The Contribution of Philosophy

I'm curious to know how all of you would defend against the claim that philosophical work does not contribute to the improvement of society. The best defense I have come up with for (political) philosophy is the following:

Although the productiveness of philosophical work isn't necessarily quantifiable, it has no doubt made its impact in the drafting of legislation and constitutions. In fact, the founding documents of America were the products of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of philosophical debate about the rights of human beings, the role of the state, as well as the nature of the good life. Our Founding Fathers did not make up everything on their own. On the contrary, like all great intellectuals, they stood on the shoulders of giants who came before them. They reached into the knowledge bank of political philosophy and extracted what they thought valuable. And where previous work proved insufficient or inappropriate, they added their own contributions.

This is how I understand the nature of philosophy in academia. Each publication adds a letter to the alphabet soup of knowledge. The letter that is contributed could represent a variety of things; it could represent a solution to a specific problem, an incongruency in someone else's work, or even a grand theory of justice. It cannot be said beforehand what any one work will achieve in the near or distant future, but again, unquantifiability should not be confused with unproductivity. It is not until the alphabet soup has the correct letters that the necessary word can be formed in the future. Each political document that has touched upon the big questions discussed in philosophy is a word that consists of a specific arrangement of letters pulled from the alphabet soup. Which letters will be necessary to address a specific issue cannot be predicted. The only thing we can do is to increase the size of the soup so that when a problem does arise, we have the tools to deal with it.

Comments

[Patrick]

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”

John Maynard Keynes

[Marcus Arvan]

What Patrick said Keynes said. :)

[Kristina Meshelski]

Love the Keynes quote, and don't like the soup metaphor. One reason is that the founding fathers also reached into that alphabet soup of academic work for their scientific justifications of racism, so obviously just adding to the soup isn't necessarily a good thing. And if you think about the founding fathers in their capacity as colonial intruders into America, then imagining them reading Locke, with his passages about how the natives don't need the American land, makes philosophy seem positively sinister. I would say political philosophy can contribute good things to society, when it is good. But it can also be bad. Or both or neither. (And by the way I actually like Locke's political philosophy, but we can't pretend there aren't those parts!)

[Adam]

I'd like to think that philosophy does good for society not only by "producing knowledge" about ways to understand and address problems, but also by producing good people. That would be philosophy as a practice, rather than philosophy as knowledge about practices. But Kristina's qualification probably applies here as well.

[Marcus Arvan]

Adam: I'd like to think that too. What I'm not so sure of is whether we have any evidence to think that it is true. :)

[A. P. Taylor]

The meta-response: In order to know whether or not x harms or benefits society, one must first have principled understanding of what harms or benefits society, and such an understanding is the bailiwick of the philosophers. The is no empirical concept of a harm or benefit, such concepts are necessarily relative to a conception of the welfare of society, and any such conception will necessarily be non-empirical and thus not resolvable by empirical inquiry.

[Joe]

"philosophical work does not contribute to the improvement of society"

Anyone who makes this claim is just ignorant. Marx alone should stand as another definitive counterexample to add to the examples you give. For any given person in any Western country, it is extremely likely that they enjoy many benefits that have resulted directly from Marx's critique of pure capitalism. Some questions don't call for detailed answers, they call for an accusation of ignorance on the part of the questioner.