The guest for this second episode of the HAPL podcast is Marco Segatti, currently senior researcher at the Tarello Institute for Legal Philosophy – University of Genoa and member of UNIGE’s ALF team.
In the first part of this highly interactive interview with Julieta Rabanos and Bojan Spaić, Segatti first introduces his academic genealogy and discusses with the hosts about the high importance of research groups for academy and the potential societal impact of philosophy and its branches. Then, he discusses about research methodology and his preferred topics of research.
In the second part of the interview, Segatti discusses with the hosts about habits and the law, and his research towards a new definition of habits. The debate goes on to touch upon the relation between habits, behaviours, and the explanation of (social) rules, to finally conclude on the interactions between habits and rules.
Below, you can find the full transcription corresponding to this episode*:
Bojan Spaić:
A couple of days ago, we welcomed Marco Segatti in Belgrade, who is here with us today. And we’re going to talk a bit about, most probably, habits, but also –
Marco Segatti:
Anything that comes to mind?
Bojan Spaić:
Yeah, but also anything that comes to mind. And given that Julieta already has some experience with recording podcasts, I’m handing the mic to her.
Julieta Rabanos:
Thank you very much, Marco, for being here. I think that we can just start by asking you to vote in this poll that we don’t have yet, but it is starting now, about the name of this podcast. We have two possibilities. One is Incompletely Theorized Disagreements, and the other one is Heavily Accented Philosophy of Law.
Marco Segatti:
I don’t know; they both sound like very good names, actually. Can you have a subtitle? Like, choose one? No, that’s not a voting option. But Incompletely Theorized Disagreements – I like that a lot, actually. I would vote for that.
Bojan Spaić:
Yeah, it’s a good name. It’s still my favourite. Jules is going, I think, for the Heavily Accented Philosophy of Law, for all kinds of obvious reasons. I mean, we had Gerald Postema at one point, so we didn’t have any accent. We’ll see. So, we’re counting in a vote: Marco Segatti gives his vote to Incompletely Theorized Disagreements. Now it even started flowing, because it’s kind of complicated to pronounce – Incompletely Theorized Disagreements – but also Heavily Accented.
Julieta Rabanos:
But we can pronounce it with a heavy accent, like Incomplete Theorized Disagreements.
Marco Segatti:
But do you say “heavy accent” in English?
Bojan Spaić:
Or “highly accented.”
Marco Segatti:
Yeah.
Julieta Rabanos:
Heavy, heavy accent.
Marco Segatti:
Is that a thick accent? Because “thickly accented disagreements” or “philosophy” – it’s even, I don’t know. Yeah. It wasn’t in the option; I shouldn’t add to –
Bojan Spaić:
You did good, because if we made a mistake in actually formulating the title, then this title has the upper hand. We’re kind of just sure that this works in English, and we’re not sure that Heavily Accented –
Julieta Rabanos:
I think that I have heard, like, “This person has a heavy accent.” Also, I heard “This person has a fake accent.” I don’t know.
Marco Segatti:
I really don’t know.
Julieta Rabanos:
I don’t know. We will have to ask ChatGPT.
Marco Segatti:
But making a mistake would be also a plus. You know, like – yeah, okay. You understand what it means, right? But if it’s not really the way that an English speaker would say it, then it’s even better, because it kind of realizes the concept. I mean, someone with a heavy accent or a thick accent, obviously, wouldn’t know how to say it.
Bojan Spaić:
Absolutely. Actually, this was a good idea – inviting people to vote for this and comment on the possible names. So, after ten episodes of the podcast, we’ll settle on one title eventually.
Marco Segatti:
Or you’ll have another ten names – probably everybody.
Bojan Spaić:
But we’ll see.
Julieta Rabanos:
Okay, so now we have one vote to Incompletely Theorized Disagreements, and then all the ideas that follow – for example, the subtitle, and then Thickly Accented Philosophy of Law, which I really like. But let’s now move to you, Marco. Maybe you can tell us a little about you, in the sense of, for example, what has been your academic career, what did you do before coming to Belgrade?
Marco Segatti:
All right. So, well, I was born and raised in Pavia a few years ago. I studied there – my first degree in law. And it was the time when there was this big reform of Italian higher education. So, we have two degrees now in law, like the three years and two years. Now it has changed again. Anyway, I did my first studies in Pavia, and then I did my PhD, always in law – in civil procedure, actually – at the University of Bologna.
But I was moving back and forth from Pavia to Bologna, because meanwhile, I was working as a lawyer in Milan. Well, as a trainee in law. And then, while still doing my PhD in Bologna, I did one year at Harvard, where I did the LLM, which was financed by the Bank of Italy. So, yeah, I had a full free ride to Harvard Law School.
After that, I wasn’t really satisfied with what I did in my PhD – or at least not completely. Partly because I wasn’t really involved in Bologna very much. So, I wanted a more – well, I found out later, actually – the kind of experience I wanted, which I didn’t really get in Chicago, where I took my second PhD. I’m kind of confusing myself, but anyway.
After Chicago – well, during Chicago – I went for the first time, and then I stayed there on and off for basically ten years at the University of Girona, at the Private Law Department, I think, but it’s the Philosophy of Law group at the University of Girona: Jordi Ferrer, Diego Papayannis, Carmen Vázquez, and now Diego Dei Vecchi, also, and all the PhD students.
And I think this is very similar to the experience in Genoa, which I’m now starting. I have a group, and from what I see also here, which is quite rare, right? A group of people who don’t necessarily work together in the sense of writing papers together – when that happens, wonderful – but in legal theory and philosophy, perhaps this is still a little less frequent than in other disciplines like economics or theology, or even more the hard sciences, so-called.
But anyway, the idea of having a large group of people who sometimes eat together, work in the same place, go to the office and meet for coffee, constantly talk about work – but not only the work – I think this is really a different experience than the one that I was exposed to, both in Pavia and in Bologna while doing my PhD. And I think it really makes a difference. A substantial difference in terms of both work productivity and new ideas that you have, and criticism of the ideas that you already have, but also in terms of enjoying the work more.
I don’t want to sound too cynical, but what we do as philosophers of law – so I’m a little bit of a procedural law guy, but more and more a philosophy of law guy and political philosophy – and especially, that’s true also, I guess, in procedural law, but a little bit less true, but certainly it’s true in the philosophy of law – I mean, what we do has virtually no impact whatsoever on anything, right? We all know that.
No, I mean, I don’t want to exaggerate the claim. I think there is an important role for philosophers. I guess sometimes it’s overexaggerated. I don’t like the philosopher-political leader’s kind of idea. I think it’s a different job. But anyway, what we do is give classes, and that’s a big part, of course – we teach students. But what we do all day is think about our own research.
Eventually the output is a paper, and if you’re lucky enough, I don’t know, a hundred people will read it. I mean, if you’re extremely lucky. You shouldn’t expect that – so much luck that you shouldn’t even expect it. If a couple of people read it, it’s already a huge success. Then you should aim for a little bit more than two citations – but not all citations are previously read, right? So that’s also understood.
And the paper has an argument, perhaps, an argument you’ve worked on for a very long time, and you really put effort into it. But then you don’t really know whether you’re right or wrong, because there isn’t a universally accepted standard for telling whether you’re right or wrong. And certainly, you don’t have it, right?
Marco Segatti:
That’s the point, partly. And so, it’s very easy to start having doubts that what you do actually makes any sense at all. Unless – and this was the point – you meet other people who are passionate about the argument, and they give you arguments against basically virtually everything you say, right? And they do it passionately, with sometimes anger – hopefully managing the anger – and sometimes fighting somewhat. I mean, hopefully, no violence. I mean, I’ve never experienced any violence in academia, so I’m not saying that. But it gives you a sense of what you’re doing. I mean, it’s not going to save the world – I mean, nobody does that. Perhaps, I don’t know – but at least it matters, right?
So really, having this group dynamic of people talking about their stuff and fighting over it is something that I literally first experienced in Girona. And I see that it has – I mean, I’m sure Jordi took inspiration also from the dynamics in Genoa, which I guess are going to be a little bit different, but it’s the same intuition. And it’s the same intuition that I see here with this office space, that it’s really an apartment, and you know, you can drink coffee, you can have a nice conversation, and all the while keep working, of course – that’s what we’re supposed to do, what we’re paid for. But, you know, I think it’s the best antidepressant that you can get, honestly.
Bojan Spaić:
Yeah. You start so many interesting topics that I’ve been thinking about. And I think we also had conversations about this – maybe even recorded in the first episode of the podcast. So, we can kind of, maybe, split it into some issues that we can discuss before we even start discussing the matter that we wanted to discuss today. And it’s fascinating to me. So now it would seem obvious – and I think we share this intuition – that the impact of our research, or research on philosophy of law, can and often is quite low from a perspective of societal changes. Nobody produces sweeping societal changes. I mean, if we take –
Marco Segatti:
But not by themselves.
Bojan Spaić:
Definitely not. But, for example, if we take the most prominent philosophers of law in the last century, you could claim that only Kelsen had a wider societal impact, and it was kind of heavily limited still, but mostly not as a philosopher of law. He was involved in things as a legal drafter, participating in commissions, introducing the constitutional system or the constitutions to Europe, arguing for them, and so on. But as in general education, for example, or general culture, you don’t miss much if you don’t know who Hans Kelsen is. It’s not a huge transgression, like you would have it in other places.
Maybe even in general philosophy you have, kind of – for example, nowadays, who’s a famous public general philosopher? You might dislike him or not, but, for example, everybody knows, let’s say, Slavoj Žižek, maybe, who’s doing stuff on a more general level. Foucault was one of those guys. Noam Chomsky is usually considered kind of like – he’s a linguist, but he’s considered to be a philosopher. So, when you calculate all, then you can count maybe all the famous public philosophers, and that doesn’t reach a two-digit number, I think. Yeah. But this is the idea.
And this is a bit more controversial to me: does it have any practical impact, the stuff we do? And it’s a thing that we were discussing, even in general, when we were doing this conference about John Gardner. He has this piece, Why Study Jurisprudence, which is kind of a nice piece. And he adopts a position in which, basically – and I’m watering it down – it’s kind of this humanistic discipline within the study of law in which you learn some technical matters, then you have this matter, this general matter of jurisprudence, that should teach you or widen your views, should teach you a bit about critical thinking and all the things that are kind of orthogonal to the study of law.
Well, my experience in Belgrade – and it was always like this – study of jurisprudence was always, I think, conceived as a bit of a more practical enterprise. One of the reasons was that general theory of law was always considered a part of jurisprudence. So, there is that entire thing where you distinguish between – and it was done by Pattaro and the editors of the Treatise of Philosophy of Law, you remember – that they were always having these lawyers’ philosophy of law and philosophers’ philosophy of law. And this lawyers’ philosophy of law was kind of conceived a bit as more practical. So, do you think, kind of like, could it be our choice that we are impractical, or that our research doesn’t have any practical consequences, or is it just a matter of necessity?
Marco Segatti:
I’m not sure. I mean, there was, I guess – but this was, I mean, I’m old, but not that old – I mean this old discussion. There was a big discussion in Italy about the distinction between philosophy of law for lawyers, or lawyers’ philosophy of law, or philosophy of law for philosophers. I’m not really sure how to draw the boundary, although I do think it’s very convenient for philosophers of law to be within law schools rather than being in the philosophy department. It makes really good sense for us. I’m not sure whether for the world as a whole or not, but it definitely makes good sense for us.
No, I mean, I guess there are a couple of insights from other people that really inform my way of looking at the practical effects of philosophy of law – perhaps philosophy in general. They’re both in the pragmatist kind-of-tradition world, so that’s not a surprise. I mean, my heroes – most of my philosophical heroes, at least – are within the pragmatist tradition. And one is, I think it is Elizabeth Anderson – you know, Elizabeth Anderson. She’s a political philosopher, super famous in the US, and super good. I love her – literally, I mean, all of her books. She’s not really famous here in Europe, I guess. But anyways – or she could be, she should be, more famous in Europe than she actually is. But I don’t know. Anyways.
And I think she was reinterpreting, kind of thinking about John Dewey’s own attitude to the practical relevance of philosophy. And she says something which is really inspiring to me. I mean, it really puts me – I don’t know, it’s something that I refer to when I’m not really sure what I’m doing with something – which is: the philosopher in general, and the philosopher of law and the political philosopher too, should think a little bit like the art critic or, you know, cinema critic. Like, you don’t read a review of a movie just to know whether the movie is good or bad. I mean, you also want to know that, and the reviewer is obviously authorized by our social norms or whatever to tell us normatively: you should go there to watch it, or you shouldn’t go there; it’s just a waste of time; the movie is bad, or the movie is good.
But what he does also is – this is a guy who has watched a lot of movies. Like us, we have read a lot of books, we have thought things through carefully – supposedly – we think about these things, about politics and law, all day long. And so, it helps you to develop a better appreciation of whatever it is that the object that he is commenting on. And I guess that’s a very small practical effect, perhaps – first of all, because you don’t have many readers, so you’re not going to help the appreciation of many people. But general culture has a way of appropriating ideas that are very abstract from philosophers and then bringing them down to earth sometimes. And perhaps they are ideas that don’t even have a name on them, but that become first popular in philosophy and then go around the larger society.
And I think it’s a good idea to think of ourselves as – we may or may not, it’s not a necessity – be involved with direct normative judgments on, you know, “This is a good law, this is a bad law.” We can do that, and perhaps we should do that in terms of sincerity of our premises and let us be clear: I don’t think that this is a good law. But apart from that, we should try to really help our readers – very few of them, very few people in general – to look at the thing and ask more competent questions about it, put it in relation with other pieces of legislation or other decisions, try to identify hidden premises to the arguments that you’re discussing, put them in relation with other arguments and see how they work together or whether they do not work well together.
And generally – and this is the second suggestion, which really helps me a lot – is something by Stanley Cavell, who would say that – and he was also involved in the philosophy of cinema, so I guess it’s all related in some sense – that part of the method of ordinary philosophy is to understand that you have a right, I think he puts it literally this way, to take yourself seriously – to take your intuitions seriously, right? So that you should begin with that. So, what are my first gut reactions to this thing? When I think about it out in the open, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Is it good or bad? Or, I don’t know, what are the associations that I can make with other concepts in relation to this object that I’m commenting on?
And of course, you shouldn’t stop there. Looking carefully at how you speak and how other people speak and talk about the thing that you’re writing about definitely helps. I mean, it’s an extremely good first step, but it’s obviously not the last one, right? So, you should begin there and try to take your reactions seriously and see: where do they come from? Do they make sense? Is there a hidden belief or a tacit belief that I have that pushed me to think this or that? Or how can I go about and find out? So that’s – again, the practical effect is extremely small. But it is a practical effect of some sort. So not necessarily the “let’s move the masses, let’s change and transform the world.” I mean, I’d be terrified if somebody followed my advice on things. I would. But perhaps you can – whether they agree with you or not – help them think better about the issues that confront them anyways.
Julieta Rabanos:
Maybe they could have experimental reasons to follow you.
Marco Segatti:
Yes, of course. Because, as we all know, experimenting with things is good.
Julieta Rabanos:
Yes, exactly. It makes life better. No, I’m just trolling you –
Bojan Spaić:
Trolling obvious only to philosophers of law.
Marco Segatti:
Not even those. I mean, just us, basically, because you know me.
Julieta Rabanos:
No, but I found what you said very interesting. Generally, I had considered in my years doing philosophy of law, or trying to do philosophy of law, that maybe there are three levels of philosophy of law: the one that is extremely abstract, the one that is extremely practical, and the one that is in between, that tries to take the abstract and then show how to maybe apply to the practical. And maybe the case is that we don’t need all of us to do the three things, or all of us to be in the middle, or all of us to be in the abstract. I think that the bad thing is if we all are at the abstract level and then if we don’t really try to think about any practical application because we are trying to analyse a social object. So, in this sense, what you said about these recommendations was extremely interesting. And I wanted to ask you if you – so, following this idea about how to do it, because this was basically something about a methodology of how to try to research, or how to choose the subjects, or how to research on them – what are your preferred topics of research? What do you think is worth researching, for example, or that you have considered to be worth researching in your career?
Marco Segatti:
The two answers don’t necessarily go together.
Julieta Rabanos:
Absolutely, but let’s hear them.
Marco Segatti:
Let’s assume that the topics I’ve chosen were all… I guess my first big topic is equality of access to justice. I have – it’s coming out finally with Springer – my first monograph, which is on equal access to justice.
Julieta Rabanos:
Congratulations!
Marco Segatti:
Yeah, thank you. Thank you. It’s been very – you know, well, I think I started writing it like some ten years ago. So, even more than that, unfortunately. I certainly started talking about it before.
Bojan Spaić:
Does it have a promotional page on Springer?
Marco Segatti:
Did I already put up a promotional –? No. Well, actually, I still have to sign the publishing contract, so –
Bojan Spaić:
But when they put it, we’re plastering it in the podcast notes in the episode.
Julieta Rabanos:
Absolutely, with your photo and then the thing, and then –
Marco Segatti:
Not my photo, not my photo.
Julieta Rabanos:
You hear about this first in the podcast.
Marco Segatti:
So, yeah. What I do there, I think ultimately it’s a book on applied political philosophy, I guess. So, it’s a huge topic, access to justice. And I was first drawn to it because it had – I mean, I started out as a procedural law guy, right? So, this is a traditional, classic topic in comparative procedural law. And Italians have a very large tradition in it because – it’s not clear whether they actually invented the name, but the guy who put the name on the map was an Italian guy, Mauro Cappelletti, a hugely famous procedural law scholar. He worked in the United States, too, and he was based in Florence and then in Stanford Law School.
And so what I tried to do is sort of come up with arguments and ways of discussing arguments of what access to justice is in terms of an object – what is it that people claim when they claim access to justice and equality in access to justice – and then also some normative arguments on what are the bases of these claims that we have, that sometimes – well, there are very many, and they have very different objects and sometimes incompatible. And how do we ground them in some – not in a technical sense, I’m not on normative ground and all of that – but how can we come up with reasons for claiming these things? And then I try to apply it to a bunch of procedural institutions – the classic ones: settlement – when it should be legitimate, when it’s not, what do we lose with settlements, and confidential settlements in particular. So, the whole topic of ADR, then collective litigation, class actions and all of that, the class action device and its mechanisms. And then, of course, the traditional, most obvious topic of legal aid and free legal counsel. And so, I test the very abstract reflections that I do in the first parts of the book within these smaller topics. So that’s one big area of research.
And if I can do a little bit of self-promotion, too: I organize and I’m the coordinator of an online course on access to justice with the University of Girona, and I think the inscriptions are now open. It is in Spanish, but anyways – so if you’re interested, those who listen, please sign up.
Julieta Rabanos:
Then you can give us the links.
Marco Segatti:
Yes.
Julieta Rabanos:
So, to put also in the podcast.
Marco Segatti:
Yeah, definitely. I will do that. We have a bunch of different scholars in different disciplines because we try to give an interdisciplinary perspective on the topic. And then – so this is one big thing. And it kind of – I mean, there is continuity, I guess, but I’ll just – So one thing that intrigued me, I would say, about the literature on access to justice is that it puts the sort of empirical question of what happens in real-life legal systems right at the forefront of the thing. And I guess you cannot really say anything relevant about access to justice without at least looking at other disciplines – theology, economics, and all other empirical social sciences and their interdisciplinary connections and all of that.
So, this drove me to look at what sociologists and economists did. And so, I started becoming interested in really trying to use – finding ways to use – the more specific knowledge of empirical research within law and legal studies and the philosophy of law more generally. So – and here’s another way that really helped me; it’s also from Elizabeth Anderson. I’m not sure whether – how, I mean, I wouldn’t be able to locate the source of this – when she said this, but she had, I think, a wonderful definition of epistemology as: one intuitive idea that philosophers get about epistemology is that it’s philosophers who say to scientists, “You should do this” or “You shouldn’t do that,” right? So a normative kind of enterprise in which we as philosophers know what knowledge is, and we’re going to go about – and I’m obviously putting a very stereotyped and paradoxical way of doing it, and there are more sophisticated versions of this, and I’m sure nobody would agree that this is the epistemological goal – so big qualifications – in which basically what we’re after is finding out that one discipline or other is some form of astrology. And I have nothing against astrologists, but that – I wouldn’t call it a science. Anyways, astrology, right?
So – and that’s wrong. I mean, the tests for truth are clearly internal to the disciplines themselves. Not clearly – but I guess we should trust the people inside the discipline telling us what is or what’s not a reasonable belief to have on this or that topic. What we should do as philosophers instead is to try and look carefully at what these people do – what are, again, the implicit premises that they plug in their arguments that make them work? What are the assumptions that they make in order to produce the things that they produce – their theories? What is the structure of the theory? What kind of support and what kind of relation with evidence does it establish, or is it established upon?
So, it’s not really a normative enterprise of saying, “Rational choice theory doesn’t work, and it’s obviously a very stupid enterprise because we all know as philosophers that people are not rational, and we have a much more complicated view of human agency.” No – well, you can say that, definitely, but you should say that within the context of empirical research on how people behave. What you can do is try and look carefully: these weird economists who think that human beings are rational – what do they actually write about, and where does this assumption of rationality really come in? What work does it do within their theory? Do they have something specific in mind when they talk about rationality? Is it something that makes sense to call it rationality, even – I mean, besides the fact that they call it that sometimes.
And so, this is the thing. And so, I got gradually interested in economics. And then, of course, in Chicago, everybody has kind of a particular style of economics. But funnily enough, when I first arrived in Chicago, I was – and I still am – I was already a pragmatist, or I already loved John Dewey in particular. He is, I guess, my all-time philosophical hero, I guess. I don’t know – it’s difficult to do a hierarchy. But anyways. And he was a professor at the University of Chicago for a long time. He founded the Laboratory School there, which is – I’m not exactly sure administratively how connected it is with the University of Chicago – but it’s a high school, I think also middle school, and perhaps even for younger kids, too, in Hyde Park in Chicago.
But anyways. And he had a very important influence – he and another guy who was in Chicago, George Herbert Mead – on the sociology department. In fact, that was the Chicago school I was most familiar with. You know, the sociologists from the 1920s were witnessing these crazy things that happened in Chicago since the end of the 19th century until the 1950s, which – I guess the population grew like 50 times, 100 times in just a few decades. And it was people coming from all over the place, literally – I mean, especially Polish people, Italians, and Irish. And of course, there was a big Black community, too, that was starting to grow. So, in this mixture, they started to do fieldwork and ethnographic research, I would guess.
I was also very into the work of this guy, also at the University of Chicago, which was Herbert Blumer, who used ideas from Mead and Dewey to found this movement, which is called Symbolic Interactionism. So, I was very much against everything that people tend to associate with Chicago School of Economics – I mean, rational choice theory, markets everywhere, and all of that. And I guess then, the rigor – I mean, I’m not sure politically, first of all – I’m not even sure anymore whether there is a Chicago School of Economics politically with fixed ideas. But that’s a very controversial topic, and I wouldn’t necessarily go into that.
Marco Segatti:
But anyways, the rigor and passion with which these people argue about stuff, and the way in which the thought and the discussions of people that were clearly identifiable within the Chicago School of Economics – like Gary Becker, for example – it just won me over, in the sense of: man, I’ve got to take this seriously. I have to take this extremely seriously, and I have to read this stuff. It’s not exactly what I expected. I mean, they’re not as dumb as I thought. In fact, quite the opposite.
Bojan Spaić:
Nobody usually is.
Marco Segatti:
And – well, yeah, that’s true. That’s very true, yes. And – yeah. So what I started thinking about was: there are limitations that I see, and I still buy the points that these people into more qualitative research on fine distinctions between types of agencies and kinds of social actions, and the influence of, I don’t know, social norms and identities and all of this on human behaviour. I see the point that something is missing there within some of the conceptual instruments that are typically used within, I don’t know, mainstream economics. Sometimes people refer to that as (kind of) Chicago School of economics. I doubt now that there is anything like mainstream economics. I mean, if it is, I don’t know what it is. I mean, it’s so complex and has so many variations and so many differences within even the career of any single economist that I wouldn’t attribute it to that.
But anyways, so the goal became: all right, let’s try and think carefully about how economists – or some economists – and I studied Gary Becker in particular as, you know, kind of like the leader of the darkest forces of UChicago economics – exactly – and let’s try to see, well, first, the assumptions that they are explicit about, how they work out and why they need them; the assumptions they are not explicit about, why they need them – if there is any, right – that even he didn’t recognize. And can we use that stuff to push it closer to interpretations that would be more friendly to the regular philosopher, or philosopher of action. That is typically extremely critical of everything that comes out from UChicago economics?
And, yeah, and funnily enough, I mean, John Dewey was the answer again. And I think – and this is the topic of my presentation the other day with you guys – I think he had a very interesting, and this is sort of one focus of my research now, interesting conception of human habits, which fits extremely well with, I would say, the basic algebra of Becker’s formal modelling of human action. Just needs a couple of modifications in terms of their interpretations and particularly being more explicit about the fact that a utility-maximizing agent is not a rational agent. So that requires a little bit of interpretive work on the concept of utility and on the concept of choice. But once you’re there, you’re good to go, basically. And, yeah, so this is what I’m really fascinated by.
So far, I’ve taken it from the philosophical side, and I think there’s a lot of work to do still on the philosophical side, just trying to come up with some conceptual revisions on habits, habit formation, utility, and all of that. And then hopefully this can be a useful concept to go about in the real world and try to study how humans behave. And obviously, I mean, this has already been done. So, I mean, I’m not suggesting that I’m the first one to think about human habits in terms of empirical research. But I guess there are some modifications to how research has been done today that could be useful, or at least to ask new questions or bring them closer to the interests that philosophers of law in particular have, in terms of what is a rule, what is a legal rule, how it’s different than a social rule, how it’s different than a moral rule, or is it different at all?
And – what kind of reasons do we have to – what’s the term in English for derrotabilità?
Julieta Rabanos:
Abrogation, derogation?
Marco Segatti:
No, defeasibility! So, yeah, this is what I’m very much into right now.
Bojan Spaić:
When you did your talk (and it was a great talk) a couple of days ago, I was very interested, because you didn’t mention – we didn’t have enough time; we have this format when it’s 40, 30 minutes, and then after that we have 30 minutes of discussion. But I was really interested in your talk, and I think you’re not giving yourself enough credit in this analysis of habits. Actually, even if we have a very good analysis, for example, in pragmatism – and habits were redefined by both, for example, William James and John Dewey, and Dewey made an entire point of writing about habits or criticizing the common conceptions of habits, which were simplistic – kind of 100 years later, or more than 100 years later, I think that we have a simplistic conception of habits, maybe not in every one of the disciplines that you mentioned, but it seems that we still have a simplistic conception of habits in philosophy of law.
And you started basically your talk by talking about Hart’s interpretation of the conception of habits that was present before Hart. Could you tell us a bit about these ideas of how law relates to habits before Hart, and what was Hart’s criticism of those ideas, and whether these criticisms are well-founded?
Marco Segatti:
Yeah, so – well, Hart is the best philosopher of law in the 20th century, I guess. I mean, well, again, Kelsen – or among the best. I mean, so I will not go with him on this one very much, but it’s not that I think we should burn his book. Definitely contrary to that. I mean, we should all read it.
So, basically, in The Concept of Law he has this conception of habit, which is really, I guess, corresponds to our first intuitions through ordinary language – namely, habits as a form of repetition. And he does – and he’s very careful, and this is why I think he’s really among the best – he’s always extremely careful. In fact, famously – and just a brief summary – in chapter four of The Concept of Law, Hart virtually demolishes Austin’s theory of law as impractical, or not, you know, in terms of its ability to explain law in modern municipal legal systems. But he’s very careful in not saying that it’s doing that. What he’s doing is demolishing a simplified version of Austin’s theory of law, which is –
Julieta Rabanos:
So British.
Marco Segatti:
Well, yeah. I mean, Dworkin does that all the time. He doesn’t say this carefully, though. I mean, again, no criticism to Ronald Dworkin – a great guy, absolutely. But Hart, I think, was better – regardless of what you think of the Hart–Dworkin debate, which, I don’t know, I don’t have a strong opinion on. But anyways, Hart is extremely good. And he’s extremely good at saying that, listen; this is not Austin. Austin is far more complex than this. And in fact – let me get to Austin later on. It’s a simplified version of Austin, which uses – he doesn’t use the term “habits and threats,” but that’s what he’s aiming at – uses as fundamental concept the concept of habit, understood as repetition, and threats – literally threats – as the two main concepts that we need in order to build a conception of law for the modern municipal legal system.
And why the simplified version is interesting, and why do we need to demolish it? Because, Hart says, it comes up constantly in discussions and in intuitions, even of professional philosophers, on account of its enormous theoretical parsimony. I mean, if we can build a whole theory of law in general – I mean, it’s not just one legal system; it’s the theory of law in general – out of two concepts, well, we are extremely smart people, right?
Marco Segatti:
I mean, of course, it doesn’t work, ultimately, according to Hart. Habits and threats are not enough. Now, the thing is that this is not Austin’s conception of law. Hart is explicit about that. And, by the way, there’s a very good article by John Dewey – I think it’s his second or third published article, I think it’s 1894 – in which, and it’s a young Dewey, so he has the problem of making himself clear and showing the work, which obviously he doesn’t have in the 1930s, when he’s the most famous philosopher in the United States of America. So, there he shows his work and he’s extremely clear, and it’s a wonderful paper. And he does things to Austin’s theory of law in terms of reconstructing it and exposing it which are highly recommended.
Because, out of the many things that he does, is distinguishing carefully between this thing that the sovereign is somebody who is habitually obeyed and doesn’t obey anyone else because it’s the legal sovereign. And it doesn’t obey anyone else in terms of legal rules, which is false, too. Austin says – and this is something that he takes from the tradition of utilitarianism, we would embed it in – that the sovereign actually obeys to a lot of other people, obeys the moral opinion of the general masses, right? So anyway, things get extremely complex from there. I don’t take that discussion into any detail in the paper, nor did I in the presentation.
But the point is, there’s a whole tradition before Hart, even before Dewey. Dewey is not very explicit in citing, actually – there’s a problem there. But anyway, certainly he is the guy I came to this tradition with. He is very good at citing ethics, and he has a wonderful chapter on utilitarianism, and he discusses what utilitarians say about habits. And it’s something – it’s a whole world. I mean, it all starts – perhaps there was somebody else before him; I’m not sure, perhaps not in the tradition – it all starts with David Hume, which is the guy I talk about in the paper especially, and in the Treatise.
And he has – it’s very, I mean, we all know the canonical sort of presentation of Hume’s idea in which it is good in terms of theoretical parsimony, again, and it certainly fits with the idea of law in terms of habits and threats and its theoretical parsimony. But it’s far more sophisticated than that. And he has a list of distinctions among types of passions – original, direct, indirect – psychological principles. I mean, I count five; one, for the love of me, I cannot understand, which is the fifth psychological principle. I cannot understand, so I didn’t put it in the paper. The first four are really on point. I think they anticipate so much of what people are doing now and have been doing for a few decades in microeconomics.
And he has among them a principle of habituation, which I find extremely interesting and worthwhile, and worth taking a look at analytically in order to really understand what they were about when they were talking about habits – crazy utilitarians of the 17th, 18th, and 19th century. So, yeah, that’s in a nutshell – not so much a nutshell – and if you can put something in a nutshell, then it deserves to stay there. This is Hilary Putnam.
Bojan Spaić:
Fair enough. He’s more fresh in the pragmatist tradition than I am. I actually did pragmatism. I actually did John Dewey for my magisterial work, which is an enhanced version of the master work – basically a PhD before a PhD. It was like that ten years ago in Serbia. And I read all the papers, and I find it completely refreshing that somebody’s talking, taking the pragmatist tradition seriously. I was also fascinated by Dewey, and most of the work was in political and legal philosophy of John Dewey. Dewey didn’t leave much works in terms of legal philosophy proper, but there are papers and there are parts of his political philosophy books. But the things that he did, he did it really well – some things about legal reasoning. And most of the things that he did in philosophy of law, he was basically just applying his general philosophy or epistemology or logic – the science of discovery – in legal matters.
But one of the things that fascinated me in terms of the pragmatic analysis was this reinterpretation of notions like habits. The pragmatists were completely – pragmatism is the first philosophy, I think, or one of the first philosophies or movements in philosophy that takes account of the Darwinian turn in the natural sciences, which was fascinating. That also means that the empiricism of pragmatism is heavily informed by the natural sciences, and they even make contributions to natural sciences, especially the early pragmatists. Okay, not Peirce – just did his logic and things – and this allowed everybody else who tried to do and change the name of his pragmatism to “pragmaticism.” So, if we find a couple of more persons who like this pragmatism thing, maybe we can form a metaphysical club or something with it. Because they started like in this – it was a real club, like the Viennese did in the ’20s, in the ’30s and in the ’40s – they had this thing called the Metaphysical Club where the ideas were discussed. And Oliver Wendell Holmes was a part of the Metaphysical Club at one point. So, the connection between legal philosophy and philosophy of pragmatism was rather real.
Now, what is exactly Hart’s – what would you say is the biggest problem that Hart has with this idea of habits that is to be found in, for example, Austin? And do you think that by giving a more true-to-life analysis of habits, we can solve actually some points of what Hart thinks, or at least the Hart simplified version of Austin’s theory, that would allow us to keep some parts of Austin’s theory in our contemporary notions regarding the law – the obligatory character of law, the relation between societal rules or social rules and law?
Marco Segatti:
Well, I think Hart has, I think very legitimately, a problem with – I mean, people are going to be insulting me for saying this – but he has a problem with verificationism and behaviourism. And he sees that tradition – I mean, this is just oversimplifying, but to get the point of the kind of direction of analysis that I’m aiming at – he sees as one big problem of that tradition of Hume, Austin, and his more contemporary imitators, or students, a problem with a very simplistic psychology, perhaps materialist or empiricist, which has – yeah, I guess – certainly verificationists and behaviourists.
So, verificationists in the sense that we have to reduce all concepts to observable phenomena, right? So, we want to have a scientific concept of law; we’ve got to say exactly what it is that we observe when we observe law, right? If we don’t say that, then we don’t have a scientific conception of law. And Hart has a problem with this – legitimately so. Legitimately, absolutely. He also has a problem with behaviourism in the sense of believing that either mental concepts are not knowable by people other than the person who possesses them, or they don’t even exist. Regardless, we shouldn’t put them into any serious scientific enterprise. So, this fits somewhat with verificationism as well: we have to reduce all mental concepts that we have in our language to observable human behaviour – choice, the choice that you see; the conduct that you see.
And the other thing is – I lost it. There was another important element to this. A third problem that he had. These two are enough. And so, I think he sees that tradition as – of course, Hume was neither a verificationist nor a behaviourist because the terms didn’t even exist. He talks about experimental philosophy. He thinks he’s doing experimental philosophy. He’s not doing any experiment in any modern sense, so it’s a bit weird. But anyway, he certainly meant something by it.
Julieta Rabanos:
Arm to your experimental philosophy.
Marco Segatti:
But there are people – my kind of experimental. Let’s experiment. No, I mean, there are certainly people in the 20th century, at the beginning of the 20th century, that believed that Hume was aiming at something like that, and that by being more explicit about verificationism and behaviourism, they were sort of continuing the Humean project. And Hart says, with reason: no, no, no, no, that’s not going to happen. We can’t do that. We can’t do that because law is a far more difficult concept than the one that we can deal with by assuming verificationism and behaviourism.
So, the thing is that there are far richer conceptual resources within that tradition that we can use and exploit in order for them not to collapse into any form of verificationism and behaviourism – or forms of verificationism and behaviourisms which are not quite as simple and simplistic as the kind of first definitions that I give. And the concept of human habits is precisely in there as the key concept in which – sort of: tell me what you think about human habits and how they explain human behaviour, and I’ll tell you how verificationist or behaviourist you are. Something like that.
So, from a verificationist standpoint, habit is just repetition, an external behaviour. You have to say that if you’re a behaviourist, verificationist. What else could it be? I mean, all else is just irrelevant or not knowable, so let’s just define it away in this way. And this is Hart’s definition of habits – somewhat implicit definition. He doesn’t even have to define them. He doesn’t have to show anything in terms of when Austin uses – in order to prove that that’s what he means. And that definition wouldn’t work for a theory of law.
Marco Segatti:
I mean, if law certainly is more than just repetition of behaviour and convergent repetition of behaviour – of individual behaviour – definitely. Point well taken, dear Herbert, absolutely. The thing is, again, in the tradition of utilitarianism, and certainly in the tradition of pragmatism – and pragmatism is within the tradition of utilitarianism in some sense, at least according to James – habits are more than that.
What is more than that? I think – well, I have my definition, which I have an argument that it captures the – “the essence,” I’m not an essentialist, so I shouldn’t say that – but the big points of these traditions, which is: habits are a bundle of impulses, expectations, skills, and environmental factors, including one social capital, which reduce the marginal cost of cognitive effort or awareness and motivational control over activity. So – definition is long, a little bit baroque. So, there are many things that should enter into it to explain it, but just to give one key intuition.
So, as I said, the principle of habituation is one of the four or five psychological principles that are easily identifiable in Hume’s Treatise. And he talks about it as a peculiar effect. So, the principle of habituation is the principle that should help us – scholars who look at human behaviour – to compare different passions together and predict choice. So, we know the passions of somebody; how do we compare them and predict choice? Since they are different, they are competing in many ways – they are competing ends – the guy or the person has scarce resources, so he’s going to have to choose among these competing ends. How do we do that? One principle through which we do that, for comparing the strength of different passions that a person has, is this principle of habituation.
The principle of habituation is the effect of repetition in the past on one’s present inclinations toward one activity or another. So basically, if the object of your passion is an activity that was repeated in the past, then this will have a comparative advantage, so to speak, with respect to any passion which has an object – an activity – that you haven’t performed in the past. Why you, I think, does give two explanations, and he sees them as connected. One is because repetition in the past increases your abilities now, right? So, I have – I don’t know – I have made coffee hundreds of times in my life. I’m better at doing coffee than I was when I was – when I started making coffee or being able to make coffee, I don’t know, 15 or something like that. So, my skills for doing coffee have increased, and so it’s easier for me now to make coffee. And so, it’s easier, for example, than making tea, for example. Let us suppose. I’ve never made tea in my life. Not true, but anyway, let us suppose it is like that.
And the other one is that repetition in the past actually, as I said before, increases your inclination to the activity itself. Now, economists would immediately – today – would immediately see something problematic. These are two effects – different effects. One is about skills, your abilities to perform the activity, and the other one is about your preferences, right? And I think Hume’s key intuition – and it’s an intuition that cuts across the entire tradition, and it’s something, for example, Alfred Marshall – was somewhat a utilitarian, certainly was a great economist, founder of neoclassical school of economics, whatever that is – also observed a similar effect.
His example was with good music – so with good habits, so to speak – that sometimes we increase our skills in a way which shifts our preferences toward the activity itself. This is exactly the intuition about exposure to good music, right? So, exposure to good music in the past increases your ability to appreciate good music, but also shifts your preferences toward good music – you like music more. And so, Marshall noted this in – Alfred Marshall noted this in the context of a discussion of possible exceptions to the law of decreasing marginal utility, right? So, if we take this literally, the principle of habituation, it could look like an exception to the law of decreasing marginal utility because you increase performance in the past and you want more of it now. So, the marginal utility from the activity increases. And Marshall says: Nah, nah! Because the law still holds for constant tastes. Here, your tastes are changing. So, the law is still intact. The thing is that your tastes change.
Where was I? Kind of got lost.
The thing is, I think this is – and this is the key point – which economists, let’s speak individually, Gary Becker, saw at least, I guess now it’s 55, 60 years ago, that there is something there. And there is something that we should consider when we study human behaviour, namely, that we shouldn’t assume that preferences are exogenously determined and they can never change. And habits is a construct that helps to explain how preferences change – how, through the effects of past activity over your inclinations now.
Becker had a whole – a very simple model, in fact, with a very simple algebra – even I understand it, sort of. I wouldn’t be able to actually use it concretely, but I do understand the things and the relations that he establishes. It’s changed things over time. And I think it’s an interesting historical – and I’ve written about this, and I’m in the process of sending it to review – the historical development of this idea of human habits.
But to go back, my definition is a definition that attempts to fit within that problem: explaining how we can influence our own preferences, inclinations. Although I don’t call them preferences – I think it’d be therapeutic to call them habits. In part because we don’t have to assume anything about people’s rationality if we do that. There are a couple of other changes that we need to do that in order not to assume that. Anyways, we can use the most hyper-rational models of human action and say, yeah, but this is not rationality. This is human habits doing their thing. Identifying – and Dewey had a wonderful expression, and it’s exactly the assumption of utility maximization – a habit identifies the point of least resistance in overt action. So, this is exactly a minimization exercise, which is the same as a maximization exercise. So, you’re doing things – habits are the things that push you to do the easiest thing. You can modify them. Of course, it takes time, and it takes a very difficult and very uncertain technology. And what you’re doing is modifying the way in which the past influences your present choices and inclinations.
Julieta Rabanos:
And how come rules in the middle of this, in the sense of – I think I could follow your explanation about what habit is, at least in your definition and with all this deep context in which you – like the context of discovery that you went into – to your definition of habits. But then I think that clearly one, for example, one thing that Hart was trying to say is – or was – that this motivational approach that I think that follows with this redefinition of habit is not enough to talk about, for example, law. And I think that is when he started with his idea of at least social rules. We are not about legal rules in itself. But then the idea of incorporating some other concept to try to account for the gap between this motivational explanation of human behaviour and then something else. So, if you can just say something about that?
Marco Segatti:
Yeah, this is an enormously difficult question and topic. So just a couple of ideas. So, there is a lot on social rules done by this tradition of assuming that people are utility maximisers. One problem with that, in terms of, I think, how it’s been received by philosophers and legal philosophers especially, is that this can’t be it. We need something more than preferences to explain rules, right? Because – and what is it, this something more?
Marco Segatti:
Well, for example, along the lines of Hart, the fact that perhaps it’s true that in this or that legal system, our commitments to social rules is just based on habituation – thoughtless repetition of acts that we’ve done in the past – or strategic thinking. Now, I’m complying with the social rule not because I’m interested in the common good, and the common good that the social rule is supposed – that compliance with the social rule is supposed – to produce, but simply because I’m scared about sanction, or incentivized by the positive sanction. Or you can look at it positively or negatively, either way.
If you talk about habits, then this problem goes away, in the sense that it takes the fun – you know, economists talk about preferences, and it’s not a reasonable objective to make them change their vocabulary. I mean, certainly it won’t happen. But the fundamental intuition about – not intuition, the fundamental element of – preference is that it is a marginal rate of substitution: how much you’re willing to forego something in order to have one unit more of another thing, right? So that has nothing to do necessarily with your preferences. It doesn’t have to do with – not in the common sense of preference, which is the one that philosophers typically respond to – or their sense of preference as something perhaps similar along the line of desires, but which is something different than values, it’s something different than, you know, commitments, it’s something different than compulsions and all of that, right? So something that you have a clear mind about, that you know what it is, that you’re conscious about your own preferences, and that you have a view on how to realize them in the most efficient way in order to accomplish – realize – the most, the biggest set of your preferences, whatever that means.
Now, if the fundamental is a marginal rate of substitution, then we can change all these interpretations. I mean, we don’t need all those other interpretations. What we need to do is try to relate these things in a way which seems useful, to then go about and study in the empirical world. And the work that’s been done already just needs some interpretational rearrangement.
Now, will that convince philosophers that this is a complete account of what a commitment to a social rule is? No, I’m sceptical about that. And what you were mentioning about this gap between, you know, pure motivations and something else that pushes us to comply to social rules – yeah, it’s one thing. It’s definitely the kind of criticism that many – not all, necessarily; I mean, there are philosophers of different persuasions – will ask me about, right?
So, I guess we could go – I mean, like, one common mistake that I made throughout my entire life, and I keep making is – and many people do make, but I’m talking about myself especially – trying to take the last step first. Right, so you shouldn’t begin – and this is, by the way, a practical effect of John Huey. I realized that this is a very stupid and silly mistake. You shouldn’t start by the last step. Perhaps it is a good idea to have an idea of what the last step will look like, so that then you can go backwards and begin with the first step. And if you keep trying to do the last step first, you fall inevitably, always. The first step is the first step, right?
So, what I’m getting at is: let’s try to unpack the intuitions that we have that make us sceptical that something like assuming that people are utility – relentless utility – maximisers, as I am willing to assume. What are the intuitions that tell us that this can’t be? Especially it can’t be when people are following social rules. One intuition is that, for example, when we follow a social rule, we kind of – we hold the grudge and say, I really don’t want to do that. I do that because I should, but I don’t want to do that. And the intuition is, if you understand utility as pleasure, for example, or expected pleasure – expected utility as expected pleasure – then this doesn’t seem to work very well, right? I don’t think it’s all that true, but anyways – strong intuition that goes against it, right? When we comply with the social rule, we’re not necessarily happy about it.
This is my first or second – depending on the order; one of the two – things that I discuss in the paper as kind of modifying, manipulating a little bit Hume’s framework: interpret pleasure as stimulation. So utility is not a metric of the objectives of choice, how we rank our objectives; it’s a metric of motivation – what pushes us to act this way or the other. Whether we know it or not, we can be stimulated by things that we don’t know we’re stimulated by. But we’re going to be acting on that stimulation. Or things that we cannot control.
Another way to sort of work with the intuition that it really can’t be that people are relentless utility maximisers if they follow social rules is to see complying with the social rule as a kind of investment on your own habits. I comply with the social rules, and I’m not happy about it because what I’m doing is I’m accepting a cost now with a view of changing my habits in the future. So, for example, in the example that we discussed – kind of horrid example that was discussed the other day – of a person spitting on this person’s wife. Well, no, I didn’t want to say that. Let’s say this person’s wife. But anyway.
There, I guess, one way to interpret – and the question is – that seems to be a habit: spitting in the sink without washing it afterwards. That seems to be a habit; a very bad habit indeed, if you live with somebody else at least, and if there are no fairies who clean after you. But that seems very different than following a social rule. Yeah, but true that. But the point is, suppose you are that person and realize that this is bad – shouldn’t do that, right? So, the strategy that you should think about in order to change that habit is what is about following a social rule. And in many ways, it is exactly that, right? I know that this isn’t good behaviour – this isn’t good behaviour because it produces effects of disgust, to say at least, to other people, especially the people I live with and have to live with that. So, I’ll try to change it, following the social rule of not doing it.
The problem is that you cannot switch it off and on as you want. You have to be strategic about it, especially with things that you’ve been doing for a long time. So, it is the problem of the endogenous determination, formation, or modification of human habits. And that explains a little bit, at least, the intuition that when we follow a social rule, we’re doing something that we wouldn’t otherwise want to do.
The third and final – and it’s not in the paper because it needs – it’s something that has to do with the stability of these preferences. I mean, an explanation – it’s a little bit more complex than that. But one traditional assumption that is attributed – it’s not true anymore; what once was attributed – to economists is that they think of preferences as something that is exogenously stamped on an agent who cannot do anything about that. We choose in light of our existing preferences; we do not choose our preferences. Right? So this is the basic intuition. So they are exogenous; they are not endogenous to the process of choice itself.
Now, when you introduce human habits, what you’re doing is – so this situation of exogenous determination of preferences – namely, they’re not endogenous to the process of choice – makes, formally, the utility function that you write stable. They don’t change. The parameters of the utility function, they don’t change; they’re fixed. Nothing you can do can change the utility function that you’re trying to maximize given your budget. When you put human habits in, then the utility function is not necessarily stable, because what you’re doing in the past changes your inclination in the present, changes your preferences – the rate at which you’d be willing to substitute things in your life, so to speak, right?
So why this is important? It is important because it is not – so, because one intuition that it couldn’t be that relentless utility maximisers follow social rules is that it is very odd to think of somebody who’s following social rules – that condition it to his resources or the cost of the action. We understand the point of “I’m committed to the social rule, I do it anyways,” save for exceptions that should be normally included in the rule; otherwise, we’re doing something that – that’s messy, as we know, visibility and all of that. All right. So, when you put in the issue of the stability of the utility function, then you have at least some conceptual instruments to think about cases in which the price, for example, of the activity or the good changes, but you keep doing it. Why? Because you’re interested in your future preferences as well – your future habits as well, in my vocabulary.
So, again, there are obviously intuitions that we cannot go from human habits to social rules – that something is missing – and I’m willing to accept them. The work is, step by step, try to kind of – well, make these intuitions more explicit. What are they based on? And try to find ways in which we can represent them within these conceptual resources. And if we cannot, then let’s look for other conceptual resources. Frankly, I mean, I don’t have a full argument about it, but it seems to me that a lot can be done. A lot can be done in terms of at least having a theoretically useful conception of social rules that doesn’t guarantee it but actually gives you confidence that you’re not losing too much when you’re using those theoretical resources to study them.
We will not get a full account of why we should obey to law from this perspective. That’s not the point of the perspective. So, if what’s missing is a normative – a full normative – account of why it is a good thing to have law, then this will not give it. It will give information, perhaps, on some structural features of the law that we know that gives us some reasons to believe that it’s not such a bad idea to have law instead of not having it. Yes, but that’s a different argument, though. And I would think this is a political argument or, you know, a very abstract political argument for the legitimacy or the justice – one legal system or other – but, and it’s perfectly admissible. I would be interested in doing it, and you are doing it. It’s not – yeah, and I – you are doing it, yes.
Bojan Spaić:
I’m going to try to yank you out of the finesse of economic argument for two reasons. One is I can’t replicate your economic analysis in this case simply because I don’t do much of it. And the second reason is that it’s similar to the question, or to the thing that we were discussing when you were doing the presentation. Kind of, from one perspective, I find myself in complete agreement with your redefinition of habits, and I think it’s very valuable. It’s my problem – and it was my problem a couple of days ago when I first heard your analysis – is that social rules, or let’s – and legal rules – have this characteristic, and we can put it any way we like, but it is these social rules that sometimes yank you out of a habit. And if I wanted to use – or I can use – a Deweyian terminology in this case: whatever, no matter how complicated you make a habit out to be, its behaviour results are similar. It’s kind of this habitual behaviour that is being repeated, no matter the analysis behind this habitual behaviour.
Now, and we have – I think at least – different relations of habits to, or different relations of social rules to, something that is either an individual or a collective habit. At times, we start from a social rule, and then the social rule acts as an initial point of habit formation – like, for example, you had in your discussion of this gross example that we have, and we all like it, let’s face it, like the spitting example. We keep going back to the same. So, you have a bad habit which was formed as a habit, and there is no discussion that we call that a habit in a sense, and it bears significant similarities to other habits – maybe more complicated habits – that we have. Then you have a social rule, or you’re faced, or you get to know a social rule, and kind of this habit bumps against this social rule. It would seem – or we have a habit and then we have a problem with carrying out the habits. So, we are faced with something that we can call a choice. We are knowledgeable now about the social rule that prevents us – or should prevent us – from spitting in the sink and leaving it there without cleaning it up, and so on, or in any other situation.
So, to me at least, it seems that – and I agree with you – that habits are a great tool, if you redefine them, to have an explanation of compliance with a social rule or a legal rule, for that matter. I mean, to my mind, most of the time we just do legal things in virtue of habit and not in virtue, of course, of deliberating about in each and every case of whether we should do something, and counting legal reasons in and counting moral reasons here and counting social norms in, and so on. It’s fortunate because we would probably go crazy, like, in the morning when we get up and get bed – go to buy bread. But oftentimes, social rule seems to me is something that yanks you out of the habit. When you’re made aware of the existence of a social rule, you either have to redefine your habits or you have to follow with your habits but bear the consequences of the non-compliance with the social rule. And that kind of creates a problem – at least in these situations, both for legal rules and social rules, I think – being explained in terms of habits. Because it would seem that their role is kind of, at least in these situations, different than the role that habits have. They are not there to reduce the costs of however you define utility. They are there to basically – or their role seems to be from the perspective of habits – to disturb a habit, or at least, when your society-wise, to disturb a habit of a part of the population or a majority of the population, and so on. How would you go about answering this from the perspective of this analysis of habits, or is there a way to answer it?
Marco Segatti:
Yeah, no, I mean, I don’t think I need to answer it, in the sense that I think that’s perfectly correct, and it’s exactly what I mean. I mean, the thing is, I think you’re still working with an intuition that habits is the behaviour. Once you don’t – I mean, in another paper that I have – which, hopefully, this one will come out, but we’re still in the review process – but, well, I mean, anyways, doesn’t have to do it. I have – I put it in terms of, and I’m more explicit of the Dewey and influence there. And I put it in terms of a methodological thesis. And this is the thesis that I would defend. I didn’t present it like that in the paper because I wanted to connect it with Hart. So – but the important thesis is methodological. I mean, it has very many sub-theses, but it’s okay.
And the methodological thesis is: how should we go about and study human behaviour? Answer: by identifying its habits – full stop. Then, of course, you define habits in particular ways and all of that. But this is the point I try to make. So, and what I mean by habit is this bundle of things, that they have this effect, and that you can write them up in this or that way, which means that they incorporate, as I said, static judgment and dynamic judgments. And these are the things – you want to know what are the social rules of people in Belgrade? Let’s search for their habits. And, in particular, let’s search for their habits that include more or less explicit expectations on the effects of behaviour on their social capital. That’s what I’m saying. And the fact that it’s a very good intuition – it’s more than an intuition; it’s a very good observation – it’s exactly your point, and it’s exactly what I want to make.
Well, for example, along the lines of Hart, the fact that perhaps it’s true that in this or that legal system our commitments to social rules are just based on habituation – thoughtless repetition of acts that we’ve done in the past – or strategic thinking. Now, I’m complying with the social rule not because I’m interested in the common good, and the common good that compliance with the social rule is supposed to produce, but simply because I’m scared about sanction, or incentivized by the positive sanction. You can look at it positively or negatively, either way.
If you talk about habits, then this problem goes away, in the sense that it takes the fun – you know, economists talk about preferences, and it’s not a reasonable objective to make them change their vocabulary. I mean, certainly it won’t happen. But the fundamental element of preference is that it is a marginal rate of substitution: how much you’re willing to forego something in order to have one unit more of another thing, right? So that has nothing to do necessarily with your preferences – not in the common sense of preference, which is the one that philosophers typically respond to, or their sense of preference as something perhaps similar along the line of desires, but which is something different than values, different than commitments, different than compulsions, and all of that, right? So, something that you have a clear mind about, that you know what it is, that you’re conscious about your own preferences, and that you have a view on how to realize them in the most efficient way in order to accomplish – realize – the biggest set of your preferences, whatever that means.
Now, if the fundamental is a marginal rate of substitution, then we can change all these interpretations. We don’t need all those other interpretations. What we need to do is try to relate these things in a way which seems useful to then go about and study in the empirical world. And the work that’s been done already just needs some interpretational rearrangement.
Now, will that convince philosophers that this is a complete account of what a commitment to a social rule is? No, I’m sceptical about that. And what you were mentioning about this gap between, you know, pure motivations and something else that pushes us to comply with social rules – yeah, it’s one thing. It’s definitely the kind of criticism that many – not all, necessarily; there are philosophers of different persuasions – will ask me about, right?
So, I guess we could go – one common mistake that I made throughout my entire life, and I keep making – and many people do make, but I’m talking about myself especially – is trying to take the last step first. Right? You shouldn’t begin – and this is, by the way, a practical effect of John Dewey. I realized that this is a very stupid and silly mistake. You shouldn’t start by the last step. Perhaps it is a good idea to have an idea of what the last step will look like, so that then you can go backwards and begin with the first step. And if you keep trying to do the last step first, you fall inevitably, always. The first step is the first step, right?
So, what I’m getting at is: let’s try to unpack the intuitions that we have that make us sceptical that something like assuming that people are relentless utility maximisers – as I am willing to assume – can be true, especially when people are following social rules. One intuition is that, for example, when we follow a social rule, we kind of hold the grudge and say, I really don’t want to do that. I do that because I should, but I don’t want to do that. And the intuition is: if you understand utility as pleasure, for example, or expected pleasure – expected utility as expected pleasure – then this doesn’t seem to work very well, right? I don’t think it’s all that true, but anyway, strong intuition that goes against it, right? When we comply with the social rule, we’re not necessarily happy about it.
This is my first or second – depending on the order – thing that I discuss in the paper as kind of modifying, manipulating a little bit Hume’s framework: interpret pleasure as stimulation. So utility is not a metric of the objectives of choice, how we rank our objectives; it’s a metric of motivation – what pushes us to act this way or the other. Whether we know it or not, we can be stimulated by things that we don’t know we’re stimulated by. But we’re going to be acting on that stimulation – or things that we cannot control.
Another way to work with the intuition that it really can’t be that people are relentless utility maximisers if they follow social rules is to see complying with the social rule as a kind of investment in your own habits. I comply with the social rules, and I’m not happy about it, because what I’m doing is accepting a cost now with a view to changing my habits in the future. So, for example, in the example that we discussed – the kind of horrid example that was discussed the other day – of a person spitting on this person’s wife. Well, no, I didn’t want to say that. Let’s say this person’s wife. But anyway.
There, I guess, one way to interpret – and the question is – that seems to be a habit: spitting in the sink without washing it afterwards. That seems to be a habit; a very bad habit indeed, if you live with somebody else at least, and if there are no fairies who clean after you. But that seems very different than following a social rule. Yeah, but true that. But the point is, suppose you are that person and realize that this is bad – shouldn’t do that, right? So, the strategy that you should think about in order to change that habit is what is about following a social rule. And in many ways, it is exactly that, right? I know that this isn’t good behaviour – because it produces effects of disgust, to say the least, to other people, especially the people I live with who have to live with that. So, I’ll try to change it, following the social rule of not doing it.
The problem is that you cannot switch it off and on as you want. You have to be strategic about it, especially with things that you’ve been doing for a long time. So it is the problem of the endogenous determination, formation, or modification of human habits. And that explains a little bit, at least, the intuition that when we follow a social rule, we’re doing something that we wouldn’t otherwise want to do.
The third and final – and it’s not in the paper because it needs… it’s something that has to do with the stability of these preferences. I mean, an explanation – it’s a little bit more complex than that. But one traditional assumption that once was attributed to economists – it’s not true anymore – is that they think of preferences as something that is exogenously stamped on an agent who cannot do anything about that. We choose in light of our existing preferences; we do not choose our preferences. Right? So, this is the basic intuition. So, they are exogenous; they are not endogenous to the process of choice itself.
Now, when you introduce human habits, what you’re doing is – this situation of exogenous determination of preferences, namely they’re not endogenous to the process of choice – makes, formally, the utility function that you write stable: they don’t change; the parameters of the utility function don’t change; they’re fixed. Nothing you can do can change the utility function that you’re trying to maximize given your budget. When you put human habits in, then the utility function is not necessarily stable, because what you’re doing in the past changes your inclination in the present, changes your preferences – the rate at which you’d be willing to substitute things in your life, so to speak, right?
So why is this important? It is important because one intuition that it couldn’t be that relentless utility maximisers follow social rules is that it is very odd to think of somebody who’s following social rules that condition it to his resources or the cost of the action. We understand the point of “I’m committed to the social rule; I do it anyway” – save for exceptions that should normally be included in the rule; otherwise, we’re doing something that’s messy, as we know – visibility and all of that. All right. So when you put in the issue of the stability of the utility function, then you have at least some conceptual instruments to think about cases in which the price, for example, of the activity or the good changes, but you keep doing it. Why? Because you’re interested in your future preferences as well – your future habits as well, in my vocabulary.
So, again, there are obviously intuitions that we cannot go from human habits to social rules – that something is missing – and I’m willing to accept them. The work is, step by step, to make these intuitions more explicit. What are they based on? And try to find ways in which we can represent them within these conceptual resources. And if we cannot, then let’s look for other conceptual resources. Frankly, I don’t have a full argument about it, but it seems to me that a lot can be done – at least, a theoretically useful conception of social rules that doesn’t guarantee it but actually gives you confidence that you’re not losing too much when you’re using those theoretical resources to study them.
We will not get a full account of why we should obey the law from this perspective. That’s not the point of the perspective. So, if what’s missing is a full normative account of why it is a good thing to have law, then this will not give it. It will give information, perhaps, on some structural features of the law that we know give us some reasons to believe that it’s not such a bad idea to have law instead of not having it. Yes, but that’s a different argument, though. And I would think this is a political argument or, you know, a very abstract political argument for the legitimacy or the justice of one legal system or other. And it’s perfectly admissible. I would be interested in doing it – and you are doing it. It’s not – yeah – and you are doing it, yes.
Bojan Spaić:
I’m going to try to yank you out of the finesse of economic argument for two reasons. One is I can’t replicate your economic analysis in this case simply because I don’t do much of it. And the second reason is that it’s similar to the question, or to the thing that we were discussing when you were doing the presentation. From one perspective, I find myself in complete agreement with your redefinition of habits, and I think it’s very valuable. It’s my problem – and it was my problem a couple of days ago when I first heard your analysis – is that social rules, and legal rules, have this characteristic – and we can put it any way we like – but it is these social rules that sometimes yank you out of a habit. And if I wanted to use a Deweyan terminology in this case: whatever, no matter how complicated you make a habit out to be, its behaviour results are similar. It’s this habitual behaviour that is being repeated, no matter the analysis behind it.
Now, I think at least, we have different relations of social rules to something that is either an individual or a collective habit. At times, we start from a social rule, and then the social rule acts as an initial point of habit formation. Like, for example, you had in your discussion of this gross example that we have – and we all like it, let’s face it – the spitting example. We keep going back to the same. So, you have a bad habit, which was formed as a habit, and there is no discussion that we call that a habit, and it bears significant similarities to other habits – maybe more complicated habits – that we have. Then you have a social rule, or you get to know a social rule, and this habit bumps against this social rule. It would seem we have a habit and then we have a problem with carrying out the habit. So, we are faced with something that we can call a choice. We are knowledgeable now about the social rule that prevents us – or should prevent us – from spitting in the sink and leaving it there without cleaning it up, and so on, or in any other situation.
So, to me at least, it seems that – and I agree with you – habits are a great tool, if you redefine them, to explain compliance with a social rule or a legal rule, for that matter. I mean, to my mind, most of the time we just do legal things in virtue of habit and not in virtue, of course, of deliberating in each and every case whether we should do something and counting legal reasons in and counting moral reasons here and counting social norms in, and so on. It’s fortunate, because we would probably go crazy – like in the morning when we get up and go to buy bread. But oftentimes, a social rule seems to yank you out of the habit. When you’re made aware of the existence of a social rule, you either have to redefine your habits, or you have to follow your habits but bear the consequences of the non-compliance with the social rule. And that kind of creates a problem – at least in these situations, both for legal rules and social rules – being explained in terms of habits. Because it would seem that their role is, at least in these situations, different than the role that habits have. They are not there to reduce the costs of however you define utility. They are there to disturb a habit – or, society-wise, to disturb a habit of a part of the population or a majority of the population, and so on. How would you go about answering this from the perspective of this analysis of habits, or is there a way to answer it?
Marco Segatti:
Yeah, no, I mean, I don’t think I need to answer it, in the sense that I think that’s perfectly correct, and it’s exactly what I mean. The thing is, I think you’re still working with an intuition that habit is the behaviour. Once you don’t – I mean, in another paper that I have – which, hopefully, will come out, but we’re still in the review process – anyways, it doesn’t have to do it. I put it in terms of – and I’m more explicit about the Deweyan influence there – a methodological thesis. And this is the thesis that I would defend. I didn’t present it like that in the paper because I wanted to connect it with Hart. But the important thesis is methodological. I mean, it has very many sub-theses, but it’s okay.
And the methodological thesis is: how should we go about and study human behaviour? Answer: by identifying its habits – full stop. Then, of course, you define habits in particular ways and all of that. But this is the point I try to make. What I mean by habit is this bundle of things that have this effect, and that you can write them up in this or that way – which means that they incorporate, as I said, static judgments and dynamic judgments. And these are the things. You want to know what are the social rules of people in Belgrade? Let’s search for their habits. And, in particular, let’s search for their habits that include more or less explicit expectations on the effects of behaviour on their social capital. That’s what I’m saying. And the fact that it’s a very good intuition – it’s more than an intuition; it’s a very good observation – it’s exactly your point, and it’s exactly what I want to make.
And it connects with my more political arguments that, yeah, it makes sense to have law and not just social rule generally, precisely because we want to do that. And through law we can do that experimentally, for example, and attribute causality to things that we’re doing. These are the effects of having changed our habits in this or that direction, of taking conscience and being aware of the effects of what we’re doing together.
Bojan Spaić:
I have just one. He has always – but I’ve been fascinated by this. You probably have been fascinated by this when you were reading Dewey, for example. So, pragmatists always had – I don’t know if Jules did much pragmatism or, for example, reading Dewey, but I was really into it while I was doing my work. And the pragmatists, including later pragmatists – for example, Rorty, Putnam, even Donald Davidson, and Robert Brandom, for example, like contemporary pragmatists – they had these fights against certain words. And one of the words that they had a fight against was “truth.” Famously – quite famously – pragmatist theories of truth are not theories of truth at all, because they wanted to change the word or to displace the word completely. And Dewey had this wonderful idea of displacing it with two words: warranted –
Julieta Rabanos:
Assertability.
Bojan Spaić:
Absolutely. And you know that. And kind of, like, I loved it while I was reading it, but after ten years, I don’t think that you can replace the word “truth,” in the sense that you can’t really – it’s just this term and this concept. Whatever you do, it’s just always present. You can clarify it a bit. Most of the time you create kind of equivocations and stuff like that, but there isn’t – I think what pragmatism has shown with these redefinitions – that there isn’t anything magical with this redefinition, or if we try to use “warranted acceptability,” it kind of doesn’t work, and we just don’t – we still kind of use the old term and things like that.
So that’s my only worry, and I’m thrilled about the project of kind of explaining habits in a way that plays a more important role in both social and legal rules. But I’m kind of worried if you draw too much into habits, even if it’s kind of technically speaking true. So, for example, if you add a reflexive moment to it, if you add responses to external stimulus, if you add the responses to internal stimulus – so if you make it into an all-encompassing concept – that kind of loses its identity, which doesn’t have to be a problem. But if you kind of delimit it in the sense that when you – you have this moment in which you have a novel stimulus, then you have the reaction, then you have a habit forming out of this reaction, and it’s based on what the reaction is. I think it makes the point more poignant, or it makes it a bit more, like, easier to swallow. I don’t know what you think about it.
Marco Segatti:
Well, I mean – yeah. I mean, I kind of agree. Yeah, it’s a very all-encompassing definition. I mean, again, my idea is that we should talk about habits and not preferences. The preference is a much more ambiguous word for the thing that we generally do with them. That, you know, now there are preferences, there are time preferences, there are the effects on – there is endogenous formation of preferences – and all the things that economists do with these things, I think we can do them by talking about habit. So, I think it’s a little bit better than talking about preferences, because it doesn’t, you know, carry all the heavy implications of the use of preferences.
Should we distinguish it? Yeah. I mean, I think that there is an interest in simplicity and parsimony, right? So, the least number of things that we use, the better for our theoretical ambitions and all of that. One thing is the importance of the distinction between habits – the quality of stability of human habits. I’m not – the claim is not – two things, then. The claim is not that people have stable habits. I’ve no idea whether that’s true or false. I think intuitively they do have somewhat stable habits. That doesn’t mean, however, that they always do the same thing. Because if you accept my definition of habit, it’s not necessarily an implication that if you have a habit, you’re repeating one action several times. I mean, in my definition, of course, we are attempting to account for – measure, whatever you want – the effects of past experiences on your present inclinations. That’s present and future works. So that’s the basic thing of having a habit.
The thing is, if you consider the distinction between compulsions and commitments – now, I didn’t, which I discussed in the presentation; I cannot get into the details here, and I don’t do that in the paper; I do that in the other paper – one key distinction is between them that you can immediately see, and it’s an implication of writing the model in the way I propose to write it, is that compulsions – forming a compulsion – reduces your full income. So, the total resources that you have at your disposal. So, it both increases relative marginal utility over one activity and reduces your income. That means, if I’m not totally mistaken, that you’re going to do that thing more. You have less money and a bigger want for the thing. You’re going to do it more, right, relatively than before. Or, better said, a bigger part of your budget is going to go to that thing.
Commitments – they are, in many ways, the opposite of compulsions, and part of being the opposite is that they increase your full income. So not necessarily your money income – not that you get richer necessarily; that may be a farther effect down the line, whatever – but your full income. So, the productivity of your time, basically. And that means that, yes, your marginal utility over the activity increases. But that doesn’t mean that you’re doing the thing more, because there is an income effect. You have more resources. So perhaps you’re doing other things more. You don’t know. Perhaps you’re never repeating the thing, and you’re still committed to the activity.
Julieta Rabanos:
So you’re basically committed to, in some sense, apply this law about maximizing – and then, but the outputs of applying it can be different activities. In the sense of, I’m trying to reconstruct, for example, your definition of habits – trying to make it compatible with the idea that even if we have a habit, for example, the activities that follow this habit can be different.
Marco Segatti:
Yeah, definitely.
Julieta Rabanos:
So I was more thinking about – yeah, you have, like, the habit of, for example, doing things in some specific way in this – for example, calculations or maybe maximizing or whatever. And this can explain or can account for the fact that following a habit, or having a habit, does not imply doing the same thing.
Marco Segatti:
Yeah, no – yeah, absolutely. In fact, it becomes ambiguous – the expression “following a habit” doesn’t mean much anymore. Yeah. And, you know, in the paper – which is in Italian, and which is closer to publication – that I have on these specific topics, I don’t call them habits. I call them abitudini, which is the translation of habits, with a star – a little star.
Julieta Rabanos:
Asterisk.
Marco Segatti:
Asterisk. So, in order to make clear that I’m not in the business – I accept that that’s not the meaning of habit in ordinary language. Absolutely not. The point is – that’s the clue – and Dewey is also very explicit about that. Perhaps you could call it aptitude, you could call it skill, you could call it whatever you want. I mean, the point is being clear what it is. Attitude – yeah, it’s not – it doesn’t incorporate skills. Skills – certainly they’re part of a habit, but they’re not the whole thing. Preferences – it has the problem of, it suggests – I mean, then when you’re clear with the words, it doesn’t suggest it anymore, as economists do; don’t suggest it anymore, basically, I think. It has this idea that, you know, you’re conscient about – conscious of – the thing you prefer. And by preferring it, you’re doing it something explicit, you’re doing something deliberate, then you’re doing something that has reason for and against, then you’re doing a calculation. Habits – no. I mean, it is normally associated with thoughtless action. “I do it out of habit” means that I haven’t thought about it. So yes, but once we clear out that thing – yeah, that’s part of it. Of course, if your habit is a compulsion, then you’re obviously not really aware of what you’re doing and what it is that you’re stimulated by. I mean, you’re probably very aware of one part of your compulsion – like, for example, the drug addict, you know, is obviously very aware of one’s drug, drugs, that specific drugs – but is not completely, totally aware of the farther effects of what he’s doing, or he can’t really control himself. Or we can imagine that moment in his addiction that he arises at, and, you know – yeah, I want to stop, but I can’t stop, right?
And that’s something that – I mean, this algebra was developed by Becker in a very famous paper – in different papers, but one of his most famous ones is “Rational Addictions.” And he’s talking about rational addiction: how to make addiction – which seems, at first sight, totally irrational behaviour, and so not the subject of utility-maximizing behaviour. It’s weird to think of the drug addict as somebody who’s maximizing something. But yeah, I mean, there are problems with them. It was very much discussed, but I think it’s on the right track on many things.
Bojan Spaić:
So, to tie things in with the first part of the conversation, one final question: when can we expect a self-help book on changing and forming habits from you?
Marco Segatti:
And, by the way, there are so many of those. There are so many of those. So, it’s an insane amount.
Bojan Spaić:
Atomic Cabbage, Changeable, Unchangeable Cabbage.
Marco Segatti:
And also, I think there are other two connections in sort of the popular market of books – which obviously I’m not very much into. I wouldn’t be able to write something like that, or to write it in order for it to sell.
Bojan Spaić:
Fortunately, nobody writes their own books anymore.
Marco Segatti:
Yeah, probably – yeah, it’s AI. Everything AI. Sometimes I think, just looking online sometimes, they’re sold together with things on flow, which is a more respectable concept than many of these self-help. And the idea represents that exactly, right? So, the idea of commitment especially represents that. And the idea of – and it’s also something extremely important that it’s – this is true, somewhat overlooked by mainstream economics or neoclassical economics – that work sometimes is not irksome, as economists tend to think; that people like to work, when under several conditions. And obviously they like to get paid anyways for their work, but it’s not a given that work is irksome and people don’t want to do it. There are conditions under which you actually want to work for the utility or the pleasure that you get out of work itself. And again, the concept of commitment does, I think, something to represent – not explain, because for that you need empirical data and see whether you can use that model to explain the empirical data in some interesting sense – but certainly to represent the intuition that sometimes work is something that you would do even if they didn’t pay you.
And third, the kind of more Eastern philosophical thing of – you know, there is, for some reason, the concept of flow is – and the concept also of change in habits – it’s associated with Eastern philosophy and Buddhism and meditation and control of your thoughts in your mind and all of that. I’m not sure whether there is anything to these connections. I’m certainly very much interested in Eastern philosophy, but I’m totally ignorant about it. So, I don’t know. Perhaps maybe in twenty years I’ve come up with a research project on Eastern philosophy.
Bojan Spaić:
Somebody rediscovered stoicism recently. Also, stoicism has this important –
Julieta Rabanos:
Like: Gasp!
Bojan Spaić:
Yeah, stoicism. No, but he’s doing the stuff. So, he just pushed flow there for us to comment, to get inspired by it. Yeah. But no, this podcast is a good example of situations –
Julieta Rabanos:
Flowing.
Marco Segatti:
Yeah, I think we went way over time.
Bojan Spaić:
No, that’s fine.
Julieta Rabanos:
No, but I think that on this note, we can say thank you very much, Marco, to be here, and thank you very much for accepting in participating in this flow of podcast that we started, like, I think, one hour ago.
Marco Segatti:
A couple of hours ago.
Julieta Rabanos:
No, one hour.
Marco Segatti:
Oh, all right, yeah. Thank you very much for having me. It’s been a great pleasure. I mean, yeah, the opportunity to talk and, you know, I think it’s always helpful. Always helpful. Thank you.
Julieta Rabanos:
And we will wait for your book on Equal Access to Justice to be published.
Marco Segatti:
Yes, absolutely. I will send it. Thank you very much.
Bojan Spaić:
Thanks, Marco!
Here you can find the book that is mentioned in the podcast episode:
Marco Segatti
Equal Access to Justice.
On the Duty to Pause, Cool Down, and Listen
Springer – 2024
(*some minor grammatical and changes have been introduced in order to make the reading more fluid, but in no way altering the content or the format of each speaker’s interventions).
The HAPL podcast is powered by the EU Horizon Twinning project “Advancing Cooperation on The Foundations of Law – ALF” (project no. 101079177). This project is financed by the European Union.
