Wow. This bloggingheads.tv interview between Will Wilkinson and UNC's Geoff Sayre-McCord is incredibly good. Sayre-McCord is a wonderfully clear and careful thinker, and Will asks him excellent, probing questions. (Can you imagine seeing such a philosophically astute discussion on regular TV? It's times like these that I really love the internet!)
One recurring issue concerns the extent to which moral statements are simply redescriptions of natural facts. Does 'Hitler was evil' say anything over and above the fact that he had a callous disregard for others' welfare, etc.? Does the goodness of our social institutions consist in anything more than the descriptive fact that they are conducive to [such-and-such specification of] human flourishing?
The problem with the negative (reductionist) answer is that it risks turning normative disputes into mere semantic disputes. Suppose one were to say: "I grant that Western freedoms are more conducive to personal development, happiness, and all that jazz, but nonetheless they are bad, because it is more important to promote obedience, piety, etc." We don't want to say they've contradicted themselves, as we must if 'good' just means 'conducive to [...]'. Their error is not linguistic. It seems there's a substantive moral question at stake here, viz. how we should organize society, or what is of ultimate value, or some such.
Granted, the tricky thing is to say what this further element of disagreement amounts to. I'm inclined to think it is the question of what moral viewpoint is most reasonable, or what all ideally rational agents would ultimately converge on at the end of inquiry. Depending on our theory of rationality, this might be further reduced to the question of what set of desires/evaluative beliefs is the most internally coherent, unified, and so forth. I think this is some sort of progress. At least it is difficult to re-raise the Open Question Argument at this level: "I grant that X is approved by the maximally coherent evaluative system, and indeed I would endorse it if I were more rational, but nonetheless I think X is wrong!" sounds pretty self-contradictory to me. But in some sense I've just passed the buck from meta-ethics to meta-epistemology, so this picture is still not entirely satisfactory.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Metaethics Diavlog
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Philosophers on Bloggingheads.tv
This is cool. Bloggingheads' first [see comments] philosophy 'diavlog' is with Josh Knobe. Here's a clip:
There's plenty there to disagree with (does he really answer the question whether philosophical questions are irresolvable by suggesting that philosophers should do science instead?), but it's great to see philosophers involved in such public discussions. I'm told Bloggingheads.tv is looking to have other philosophers on the show (/site) over the next few months, so it'll be interesting to see how (and who) they turn out...
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Beyond the Ivory Tower
A reader wrote to ask what "efforts outside of academia" I'm interested in, and I realized I haven't really written explicitly about this before.
There are perhaps three ideals that especially appeal to me as an aspiring philosopher. One is the pursuit of knowledge, or advancing the frontier of human inquiry. Another is the dissemination of this knowledge to advance human understanding throughout society. And third is the development of a more rational society.
Only the first can be pursued within academia alone. (And perhaps not even that, if the public purse becomes closed to research that most people neither value nor understand. I really think we should be doing more to persuade people that philosophy matters!) And while I certainly place a lot of value on pure research and philosophical inquiry, in my more ambitious moments I also think that I'd like to contribute to the advancement of intellectual values more broadly.
So what does that involve, exactly? Possibilities might include:
1) Writing popular philosophy that's engaging and accessible to a general audience.
2) For ethicists: engaging in reasoned public debate -- through blogs, newspaper columns, etc.
3) Promote philosophy in schools. (Including, as Brandon put it, 'Teaching People to Reason Well'.)
I guess those are the three broad projects of public philosophy that capture my imagination at present. Any further suggestions?
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Public Philosophy
Three of the AAP talks I went to were about taking philosophy beyond the ivory tower.
Edward Spence described his project to engage the public in philosophy through theatre. His central theme was that to impact on the broader culture, philosophy must "engage the sentiments". There are many ways one might go about this, but his own approach is to incorporate philosophical elements into a wider cultural-entertainment experience, philosophy as a "night out", a performance in a restaurant while the audience wines and dines. This might be followed by a brief lecture from a philosopher who draws out the themes of the performance, and then invites public discussion. Apparently the project has proved reasonably popular, though one might entertain doubts about the depth of the philosophizing therein. Still, a worthwhile first step, perhaps, and it would be good to see more efforts to broaden public participation in philosophy. There are always worries about the tradeoffs and compromises inherent in popularization. I'm not sure what can be done about that.
Suzanne Uniacke tackled the question, 'What Can Philosophy Say About Public Policy?', suggesting that there were tensions between the two projects. In particular, public policy is constrained by such contingencies as popular beliefs (no matter how misguided), and is directed towards a specific audience. These features may clash with the impartiality and intellectual independence characteristic of philosophy. Philosophers might need to hide their true reasons for backing a policy if those would not be considered "socially acceptable". To some extent this is the old problem of pragmatic compromise that any radical faces: to make piecemeal progress they must endorse rather less than they would ideally prefer. But Uniacke seemed to think there was something especially problematic about this in relation to one's role as a philosopher.
Other interesting issues arose concerning just how philosophers should influence public policy. Theory may be indirectly influential through its effect on the public intellectual climate. (Cf. "think tanks".) But Uniacke focussed on the more direct policy input you might get, say, from a philosopher on a committee. Questions then arise about their competence and authority: should they restrict their input to the philosophical dimensions of policy? (Is there any clear-cut distinction here anyway? Just what sort of expertise does a philosopher bring to the policy-making table, if any?) Apparently Sydney Hook has proposed four facets to the philosopher's contribution:
1) A well-researched knowledge of facts
2) Methodological sophistication (disambiguate, clarify distinctions, etc.)
3) Philosophical sophistication (e.g. appropriate employment of the fact/value distinction.)
4) Critical distance or "disengagement" (to avoid bias).
This may lead to a picture of the "philosopher as technician", perhaps enabling a deliberative environment rather than offering substantive contributions themselves (as one might expect from the alternative picture of the "philosopher as expert"). Should there be a place for substantive philosophical advocacy of public policy positions?
Turning to the question of authority, Uniacke helpfully distinguished two forms of the distinction between "authoritative vs. advisory" contributions. In the first case, we might ask whether the philosopher's opinion should be treated as decisive on an issue (cf. a doctor's medical testimony). Presumably the answer to this is "no", since philosophers usually cannot even agree amongst themselves what the most reasonable position is. A second question is whether the philosopher's reasoning can be made transparent or accessible to the layperson, so that the latter may make their own reasonable assessment of the given advice, rather than taking the philosopher's verdicts as if from a "black box" which demands sheer faith (to whatever, perhaps limited, extent one is inclined to take its contributions into account at all).
Now, it seems that public policy must be grounded in publically accessible reasons, suggesting that the philosopher's role must also be advisory in this second sense. Again we face the difficult compromise between depth of rigour and broad accessibility. Given the complexity of the literature about killing and letting die, for instance, is there any hope for an informed public policy on end-of-life issues? Can philosophers always (or even often) make contributions to public debate that are both worthwhile and comprehensible? (Though as one person responded, it would be still worse to abandon this role to non-philosophers!)
There are also worries about courts (etc.) misapplying philosophical arguments. Apparently such distortion regularly arises through over-simplification, over-generalization, selective use, conflation or confusion, etc. Is this inevitable? (Is expert reasoning just too complex?) Or can something be done about it?
Many of these issues also arose in Steve Curry's talk on 'Philosophy as Research Methodology', which touched on interdisciplinary social-scientific work that he has contributed to as a philosopher. Again, the general intellectual skills of methodological critique and disambiguation, etc., were part of his contribution. But he also suggested that the philosopher's familiarity with the practice of reason-giving or justification can give us distinctive insights.
Curry described his involvement in gathering qualitative data (e.g. about whether various artistic or cultural programs have been successful in creating valuable experiences for people), which is often dismissed as "mere anecdote". They typically utilized a "Most Significant Change" (MSC) methodology, which elicits people's stories, which the group then discuss and eventually pick one to get passed back as the data from their group. However, drawing on his experience with modern Socratic Dialogue methods used by some teaching philosophers, Curry proposed that group participants immediately choose their favourite story, prior to discussion, and then have participants discuss the reasons for their choice. These are often initially hidden, so the discussion brings out much "deeper" information than is otherwise available, including implicit assumptions about value, etc. The group's considered judgments then go beyond "mere anecdote", and contribute valuable information that was previously inaccessible. You don't just get the anecdote; it is accompanied by the reasons explaining exactly why participants considered it significant.
So that was interesting. (Though Curry noted that such data should be "triangulated" with other, more traditional, research methods, and may not be worth much by itself.)
In sum, these talks seemed to be suggesting a somewhat deflationary picture of the philosophical enterprise. Rather than seeing reason as a reliable route to truth, most expertly navigated by professional philosophers themselves, I got the impression that these speakers would see philosophy's public role as more humble in nature -- perhaps as providing a method for clarifying and bringing structure to people's own views about the world. I would hope for more than that, though, I think. Philosophy may subvert widespread prejudices, question otherwise unquestioned assumptions, and thereby lead to a more radical rethinking of our ideas. At least, that's the ideal. The challenge, as ever, is how to implement it?
[I suspect that introducing philosophy at school would be a crucial step. Any other ideas?]
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
The Thinking Man's Tory
TPM have a fascinating interview with British politician and philosopher Oliver Letwin. I wish we had politicians like that here in New Zealand. Consider his remarks about social justice:I think the main question we need to be addressing is how we can have a society in which people grow up to be the kind of people that we would all like to be. That isn't the way it's often put, but it's my view of what it means to live in a socially just society. To my mind, something has gone very wrong – so we're doing a great social injustice – if there are people growing up to be the kind of people we wouldn't like to be: people who find themselves with chaotic lifestyles which they can't control and which drive them to despair and suicide; people who are oppressed by a lack of ability to control their world and deal with it; people who are deprived of culturally rich existence: all these things seem to me profound social injustices.
Some of them have to do with material prosperity, although that's never a guarantee of getting where I want people to be able to get to; nor is its absence a guarantee of not being able to get people where I want people to be able to get to. There are relationships, but it isn't the case that they should be conceived as a sort of mechanical operation for making sure that everybody has enough money, or for making sure that nobody is attacked by a burglar. It's something much deeper than either of those.
More specifically:I think there is at the moment a paradox that certain kinds of activity where it would be better if they were freer are more constrained; and other kinds of things where it would better if there were more social support or where social solidarity has been left to decline. For example, we live in a society where there is a huge aversion to risk. There is a colossal amount of regulation designed to minimise risk, I think to an extent which is impeding excellence, exuberance, cultural richness and so on. On the other side, people are growing up in circumstances where they are cruelly deprived of the emotional support that a human being needs in order to live the kind of life that many of us want to lead. This is a particularly intrusive state in some respects and a particularly thin society in other respects.
These are remarkably respectable ideals, especially for a conservative. (I'm used to just hearing them demand tax cuts and rail against gays.) Though he's a bit thin on details, so maybe he'd implement these ideals in a less agreeable fashion. Regardless, it's nice to hear a conservative talking about human well-being for once -- I was beginning to think it was an exclusively left-wing concern. It would be nice if these concerns would permeate the broader public discourse, focusing our attention on the crucial question of how to realise our shared values, i.e. of enabling humanity to lead flourishing lives. This is the challenge for politics, but it's so easily lost in the daily bustle and scandals of partisan politicking.
He also makes a nice point about how philosophy can be important for raising the level of political discourse:As I see it, the biggest single problem of democracy in Britain today is the level of political discourse rather than the substance of the positions taken... I don't think this is unique to philosophy, but I think that any serious immersion in a serious academic discipline leads people to learn habits of thought that tend to raise levels of discourse. Philosophy is perhaps particularly well adapted to that because it is about thinking about matters of great complexity. That's a particularly good thing for talking about politics in a dispassionate, rational, careful fashion, which helps. It doesn't get the whole way to any answer, but it helps.
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