Alexis de Tocqueville: Welcome back. This conversation is brought to you by PhilosophersTalk.com, where thinkers discuss!
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Alexis de Tocqueville: When we concluded Part One, Mr. Mill had just explained that my contribution to this debate was identifying the occasion for a lecture rather than a philosophy. I want to say, in the spirit of intellectual honesty, that he was right, and that I intend to continue in exactly that spirit for the entirety of Part Two.
John Stuart Mill: And you ended by suggesting that when I win the lawsuit I will discover I have not fixed anything. I have been considering that claim during the interval and I want to press you on it, because it is a prediction about the future dressed as though it were an observation of the present, which is a rhetorical move I normally associate with prophets rather than political scientists.
Alexis de Tocqueville: I am both. The two are not mutually exclusive. A man who understands political science well enough eventually becomes a prophet simply by paying attention.
John Stuart Mill: Let us talk about what the litigation is actually accomplishing, because I think you have been dismissive of it and I want to be specific about why that dismissal is wrong. The states that have brought these cases, and there are now more than forty of them, are establishing a legal framework for what constitutes acceptable product design when children are the users. This is not merely about damages. It is about precedent. A court finding that algorithmically optimized addiction in a child is a cognizable harm creates a standard that future product designers must work around. That is a structural change, not a symbolic one.
Alexis de Tocqueville: I grant that. A legal standard for acceptable design in products used by children is better than no legal standard. What I want to ask is what happens to that standard in fifteen years when the companies have spent several hundred million dollars on lawyers whose job is to interpret it into irrelevance. I have watched this process occur in every democratic country I have studied. The standard is established, the regulated parties learn to comply in the most minimal sense possible, the regulators who enforce it are staffed by people who rotate between the regulatory agency and the industry being regulated, and within a generation the standard protects approximately no one. This is not cynicism. It is the documented history of democratic regulation.
John Stuart Mill: The solution to institutional capture is better institutions with stronger independence and more transparent accountability, not the abandonment of the institutional approach. You are arguing that because reform is difficult and subject to erosion, we should prefer the analysis that produces no reform at all.
Alexis de Tocqueville: I am arguing that we should pursue the legal reform and understand its limits simultaneously, and that the second part of that sentence matters because democratic societies have a strong tendency to pursue the first part, declare victory, and stop. I am not opposing the lawsuit. I am opposing the satisfaction that will follow winning it.
John Stuart Mill: That is a distinction I am willing to accept as real and important. The satisfaction that prematurely follows a partial remedy does consume the energy that would otherwise be directed at the underlying problem. I have written about this pattern in the context of the Reform Acts. You win the visible fight, the energy dissipates, and the structural problem reconstitutes in the space that was cleared.
Alexis de Tocqueville: We agree on that more than I expected. You are a more difficult opponent when you are being reasonable than when you are being certain.
John Stuart Mill: I am always certain. The question is whether the certainty is warranted. Let me turn to the point where I believe our disagreement is genuinely irresolvable. You argue that adults using these platforms are not exercising genuine freedom because the product is designed to disable the reflective capacity that genuine freedom requires. I reject that claim, and I reject it on empirical as well as philosophical grounds. Many adults use these platforms without becoming psychologically dependent. Many who develop patterns of excessive use are capable, with support and accurate information, of changing their behavior. You are treating a statistical vulnerability as though it were a universal incapacity, and that move is the first step toward the kind of paternalism that liberal philosophy exists to oppose.
Alexis de Tocqueville: You are correct that I am making a statistical claim rather than a claim about universal incapacity. Where we disagree is on what follows from that statistical claim. The platforms are not designed for the resilient users who can manage them. The platforms are designed to maximize engagement across the entire user population, and the design is optimized by systems that learn, in real time, how to find the specific vulnerabilities of each individual user and exploit them. The statistical average is what the machine is built to produce. The exceptions prove the design is imperfect, not that the design is acceptable.
John Stuart Mill: Then the remedy for adults is what I have said: mandatory transparency about how the system works, clear disclosure of what data is collected and how the recommendation engine functions, and interoperability requirements so that users can migrate to less manipulative alternatives. These give the individual the tools to make a genuinely informed choice. That is the liberal solution.
Alexis de Tocqueville: Those are the liberal solutions for a population that is capable of reading the disclosure, understanding its implications, and acting on that understanding against the immediate pull of a product that has been optimized specifically to prevent exactly that sequence of events. You are prescribing reading glasses to someone who has been conditioned to keep their eyes closed.
John Stuart Mill: And you are prescribing civic renewal to someone who is late for work and has no idea what that phrase means in practical terms. At some point, a philosophy must produce an action that a specific person can take on a specific Tuesday. Yours does not.
Alexis de Tocqueville: Mine produces an understanding of what is actually happening, which is the necessary condition for any action that lasts longer than the next election cycle. You keep treating the absence of a specific Tuesday-action as though it were a defect of the argument. It is a feature of the kind of problem I am describing. If the problem could be addressed by a specific Tuesday-action, it would not be the kind of problem I have been describing.
John Stuart Mill: That is an extremely convenient definition of a problem. Any problem that cannot be solved by your approach is, by your definition, the kind of problem that cannot be solved by any approach other than yours, which has not yet been specified in terms anyone can implement.
Alexis de Tocqueville: The specification is voluntary associations, local governance, civic participation, the habits of self-governance that prevent citizens from becoming the isolated and manipulable individuals that these platforms are designed to produce. I have been specific. You simply find the specification unsatisfying because it cannot be passed as a bill.
John Stuart Mill: I find it unsatisfying because it requires a generation to implement and the children being harmed by these platforms need help before their neurological development is complete. Your civic renewal is a twenty-year project. These children do not have twenty years.
Alexis de Tocqueville: And your lawsuit is a five-year project that will produce a settlement, a redesigned algorithm, and a new generation of engineers paid to find the edges of whatever the settlement requires. Your children will be fine. Their children will be exactly where we started.
John Stuart Mill: Then we should win the lawsuit and begin the twenty-year project simultaneously rather than using the inadequacy of the lawsuit as a reason to stand apart and provide commentary.
Alexis de Tocqueville: I HAVE NEVER PROPOSED STANDING APART! I HAVE PROPOSED PURSUING BOTH AND REFUSING TO LET THE LAWSUIT CROWD OUT THE LARGER CONVERSATION!
John Stuart Mill: THE LARGER CONVERSATION HAS BEEN HAPPENING FOR A HUNDRED AND EIGHTY YEARS AND THE CIVIC RENEWAL YOU ARE DESCRIBING HAS NOT ARRIVED! AT SOME POINT THE CONVERSATION MUST PRODUCE SOMETHING OTHER THAN MORE CONVERSATION!
Alexis de Tocqueville: THE CIVIC RENEWAL ARRIVED AND WAS DELIBERATELY DISMANTLED BY ECONOMIC FORCES THAT YOUR FRAMEWORK PROVIDES NO TOOLS TO RESIST!
John Stuart Mill: NAME THE ECONOMIC FORCES AND THE TOOLS NEEDED AND WE CAN LEGISLATE AGAINST THEM! THAT IS HOW LIBERAL GOVERNANCE WORKS!
Alexis de Tocqueville: THE ECONOMIC FORCES ARE THE LOGIC OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM ITSELF! YOU CANNOT LEGISLATE AGAINST THE LOGIC OF YOUR OWN SYSTEM!
John Stuart Mill: THEN YOUR ENTIRE POSITION IS THAT LIBERAL DEMOCRACY CANNOT SAVE ITSELF AND WE SHOULD APPRECIATE THE ACCURACY OF YOUR DIAGNOSIS WHILE EVERYTHING COLLAPSES AROUND US!
Alexis de Tocqueville: MY POSITION IS THAT IT CAN BE SAVED BUT NOT BY PEOPLE WHO THINK A LAWSUIT IS SUFFICIENT!
John Stuart Mill: PATERNALIST!
Alexis de Tocqueville: OPTIMIST!
John Stuart Mill: PROPHET!
Alexis de Tocqueville: BUREAUCRAT!
John Stuart Mill: ARISTOCRAT!
Alexis de Tocqueville: UTILITARIAN!
John Stuart Mill: That was intended as an insult?
Alexis de Tocqueville: In the context of this conversation, yes, absolutely.
John Stuart Mill: Noted.
Alexis de Tocqueville: If you have enjoyed watching a man who has been accurately describing the collapse of democratic self-governance since before the telephone existed be lectured about the importance of litigation by someone who spent thirty-five years employed by the East India Company while writing essays about liberty, please like this video and subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com, where at least one of us has thought about what the word freedom actually requires rather than merely what it permits.
John Stuart Mill: If you have enjoyed watching a French aristocrat with a genius for diagnosis and an absolute refusal to prescribe anything spend an entire two-part debate explaining why the only thing that can help cannot be implemented, please like and subscribe. Monsieur de Tocqueville wrote two volumes warning that democratic citizens would eventually become too comfortable and too isolated to govern themselves. I would like the audience to consider which of us in this conversation has spent more time explaining why nothing can be done, and which of us has spent more time explaining what should be done. The answer, I think, is instructive.
Alexis de Tocqueville: What should be done and what can be done through the mechanisms you prefer are not the same thing. I am glad you find the distinction instructive.
John Stuart Mill: I find the distinction convenient. There is a difference.
Alexis de Tocqueville: The difference is the whole argument. If you had understood that distinction at the start, we would not have needed two parts.
John Stuart Mill: If you had a mechanism at the start, we would not have needed two parts.
Alexis de Tocqueville: And yet here we are.
John Stuart Mill: Indeed.
