to this. So the two problems really are related. What Orwell wanted to do was replace that belief in personal immortality with something else, something else to provide us both, you know, a kind of ethics, but a kind of contrary motivation. And there is another idea, idea of decency in Orwell's book, which

Well, I mean, I could see how it usually plays out in his works. But again, it's not one of the main themes that if somebody asks me what are the top three issues that Orwell was concerned with, maybe that's not what would be on top of my list again. But can you tell us what you mean by the idea of decency that Orwell is invoking in his works from a philosophical perspective, of course?

Yeah, it's a good question. It's a word that shows up all over the place, maybe not so much in the novels. It doesn't show up a ton in 1984, for example. But especially in some of his essays and book reviews and correspondence, it's a word that shows up frequently. And so some of his some of the secondary literature has made a point about this.

But he frankly never gives us a – and of course he didn't. He's not a professional philosopher. He never gives us like an analysis of the concept of decency or anything like that. So sometimes some of his readers have complained. He uses the word decency all the time, but he never really explains what it means.

That said, and again, this is where I think philosophy can be helpful. If we use some philosophical methodology, we can kind of reconstruct what Orwell's after. So here's a couple thoughts about what decency was for Orwell. First of all, by all accounts, something decent is good decency.

but let's say minimally good. A decent sandwich is fine. It's a perfectly good lunch, but it's not exceptional. It's not great. It's not fantastic. A decent movie is fine, but it's not winning any Academy Awards or anything like that. So let's start with the idea that decency is a term of commendation, but maybe just a minimal one. If someone reviewed my book and said it's decent, I'm not sure I would take that as a compliment. It's very faint praise, right?

But here's another thing about decency that's really important for Orwell in particular. Decency is supposed to be common. It is something that is supposed to be possessed by, say, the English quite generally and working class persons quite generally. It's nothing rare. It's nothing exceptional. It's nothing especially unique. It's actually quite common.

So, for example, again, in The Lion and the Unicorn, a piece of Orwellian propaganda where he was trying to get the English and especially working class English persons to join the socialist cause, he repeatedly refers to their common decency, to their ordinary decency, to the innate decency of the English people. So this is something that should be not only not exceptional, but not especially rare. It's something that we should find, say, in the working class quite regularly. Right.

One of the things that's interesting, though, is there are some themes when Orwell is talking about decency that we can kind of locate as well. He often talks about decency in the context of cleanliness. So sometimes he talks about working class homes.

of the sort that he documented in his fifth book. I think it's his fifth book, The Road to Wigan Pier. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. I was corrected in another podcast because I'm not saying it correctly. Apologies. But he has a lot to say about the sort of

Sorted condition of the working class homes he was, you know, finding himself in when Orwell was talking about decent homes and decent clothes. He really often was explaining that he wanted clean homes and clean clothes.

That seems like an odd thing for the concept of decency to involve, but I think it's actually really quite important. The reason Orwell wanted to see decent working class homes and working class people wearing decent clothes was because if you had a decent home, decent clothing, you could have a kind of self-respect. You could respect yourself in an important kind of way. You could get a certain kind of social respect.

One of the things Orwell was incredibly sensitive to was the way that things like clothing manifested in social relationships, that especially the bourgeoisie were very good at picking out the ways that, say, a working class person would wear their jacket as opposed to, say, an upper class person would wear their jacket or the condition of their clothes.

Cleanliness and decency were tied together for Orwell, and they were important for Orwell because decency actually gets us something morally important. It gets us self-esteem, but it might also be related to a kind of relational equality, which I bet we'll talk about before this conversation is done.

Similarly, when Orwell is talking about decency, he often makes it clear that a decent person lacks certain things. They lack privilege. They lack hostility to other people, say, on the basis of ethnicity or race or something along those lines. They aren't obsessed with material possessions. Some of Orwell's ironic use of the word decency, for example, in his novel Burmese Days, are coming from a character who

Was clearly, you know, not a decent person, but is obsessed with exactly these sorts of things. So oftentimes for Orwell, a decent person lacks certainly morally problematic character traits and dispositions.

especially, and maybe most notably for an analysis of what Orwell means by decency, a decent person, he suggests a number of occasions, will lack a certain kind of motivation, what I call the power fetish. Orwell was deeply concerned that something new was happening in the 1930s and 1940s, that we were seeing for the first time authoritarian type figures who wanted power, but

not for the sake of advantage or for the sake of

you know, financial benefit. They wanted power for its own sake. This is the goal of the party, of course, in 1984. And Orwell was deeply concerned by this. He was pretty clear that decent people, the decent, ordinary English working class had no such motive. This was a very good and comprehensive explanation. But another thing I'm also interested in is the question of power.

egalitarianism and it's sort of implied in the title of your book ethics of equality

You have a very, very interesting approach towards the question of egalitarianism. You analyze it from two different perspectives, a relational interpretation of egalitarianism, and the other one is luck, true luck. Can you tell us what you mean by these two interpretations of egalitarianism in Ola's work, and which version is more manifested in his works? Sure.

Yeah, absolutely. So by all accounts, an egalitarian is someone who thinks that equality is really, really, really, really important. Not, you know, maybe it's one value among many, but it's an especially important value when it comes to ethics and political philosophy. Now, what we've seen in the literature on egalitarianism in the last, say, 50 years is that there's been different conceptions of what egalitarianism's demands are.

On two of the very, very influential conceptions that have become available. On the one hand, we've got let's call it luck egalitarianism. Now, according to luck egalitarianism, inequality is bad or unjust when it reflects differences in factors that are beyond the control of the worse off.

Um, but it, but if not, then perhaps not. So very roughly, according to the luck egalitarian, um, unjust inequality is that which is not the product of say my voluntary choices or decisions or actions. But if inequalities emerge, say because of risky gambles or bad decisions on my part, then those inequalities might not be, um, justice might not demand or not demand as urgently that they be rectified. Uh,

A different and maybe historically more accurate version of what egalitarianism demands has come to be called relational egalitarianism. On relational egalitarianism, what is not so urgent or not of primary concern is that we redistribute or distribute at all various kinds of commodities or capital or something like that.

According to relational egalitarianism, inequality is bad or unjust when inequality makes it the case that people do not relate to one another as equals, when inequalities make it difficult or impossible for us to look one another in the eye, so to speak. So for the relational egalitarian, it's not so much a problem if you and I have very different incomes, so long as you and I can relate to one another as equals equally.

Yeah.

Now, what's interesting about Orwell is sometimes he talks like a luck egalitarian and sometimes he talks like a relational egalitarian. So, for example, Orwell has a critique of the English class system, but especially the English class system as it concerns education.

One of Orwell's complaints is that in the English system, a mere accident of birth, his phrase, can determine a child's chances very early on. So if by a mere accident of birth, you're born into the upper classes, into the aristocracy, and you can make it into the best schools, go to Eaton, go to Oxford or Cambridge, you're going to have much better prospects than the child who, again, as a mere accident, is born to working-class parents,

who cannot afford to send their children to the best schools where those opportunities are simply closed to them.

So Orwell made a big deal about reforming the educational system along class lines. That sure sounds like luck egalitarianism. That said, on the whole, I think Orwell's really best read as a relational egalitarian. And this is maybe for a couple of reasons. We know that when Orwell made it to Spain, he spoke very highly of his time in Spain.

I mean, especially his relationships with the Spanish. He loved the sort of sense of Spanish brotherhood that he saw, but also the absence of like class and caste distinctions. At least initially, when the fascists kind of came in back into Barcelona and took back over, he saw all of those signs of class and caste return.

But when he first arrived, what he was really struck by was this kind of brotherhood among the Spanish and the absence of these signs of class and caste. He also spoke so often, say, when he was talking about poverty and the trance in his very early work, reflected in books like Down and Out in Paris and London. He had a great deal to say about class and poverty and their relationships.

He would talk about the clothing of tramps, the social cues of class and poverty, his life as a plonzeur, and all the social relationships that were involved with that. When Orwell was sort of implicitly or explicitly complaining about these things, it wasn't that he wasn't getting paid enough, that there were inequalities with respect to income. It was that there were social inequalities. There were social worlds that he simply could not access. Right.

And, you know, eventually later returned to, but not at the time, not at the time. These are things he talked about so often in his early work. And it also makes sense if we remember again, Orwell thought that the goal of democratic socialism, the sort of organizing thought behind all of his ethics and political thought,

that the goal of democratic socialism was human brotherhood. What else could that mean if not you and I relating to one another as equals freed from the trappings of class and caste? So while I don't deny that Orwell says things that do sound like a luck egalitarian, I think on the whole, if we look at his whole body of work, Orwell's really best read as a relational egalitarian. What he wanted was the dismantling of social institutions that enabled class and

And cast to remain and that we, that is all of us relate to one another in a certain kind of more democratic, um, in a more democratic way. And I'm guessing this aspect of his works are more manifested in his nonfiction rather than fictions, right?

Yeah, because when you –

In 1984, the party is distinguished partly by their political powers, but also where they live and their clothing and those kinds of things. These were all the things that Orwell was very, very sensitive to. So even I think I do think you're right, especially when we look to his reportage, his essays, his correspondence, we will see these themes developed. But I think they're there in his most famous later novels as well. Let's talk about another topic.

I was myself really, really interested in the last few chapters of the book. That's where you talk about his political ideas. And again, you cast a different lens. You bring up the idea of John Rawls' property-owning democracy. And I've been reading more about John Rawls myself more recently. So it was, to be honest, the last thing I expected to see in this book was John Rawls, which was, that again goes to show that how fresh your interpretation of George Orwell is. But before talking about John Rawls,

So Orwell is normally associated with the left. Well, of course, it's kind of ironic that whenever I talk to an Orwell expert, I usually bring up this idea that it's quite ironic that how even the right wing is kind of co-opting Orwell for their own purposes. But, you know, I don't think Orwell would have much in common with them. But anyhow, so Orwell is normally associated with the left, being a left libertarian maybe. But you kind of put this idea under question, right?

How do you think he may not be so much of a left libertarian in this case? Yeah. So this is another area where we've seen a lot of movement in political philosophy and trying to get really clear about what we're talking about when we're talking about left libertarianism as opposed to right libertarianism. So one of the things that we see that's really all libertarians tend to think, for example, that we are, let's call it self-owners of

That we are owners of our minds and bodies, our labor and the fruits of our labor. And to use a popular way of putting it, to think about if we're self-owners, then we possess over ourselves as a matter of moral rights, all those rights that say a slaveholder has over a chattel slave as a matter of legal rights.

So if we're self-owners, we can dispose of ourselves in the same way that a slaveholder is entitled, legally speaking, to dispose of his slaves. Of course, taking that liberty seriously means the abolishment of slavery, but it means retaining that kind of property legally.

libertarianism is that we also think that for example certain kinds of resources say natural resources need to be distributed in an egalitarian manner um

Whatever that looks like, egalitarians disagree about, but there has to be some kind of distribution or at least equal access of natural resources on whatever a person's station or position or whatever.

So, um, a left libertarian, as I understand it has to endorse those two doctrines, um, this very strong doctrine of self ownership and a view about the net distribution of natural resources. Now, maybe a bit to people's surprise. I don't think Orwell quite gets there on either one of those two constitutive claims of the left libertarian. Um, he, he's certainly a defender of liberty and free speech and free expression and lots of other things. Um,

But when we start looking at some of his policy positions, he often recommends positions that I suspect a full-blown libertarian would be very uncomfortable with. So, for example, Orwell comes out in favor of conscription, drafting persons into service. He's explicit about this in the 1940s. But conscription is essentially forcing someone, perhaps against their will, to participate in a war effort.

that they might have moral or other objections to. That's something libertarians are typically uncomfortable with. Orwell is very clear at points that he thinks that the state should have a monopoly on coercion. Libertarians sometimes think that monopolies should be retained by individual persons and that we can work on different kinds of networks to punish, to hold people responsible, and other kinds of things. Well,

Orwell was certainly a defender of free speech and expression, but he thought those things had limits, especially during wartime, for example. He thought that our rights of speech and association could be curtailed in certain kinds of important ways that libertarians probably have limited.

serious objections to. He was also adamantly opposed to, and I know this is controversial for some folks, but he was adamantly opposed to birth control and to access to abortion in a way that, again, an awful lot of libertarians think is essential if women in particular are to be self-owners and to have that robust control over themselves and their bodies.

So when we look at a lot of the positions that Orwell took during his time, they're just not the kinds of things that I would expect a full-blooded libertarian to say. He's close and he certainly thought liberty was valuable but not quite a libertarian.

I'm a little less sure what to say about Orwell and the distribution of natural resources. He never comes quite to the point where he describes exactly how he thinks natural resources should be distributed. He comes close on a couple occasions, but

I don't know if he would quite endorse the thesis the way that I put it. So Orwell certainly is a man of the left. He was very clear about this. He said, I belong to the left and must work inside it. He certainly thought liberty was incredibly important value, but you can't quite put those two things together and get him all the way to left libertarianism. Close, but no cigar.

And again, I guess it's a perfect segue to my next question about socialism, because he was identified as one. And I think it was in a preface to, I don't remember, German or Hungarian translation of 1984, where he wrote that nothing has hurt, something similar along these lines, that nothing has hurt the cause of socialism more than the fact that some people think Russia or Soviet Union, don't know which word used at that time, is a socialist country.

countries, and it's no secret that he had nothing in common. He hated the Soviet Union for all the right reasons. And you also make this case here that his vision of socialism was incomplete, and a better, perhaps, alternative to his vision was

John Rawls' idea of property-owning democracy. That provides a better alternative, a vision of that socialism. So what was Orwell's incomplete vision of socialism and how does John Rawls' idea complement that?

Yeah. So I would say that Orwell's argument for socialism, for democratic socialism, that is, was incomplete, mostly because, well, even if you accept his multiple criticisms of capitalism, and even if you accept the goals that Orwell was trying to realize, there is arguably another alternative, another kind of political economy that both corrects

Yeah.

And this is, as you say, a property-owning democracy. Now, interestingly, the words property-owning democracy actually emerged, I believe, in the first half of the 20th century in English political philosophy, but it was arguably best developed by the American political philosopher John Rawls, most influential political philosopher in the Anglophone world during the 20th century, probably the most influential political philosopher of that century period.

In his important work, A Theory of Justice, Orwell was maybe not as clear or maybe we just misunderstood him, to be perfectly honest, about exactly what he thought a just political economy would look like. In his later work, he explained that there were certain kinds of political economies that were clearly unjust. So, for example, a state-sponsored socialism of the kind that Orwell criticized in Russia

was certainly off the table. But he was also critical of free market capitalism as well, precisely because he thought there could be these...

accumulations of wealth that would disrupt political liberties and their fair exercise. So when Rawls was trying to clarify what he thought would be just, there's a reading of Rawls where he would be okay with democratic socialism, but also with what we're calling a property-owning democracy. Now, what's the difference between a property-owning democracy and, say, democratic socialism? One of the big differences is that

You might think that private property or at least the means of production in socialism would be possessed by the state. There at least would be a limitation on private property, which, by the way, Orwell once called the right of – identified the right to private property as the right to exploit and torture millions of one's fellow creatures. It doesn't sound like someone who's behind the idea of private property. Right.

But there would be private property in a property-owning democracy. But it's characterized by the following three features. First of all, there would be the wide dispersal of capital and capital in every interesting sense, not just financial capital but human capital. There would be widespread access to opportunities for education, for example. But these would be things that would be available to people, say, from birth, right?

In a property-owning democracy, we would not redistribute resources, but people would have access to them early in life and then throughout life as well. So this wide dispersal of capital is really equal access to capital throughout a person's life.

The second feature of a property-owning democracy is that we would block intergenerational transmission of advantage. So, for example, in a property-owning democracy, persons would lack the right to, say, bequeath their estate to

to their children. Children would not have the right to inherit the property or the estate of their parents. There would be serious inheritance and gift taxes. And this was to keep wealth and capital from accumulating along family lines. This was something Orwell was, of course, familiar with, that both financial and political capital would be invested in families.

in the UK for no good reason other than someone's great great grandparents had it and continued to pass it down in a property owning democracy those lines of inheritance would be disrupted by

Finally, in a property-owning democracy, there would be serious safeguards against the corruption of democratic politics. We might, for example, demand publicly funded elections, which of course we don't have here in the United States. There would be serious campaign finance reform, maybe public funding of political parties, public provisions of forms for political debate, but ways of making sure that wealth

and capital did not have an untoward influence on the operation of politics, especially elections. But that said, would people have the right to private property? Absolutely. Would the state uniquely possess the means of production? Nope. Those could be possessed by individual persons as well. So democratic socialism and the property-owning democracy are really rivals to one another. They can't both be right. Right.

Now, one of the things that I think is interesting, and I don't blame Orwell for this, is that a couple of places he kind of identifies the potential candidates for a just political economy and he rejects them. And so it seems like he winds up with democratic socialism kind of by, you know, process of elimination. It's not going to be state sponsored socialism because we've seen what happens with that.

It's not going to be capitalism because we see the kind of massive inequalities in both political capital and human capital as well as financial capital that can occur there. If democratic socialism was the only other player on the board, then Orwell would have a pretty airtight case for democratic socialism, but through no fault of his own because he didn't consider a property-owning democracy, which arguably remedies capitalism.

all of the problems of capitalism, but also provides the kind of equality that Orwell thought was so valuable, there's at least one other player on the board. So for Orwell's case for democratic socialism to be complete, he needs to give us an argument that the property-owning democracy of the kind advocated by Rawls, especially in his later work, is also not eligible, that that could not be just, that would not get him the kinds of things

that he would be attracted to. Now, obviously, Orwell's not going to be able to do that. Maybe some of Orwell's followers will be able to resurrect that kind of argument. But if we take Rawls seriously, we've got at least two kinds of political economy on the board that could be just the property-owning democracy and democratic socialism. For the Orwellians who want to complete Orwell's case, you're going to have to make the case against property-owning democracy. Mm-hmm.

And that's the little bit that doesn't really, let's say, fit with maybe a perfect socialist vision. And that's where John Rawls kind of complements that idea. Dr. Abdelish. Yeah.

Dr. Peter Roseberry, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us about your book. As I said at the beginning of the interview, I found it really, really fascinating. And me as a student of literature, somebody who has studied literature, it helped me even look at George Orwell differently from a literal perspective even. And it's fascinating.

breath of fresh air because it's simply not reinterpreting what is already there about Orwell. That was my initial thought before reading, but once I started reading the book, I thought, wow, this is quite a different text. And that's why I do strongly recommend to our listeners to read the book. There are, I guess, five chapters, if I'm not mistaken.

And in each one of them, you pick up a chapter, sorry. In each one of them, you pick up one, several philosophical ideas. Yeah. And then you explore them through George Orwell's work. So thank you very much for your time. Really enjoyed this conversation.

Thank you so much. I should say, as you and I are talking, we are three days after the 75th anniversary of Orwell's passing. And given, you know, contemporary political events, we could not be talking about Orwell at a better time. So really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today.