Comments on Bernie Rollin, “The Future of Philosophy”

In Celebration of Jim Forrester’s Retirement

Ed Sherline

2 December 2005

In Bernie’s vigorous, rich and provocative paper, the point he makes that I’ve found to be the most personally challenging is the need for philosophers of the future to be bold, not tame (for better or worse I’m a tame philosopher): “some of philosophy needs to become serious applied ethics—not the intellectual ping-pong of ‘pure applied’ philosophers talking only to each other” (19). Reading between the lines, Rollin’s exhortation is in part a criticism of the typical personality that is drawn to philosophy, the Myers-Briggs INTJ--Introversion, Intuition, Thinking and Judging, the bookish retiring scholar. This personality type is not suited for doing serious applied ethics.

But the tension between serious applied ethics and philosophy runs deeper. Serious applied ethics is ‘serious’ in the sense that it aims at engaging the relevant audience and changing the world. I argue that good serious applied ethics is bad philosophy, and good philosophy is tame applied ethics. Why? A methodological goal central to the philosophical enterprise is achieving a complete theory at the highest-level of abstraction. This means that if you’re reflecting on a concrete case of applied ethics in your capacity as a philosopher, you quickly move to normative ethical principles, from there to foundations, and from there to metaethics. This is why, when good philosophers teach applied ethics, they typically start with metaethics, move to normative ethics, and only then to the cases of applied ethics that draw the students to the class in the first place. The course is a success from the standpoint of good philosophy (all theoretical levels have been covered in the proper order) and a disaster from the standpoint of serious applied ethics (it fails to impact the students). And the ideal of a complete high-level theory helps to explain why good philosophers doing applied ethics end up in intellectual ping pong matches with each other. Serious applied ethics requires what Cass Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, calls “incompletely theorized agreements” on low-level moral principles (see his Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict, Oxford). By utilizing incompletely theorized agreements, serious applied ethics stays at a lower level of theory so as to avoid philosophical conflicts at higher levels of abstraction, both to achieve and exploit consensus and to get on with the work of evaluating particular cases. But treating incompletely theorized agreements over low-level moral principles as the starting and limiting point of serious applied ethics is bad philosophy, because philosophy abhors the low-level, the concrete, and the incomplete.

That serious applied ethics is bad philosophy isn’t a logical truth. I’m not saying that it is impossible for the same person to do both well. I’m noting a tension between the demands made by two different audiences, the philosophical audience and the practical audience. Thus there is no impossibility in being both an excellent philosopher and doing serious applied ethics. Likewise, it isn’t impossible to combine, in one course, serious applied ethics and serious philosophy. It is an extremely difficult maneuver, requiring a careful use of the division of labor. For example, many of Peter Singer’s most accessible and notorious arguments rely on analogies that are grounded in incompletely theorized agreement. Nonetheless, he has, in other places, developed an account of the theory behind the agreement. So the division of labor might be between different writings with different goals. A complementary second division of labor might be between those periods in one’s research life, or in a course one is teaching, when doing serious applied ethics and when pursuing higher-level theoretical reflection. Or, the division might be at the institutional level, between those who work on higher-level realms and those who do the serious applied ethics.

However the division of labor is developed, philosophers who aim to be practically serious must have the confidence to overcome one of their most ingrained philosophical traits, that of following the inquiry into the highest-levels of abstraction. They must also be able to standing firm when recognizing the possibility that they will encounter the scorn and derision of their peers who work on higher-level theory, as sloppy, theoretically lightweight, popularizers and sell-outs.

At the heart of Bernie’s illustration of the value of philosophy is the following historical narrative (here’s my rough paraphrase):

Logical positivism, especially thanks to the great popularity of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Language, spawned three children that had a grip on the scientific and technological professions: the value neutrality of science, emotivism and logical behaviorism. These progeny made it easy to rationalize absolutely horrible moral practices towards non-human animals and people, especially children and minorities. In the late decades of the 20^th Century, various rights movements were taken up and advanced in the field applied ethics. As a result, the recognition that non-human animals, children and minorities have rights helped to check and dislodge these practices.

My initial question is: If this narrative is true, is philosophy really of value? After all, wasn’t it philosophy that articulated and popularized logical positivism and its implications, the theories used to rationalize the barbaric and cruel practices Bernie lists? If the value of future philosophy is checking the harmful impacts of past philosophy, then isn’t this one step backwards, one step forward, and we’re currently standing still?

Though I’m simplistic enough to be tempted by the conclusion that we should look for examples where philosophy has made a completely positive and unequivocal contribution to improving our world, that won’t do. Philosophy is too complex for that expectation—since even views that take a stand against cruelty and injustice have the potential to provide rationalization for cruelty and injustice--and philosophy is too integrated into our culture to be evaluated in such an isolated way. The important gist of Bernie’s historical narrative for the future of philosophy is that philosophy is a self-correcting enterprise. When the philosophical marketplace of ideas is operating freely and with robust dissent from different quarters, then the self-correcting mechanism is at its most powerful, and can have an impact on the larger culture. And Bernie’s narrative suggests that at least from the 1920’s until the appearance of a new breed of philosophers, the serious applied ethicist, this self-correcting mechanism was weak. The philosophical and biomedical community was in the grip of a view to the point where there was no robust criticism. The lesson I draw is that for the self-correcting mechanism to flourish, we must have philosophers willing to watch philosophy’s impact on its various audiences and able to step in and provide effective dissenting voices to those audiences, whether the audience is the academic philosopher, the scientist, the doctor or the veterinarian.

Finally, philosophy doesn’t deserve to take all the blame for the cruelty of the biomedical community that Bernie has fought so hard to stop. Consider the example of the horrible rite of passage of medical and veterinary students, bleeding a dog to death. The practice wasn’t to bleed a human patient to death. A line was in effect, between human and nonhuman animals. Likewise, in the case of withholding anesthesia from children, this practice was not extended to adults. A line was drawn between children and adults. And in the Tuskegee studies, a line was drawn between African Americans and White Americans. The point is that logical positivism and its progeny inherited these lines. Though it failed by not attacking them, it wasn’t their source. Thus the real problem was these preexisting lines of prejudice, not logical positivism and its progeny. Couple these lines of prejudice with other factors, such as sadism and the need to be a “real man,” and you have a cruel brew. Even if the self-correcting mechanisms within the philosophical community had been vibrant when logical positivism arose, the best we could have expected is broad and immediate debate about the merits of logical positivism/logical behaviorism/emotivism, and caution among non-philosophers in embracing it. This would have done nothing to eliminate prevalent sadistic practices and these deeply embedded lines of prejudice. Those needed direct confrontation by society at large. One question is whether philosophy was a leader or a follower in this direct confrontation. But in either case at least it was a participant.

Third Comment

Bernie finishes his talk by saying: “We are losing freedom of expression to two opposed trendy ideologies—left wing political correctness, which I think is more oppressive than McCarthyism, because it comes from within the academy, and right-wing Christian fundamentalism . . . . Philosophers should not, as they often do, pander to PC, but resist it vigorously” (20). He needs to be challenged on his claim that these two ideologies are equal in their threats to freedom of expression (I’ll leave it to you to think about the claim that left-wing PC is more oppressive than McCarthyism). Currently the threat to Constitutional rights and liberties is far greater from right-wing Christian fundamentalism than from left-wing PCers. But looking beyond the contemporary scene to underlying principles, these two ideologies challenge different facets of liberty. Right-wing Christian fundamentalism seems most intent on reanimating the liberty-limiting principle known as “legal moralism,” which says that a good reason to limit liberty is to enforce morality, as well as expanding the scope of those who can be harmed in the harm to others principle to include the human fetus. In contrast, left-wing PCers seem most intent on deploying the offense to others principle, which says that a good reason to limit liberty is to prevent offense to others. So Bernie might be correct that left-wing PC is a greater threat to freedom of expression than right-wing Christian fundamentalism, but that is because right-wing Christian Fundamentalism has a different agenda, and in the bigger picture the latter agenda is the greater threat to liberty.

Still, Bernie’s reminder that philosophers have an important role to play in protecting freedom of expression should not be lost. Bernie and I both distinguish between the familiar right to freedom of expression, and the correlative duty not merely to respect this right, but to promote it (within the limits of respecting the right itself). I’ll end by stressing that the duty to promote freedom of expression applies in our own hallways. It applies to philosophical expression and thought no less than to religious and political expression and thought. This is a point we need to keep in mind because we philosophers are quick to call rival views “Bullshit” and those who practice them third rate. When we attempt to shut down rival philosophical views at the expense of a fair hearing in the philosophical marketplace, then we violate this duty. When we use ridicule, the scoff, the ad hominum, the ad populum at the expense of philosophical engagement, we also sell freedom of philosophical expression short. Academic philosophers have at least two special reasons to promote freedom of expression. The first arises from our role as teachers, the second from our role as philosophers. A free and vibrant market-place of philosophical ideas treats our students as autonomous and is the most significant self-correcting mechanism of the philosophical community, the mechanism that must be in place to prevent any one philosophical view from getting a blinding grip on us. Though we might not have a duty to study or teach the stuff we disdain, we shouldn’t create a hostile atmosphere that discourages our students from figuring it out on their own.