JM: It's remarkable that, given the evidence of the ease with which people manage to deceive themselves with regard to their social and political motivations, to bond by exclusion, to succumb to racism and tribalism, and to cede their decision-making to leaders, to authority, and to power, you continue to maintain the optimistic view that a democracy in which people make decisions on the full range of issues that concern them – especially economic issues – is still a live vital option. Are there reasons to maintain this or is it perhaps a matter of hope, or even of faith?[C]

NC: It's not so much faith as hope – but there's plenty of empirical evidence for it too. It's true that people cede responsibility, become obedient, become racist, and so on. It's also true if you look at the historical evidence that they overcome it – that they struggle to overcome these things. There's been plenty of progress in every one of these domains in recent years. Take, say, women's rights. [Earlier, people didn’t even consider the matter:] my grandmother didn’t feel oppressed – she didn’t know she was oppressed. My mother knew she was oppressed but didn’t think there was anything you could do about it: it's just the natural order. My daughters aren’t like that. They wouldn’t accept that kind of existence – they’re aware of it, and they wouldn’t accept it. And the society around them doesn’t accept it. That's moral progress; [and] that's progress in understanding our own nature. But it's been achieved. It's not an easy struggle and it's certainly not over. And it's just in our own recent lifetimes, so we can watch it.

The same is true in case after case. There is slavery – there are maybe 30 million slaves in the world. But we no longer approve it, regard it as the natural order, or make up stories about how it's better for the slaves. Yet the arguments that were given for slavery – which were not insubstantial – were never answered; they were just rejected as being morally intolerable through a period of growth of moral consciousness. I haven’t heard a sensible answer to the main argument offered by slaveholders in the United States – it was a perfectly sensible argument, and has implications. The basic argument was that slaveholders are more moral than people who live in a market society. To take an anachronistic analogy, if you buy a car and I rent the same car, and we look at those two cars two years from now, yours is going to be in better shape than mine, because you’re going to take care of it; I’m not going to take care of mine.