"Yes. Standardizing imposes some costs but everyone being clean is really good."

"What does an argument about a thing being essential look like?"

"Well, there are a couple conceptions of pollution. There used to be a lot more variance, actually, one thing I've written a paper about is conceptions of pollution before international standardization. But there's still disagreement on things like whether when someone touches a polluted object the whole person becomes polluted or just the part that touched something, and about whether being in a sufficiently polluted area pollutes you even if you didn't touch anything, and the extent to which there are degrees of pollution or a binary, and what sorts of contact transfer pollution."

"Hmmmmm."

"So to make an argument about a cleaning procedure you specify your assumptions about how pollution works and how strongly if at all your argument depends on those assumptions, and then you explain which desireable things the cleaning procedure achieves, and you appeal to evidence like how people feel about it and how consistent its effects are and what effect it has on microbes and small objects and maybe you test with tracing dyes to see how the dyes move in the course of cleaning and you compare to other things that are agreed to work."

"It matters how people feel about it?"

"Yes, definitely. Intuition is our strongest guide to pollution."

"Oh. I guess I wouldn't be very good at this."

"It seems like it would be harder for you but you can always ask other people about their intuitions, if you wanted to get into pollution theology. Intuition doesn't have to mean mine, personally, just those of people."

Nod.

"Some pollution research involves taking surveys. There was a design institute that worked to develop better bathroom designs to reduce pollution risk and also make bathrooms feel less disgusting, and some theologians studied their internal focus group data to understand what contributes to peoples' sense of pollution. All kinds of things do - for example, a bathroom that is otherwise dirty will make people feel more polluted even though dirt is just dirt, and bathrooms that felt very modern with lots of steel and glass surfaces tend on average to feel cleaner to people - if you keep them clean, of course."

"Why steel and glass?"

"I don't know. I think because they're nonporous and it's very visible when they are dirty, but the paper argued that because they seem modern and modernity is associated with better handling of pollution, they strike people as inherently cleaner substances than, say, stone."

"...but they aren't technically, just they make people feel better, except if people feel better that can make things technically different?"

"Someone could conceivably justify a cleaning procedure by, among other things, convincingly demonstrating that after doing it people felt really clean. It wouldn't be enough on its own but it can contribute."

"What things are enough on their own?"

"A tradition of it being considered adequate or proof that it supersedes something traditional like that without being worse along any axes."

"Hmmmmmm."

"I wrote a paper about pollution as it relates to new technologies in which I argued we need something more robust than that, to answer questions like whether people who are teleported by destroying them and reassembling their molecules at the other end are clean."

"Is that a thing?"

"It is not! It was one of the examples of technologies that could maybe exist someday which we'd need a different way of thinking about theologically."

"Oh."

"It would be pretty neat, though! Anyway, in that article I propose some ways of evaluating cleaning mechanisms from first principles and argue that you could evaluate existing pollution ideas using those principles and derive laws that are also good by other principles."

"How do you pick principles to be first?"

"You propose some and then argue that they're useful, produce accurate results, reflect our understanding of pollution, all that."