Interview with Dr Joel Chow

On 18th September 2023, we sat down to have a chat with Dr Joel Chow, Staff Advisor of the NUS FASS PPE Club, as part of a series of interviews with faculty members.

Joel Chow is a lecturer with NUS College and the Philosophy department at NUS. His research interests are in political philosophy, moral responsibility, and the intersection between philosophy, politics, and economics. He obtained his PhD from the University of Arizona. He has published in The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and Res Publica. 

His research interests have also informed his teaching, where he has developed strong interests in interdisciplinary teaching and pedagogical research. He was recently awarded the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (FTEA) and the NUS Annual Teaching Excellence Award (ATEA) in 2023.

Note: This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Shang Wen: Hi Prof! Let's start with some questions about your academic interests. What inspired your interest and pursuit of philosophy?

Joel Chow: I've always been interested in philosophical questions, especially questions about moral responsibility or how we should act in the world. I’ve also been very interested in the question of what is rational, how people should act under certain kinds of situations or decisions, and how they should be guided by certain kinds of rules or norms. Of course, that language is kind of technical, but it began out of an interest in trying to understand how humans behave and why they behave that way. 

Typically, people turn to psychology to understand that, right? However, I found that these are deeply philosophical questions because as I was reading more about psychology, I realized actually there are a lot of philosophical concepts that are employed. So, that led me to try to understand those questions.

Shang Wen: So I think you mentioned rationality and norms of human beings. Does part of that explain what made you focus specifically on PPE as opposed to, more generally, philosophy?

Joel Chow: Yes, so that was a question I had when I started my undergraduate studies. I was very interested in trying to understand human behavior, how humans interact with one another, and why they would accept, you know, certain kinds of rules, right? I always like to say it's a bit like magic, if someone asks you to do something and then you do it without coercion. In fact, philosophers are very puzzled by this behavior. How does a request or obligation have some kind of binding force on people? They are puzzled by this and so naturally that also led me to think about questions in economics. So why do people behave the way they do? Why do people, if they are rational in the way that economics says they are, why would they act in certain kinds of ways? So those are questions that naturally arise. So they have led me again to focus in on more PPE questions. 

Shang Wen: In the field of PPE, what specific areas of PPE are you most interested in?

Joel Chow: (It goes back to) the question(s) about how do people come from small-scale micro interactions to set up institutions, how do people engage in markets? Why? What are the moral limits of markets and how should societies organize themselves? Those are the enduring questions of PPE, and those are the questions that I'm most interested in.

But recently, I have also been very interested in applying methods and techniques from PPE to relatively new areas. So, for example, some people want to use PPE methods to understand how people learn from one another or interact with one another. Or how people might actually engage in activity where they learn in groups and share results. 

But my enduring questions that I am most interested in have always been about how should states govern citizens? Should the state regulate the market? How should citizens interact with the market? Those are the big PPE questions, and I’ve always been interested in those.

Shang Wen: I see. I think just now you mentioned the moral limits of markets. I think that's (from) Michael Sandel, right?

Joel Chow: Yes.

Shang Wen: So on that note, what books would you recommend to an aspiring PPE major? You know, we just had a reading list published by Austin, so we thought you could add onto that.

Joel Chow: Of course, Sandel’s work will be one of the few key classics. If we go through the sort of more kind of historical canonical works, On Liberty by John Stuart Mill is a very important book. John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy is another important book, although a more difficult one to read. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is another one, but those are historical works that I think are useful to contextualize certain things. I would also recommend that we understand certain kinds of Chinese philosophy like Confucian thinking. 

Canonical contemporary works that I think are worth reading: one of them, one of my favorites, is this book by Cristina Bicchieri called The Grammar of Society which I covered in some very small form in (my) Introduction to PPE. Another big work is A Theory of Justice by John Rawls.

In terms of economic work that you can learn a lot from, there’s this book by Joseph Stiglitz, Creating a Learning Society, as well as the classic, Why Nations Fail, by Darren Acemoglu and James Robinson.

That being said, I really think these are all very big books, hard to digest and read. However, I think these are books that will give you a sort of empirical scaffolding and allow you to think about the normative questions that I mentioned.

Shang Wen: I think this next question might be a little bit difficult. Of the three disciplines of P, P and E, which discipline do you think PPE is most anchored in?

Joel Chow: Honestly, I would say that it's most anchored in two, rather than one, and that is philosophy and economics. The reason being that, if we look very closely, we see that a lot of PPE questions arise from the intersection between philosophy and economics. For example, the moral limits of markets. You can't talk about that without talking about [the] efficient market hypothesis. You can't talk about it without thinking about perfect market conditions. You can't talk about that without talking about some philosophical questions. You should talk about it using a lens of political science, but it's possible to discuss those questions without actually bringing in political science. So, that's what I mean by necessary.

And we look at another idea about, say, rationality and decision theory. You can have that whole discussion without bringing in political science — you should — but you could have a discussion on its own using economics and philosophy. If you look carefully at how the field has emerged, there has been a lot of fruitful discussion between economists and philosophers, partly because economics has made some very big assumptions in trying to model rational behavior, and philosophers naturally want to question and to probe and pick at those ideas. Philosophy also has had very fruitful discussions with economics, because philosophy is pushed in the direction of asking questions about why do you think these idealized assumptions would work? Why should we assume that humans will behave in this way?

That's not to say that political theory or political science is not in conversation in philosophy. Again, that is another big area where philosophy and political theory have lots in conversation, right? So, in a way, we might think of philosophy as the (kind of) anchoring discipline, but I would say that we usually see two disciplines in conversation with each other that gives rise to a whole series of questions. So in terms of political science and philosophy, a big series of questions are raised about the legitimacy of the state. Why should citizens obey the state? Is it rational? Why should they do that? What kinds of obligations they have to one another, what kinds of obligations nation-states have to one another? That's another area where the two disciplines intersect very nicely.

You can have those conversations with an economic lens. But again, you (also) can have that conversation with just political theory and philosophy. The way I think about is that there are areas where putting those two disciplines in conversation will give you a lot and then a third discipline will be brought in to complicate the story. But in the beginning, we always often start with emphasis of one and usually two of those in conversation with one another.

Shang Wen: That’s a very interesting way to see it. Maybe just one last question on PPE-related matters — and I think you briefly said just now — if you could make a brand new PPE course now, how would the course look like and what would it be about? 

Joel Chow: So I have been thinking about a new class, bringing in some of the tools from PPE to examine what are not traditionally PPE questions. One of the areas that I’ve been very interested in — the question, of course, starts from philosophy — is how do people learn about things from the world. Then, the thought is how do people learn about the world from one another? They talk to one another, they learn about what's happening around them. That means that knowledge is a kind of social phenomena, influenced by social networks and things like that. If that's true, that means that naturally, we see one point of contact with the social sciences, which is that we need economics and political science to help us to try to understand how people learn about the world. 

In the past few years, we’ve increasingly seen why this is very important. The proliferation of misinformation often employs social motivations rather than acting on people's willingness to seek the truth. This class wants to explore that question a bit more and look at how economic analysis of communities of agents learning from one another operate. (We also) look at how political scientists have taken some of those models to think about how democracies should work, and how political institutions should deal with questions about misinformation and disinformation. So, that's one of the classes I’m interested in thinking about. 

Shang Wen: Maybe now we’ll move on to some questions related to yourself. What are some of the hobbies or activities you like to pursue in your free time? 

Joel Chow: This comes from some of the PPE stuff that I’ve been thinking about a lot. One of the things I’m very interested in – following my thinking about the collective, cumulative effects of people's choices – is this idea that we should reduce our carbon load. For the past few years, I’ve tried very hard to be conscious in some areas — not all, I should be more conscious, according to my own standards – about my carbon emissions. I’ve tried a lot to reduce my own carbon footprint, at least mainly with respect to transport. So it has led to an obsession with cycling everywhere. Naturally, it has led to a hobby, especially when you want to travel great distances. Other than that, because I like to do cycling, naturally I’ve met some friends who would like to do bouldering, climbing and gym. That’s a new thing I’ve been doing a lot of. One thing I’ve been interested in is learning how to do more video work and that's also because I want to create smaller snippets of videos for students. So that's what I do outside of work. 

Shang Wen: Okay, so the next question is: What is one piece of life advice or wisdom you could give to an undergraduate today?

Joel Chow: One thing that I think students should bear in mind is that — and this is very cliche, but I will hopefully try to make it less cliche — grades are not the most important thing. What I mean by that is actually two things. 

First, it's of course important to try to do well, but what will make you successful – however you define success, which can be defined in a multitude of ways – is your ability to engage with one another and to know yourself quite meaningfully. I think that is very important because this is probably the best time in your life to figure that out for yourself. That is also something that students, when I speak to them outside of class, are most interested in finding out. I have many students who might not talk to me that much during class but after the semester has ended, they will suddenly find me and say, “I need to figure out some stuff in my life,” and then they will talk to me for hours. (That) is fine, but I think that means that students are very keen and know that they need to figure things out. So you should try to devote quite a bit of time to doing that.

One way that you can do that is through reflecting upon your learning. That means thinking about: Why am I doing this? What do I find myself intrigued by? And learning from your peers and talking to one another. It takes a kind of introspection that I think is good to cultivate during university and hopefully, that the university education also helps to cultivate. But it also takes a lot of time and energy, which is, if I'm honest, is getting a bit more scarce (in university). So, that’s the other thing to be mindful of. Don't give yourself too much commitment (such) that you don't have the time and space to engage in that kind of reflection. Take the time to find that space, because when you graduate, your commitments will begin to become even more time-consuming, so that will become rarer.

Shang Wen: I see. So, I guess the next question is kind of related to what you said about talking to students and knowing yourself. How would you describe yourself as a lecturer or a teacher?

Joel Chow: This is probably the hardest question to answer. I think that I have one strength, which is that I am very passionate about what I want to teach. That is also a weakness, because I want to make sure that everyone understands certain things and then that can lead me down to covering too much. At the same time, that's a strength, because I really want to try to understand something and convey it to everyone. 

But the other thing that I really want to do is to make sure that there's a classroom environment where you feel that you can at least see the applicability of abstract ideas. That is the thing that I always want to try to impress upon students. The things that we learn in PPE especially, can often seem very abstract and lofty, but they do have a lot of real world relevance. I'll try my best to always show that in a variety of areas. 

The last thing is that I want my students to come away from my lessons with the understanding that the social world is very complex. It’s not something that we can understand easily, so we need to approach it with humility, but at the same time, it's not something that is impossible to appreciate. We can have some understanding of the world, but we should also be aware that our understanding would be limited in some very important ways. If nothing else, I think that is the most important takeaway, which is that social science and philosophy help us to appreciate the complexity of the world around us, but we also know that whatever answers we come up with are provisional at best. 

Shang Wen: Finally, the last thing we wanted to ask is about the PPE Club. Could you share more about your plans for the PPE Club? For example, I believe you have a podcast aind some Youtube video projects planned.

Joel Chow: So we are trying to work with the club to create some content. Some of it will be used for (the) introduction class, while some of it will also be used to do more popular explanations of things that are interesting in PPE. 

For the podcast, we are still trying to see whether it can be done, but what I want to do is to get some faculty members who are all from different areas in the three disciplines to talk about an issue. So that students actually get to see how people from different disciplines think about and understand an area and then how they have a discussion around that. That is very important for me, because that's how I envision interdisciplinary learning to occur. Students should not just learn about themselves, but different students will naturally have different strengths and talents. And that's fine, right? Not every student will always be equally competent in each area.

Then that's why we learn from one another. Because someone who might be more versatile in say, economic theory or understanding economic models, can explain something to another student who might be more interested in normative questions. Of course, everyone should be conversant in all three areas. But having different strengths means that students can tap on one another to understand something in a more holistic way. For the podcast, I hope to model some of that. 

And the last thing that I want to do is to try to take something that's happening in the world and then use PPE tools to try to explain what's happening. But that’s a bigger project that I’m working with the students and also doing myself.