Most of my recent posts on this blog have been about transitioning to online teaching, the job-market and other issues in the profession. It has been quite a while since I have talked actual philosophy. This little series will try to do some of the latter, and I hope readers will find it an interesting change of pace (I don't know about you, but being stuck at home all day due to COVID-19 is getting pretty tiresome already!). In brief, my plan in the series to discuss some of the motivating ideas behind my two books, Rightness as Fairness: A Moral and Political Theory and Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality: A Philosophical Theory. My hope here is two-fold. First, I'll be very curious to hear what readers think of the motivating ideas, particularly once I make the history of the project and its intended future trajectory clearer. Second, my hope is that the discussion will help readers of both books better understand what I am really up to and why.
Both of my books argue that normative moral philosophy should be based (at least in the first instance) on (1) instrumental ('means-end') normative rationality and (2) empirical moral psychology. Both of these claims have been met with resistance, for fairly obvious reasons. First, there are many in moral philosophy today who think (following Kant) that moral reasons are fundamentally different in kind than prudential ones (moral reasons being categorically binding, prudential reasons not - though see this). Second, there are those (including TM Scanlon) who argue that empirical psychology can have nothing useful to say about normative matters, since (supposedly) the empirical and normative are fundamentally different kinds of phenomena. Readers may be a bit surprised to learn than when I began my first book, I was actually sympathetic with both of these positions. As you can see on my university's faculty webpage (which I really need to update!), Rightness as Fairness initially had a very different title, "Reconstructing the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals." Early iterations of the book (right up to three months before the final manuscript was due) had nothing to do with instrumental rationality or empirical moral psychology, but instead defended my normative moral theory--Rightness as Fairness--on classically Kantian constituvist grounds (viz. categorical moral reasons).
Why did the aim of the project change so fundamentally? It will take a few posts to lay out the full details, including why I hope to return to the Kantian side of the project in future work. But let me conclude this first post by giving some hints. One of my main intellectual concerns dating all the way back to my undergraduate days has been to avoid what I take to have been a very (epistemically and morally) problematic trend in intellectual history: the trend of engaging in purely armchair speculation about matters of practical importance. Let me explain.
When I was an undergraduate at Tufts in the late 90's, I was actually a double-major in philosophy and clinical psychology. I thought I wanted to be a philosopher, but I also had a longstanding interest in clinical psychology, as mental illness runs strongly in my family and has affected people very close to me. In fact, I gave serious thought to becoming a clinical psychologist, as I wanted to help people--and I worked for a couple of years in an outpatient clinic and then as an associate director of a group home. My undergraduate courses in clinical psychology, however, deeply disturbed me. I was taught things ranging from Freudian psychoanalysis, to humanism, to Jungian analytical psychology, and so on, including how to counsel or 'treat' patients using these theories methods. Unfortunately, when I actually read this stuff, I was astonished at how sure theorists in each areas seemed of their theoretical framework, how dismissive they were of rival theories, how systematically they gave post hoc explanations of new data (fitting whatever new data came in to their theoretical framework)...and how little hard data there were that actually supported any of their theories.
In fact, it was much worse than that. When I was growing up in the late 70's and the 80's, psychological counseling was really big business, particularly among the bourgeois classes. As this was before the explosion of health insurance and managed care, there were clinical psychologists all over the place with expensive private practices--and it seemed like every well-to-do person with money had a personal psychotherapist. Anyway, there I was at Tufts in the 90's, the only thing that I had ever seen actually help anyone I knew with mental illness was the relatively new science of pharmacology. I had literally seen people who never got better with psychotherapists take a new drug (e.g. Prozac) and watch their lives transform for the better literally overnight. Moreover, when I read the just-emerging empirical research on psychotherapy as an undergraduate, the data at the time (if I recall correctly) indicated that Freudian psychoanalysis, humanism, and Jungian treatment methods had literally no statistically significant positive effects on patients, and that the only things that actually worked were pharmacology and cognitive-behavioral therapy. I was so taken aback by this that I wrote a term paper for a psychology class arguing that the former treatment methods were unethical--and, if I recall correctly, my professor (who worked in the Freudian tradition) was none too happy with it.
At the very same time, my undergraduate mentor and eventual thesis advisor in philosophy was Dan Dennett. Dan, who as everyone knows approaches philosophy from a very empirical bent, was always going on about how problematic philosophy's standard methods are. Among other things, he had me read his paper, "Higher-order Truths About Chmess", the abstract of which reads:
Many projects in contemporary philosophy are artifactual puzzles of no abiding significance, but it is treacherously easy for graduate students to be lured into devoting their careers to them, so advice is proffered on how to avoid this trap.
Let me be clear: as much as I share some of Dan's general epistemic concerns (see below), I don't agree with him that 'many' projects in contemporary philosophy are artifactual puzzles. Although I do have some doubts about some types of projects, by and large I think that most philosophical projects are interesting and worth pursuing. What I do share with Dan is serious epistemic concerns about standard philosophical methodologies. During my undergrad days (and more recently when I've run into him), Dan always made the point that if philosophy is to have good epistemic credentials, it should move away from the armchair toward greater integration with the sciences--as the scientific method (he argued) is the only methodology humans have ever developed for investigating the world in an epistemically rigorous way.
Now, let me be clear again: I don't think armchair theorizing is to be avoided at all costs. Indeed, I don't think it can be avoided, I don't think it should be, and I've engaged in plenty of it myself, including in sections of my new book. Instead, what I agree with Dan is vital--and what I disagree with people like TM Scanlon, Derek Parfit, and many others over in moral philosophy specifically--is that I think philosophy should be as informed by empirical science as possible (viz. natural as opposed to analytic philosophy)
Here, in brief, is why. When I looked at purely speculative psychology (in the Freudian, Jungian, etc. traditions) during my undergrad days, it seemed to me not only epistemically irresponsible but morally irresponsible, in that it expounded poorly-founded doctrines, methods of treatment, and so on, that affected people's lives. Then, when I looked at intellectual history in general--at everything ranging from astrology to alchemy--it seemed to me that the same story repeated over and over again: people speculating purely from the armchair came up with theories that seemed plausible to them, but which science later showed had little to basis in reality--despite the fact that the theories they came up with affected people's lives in fairly serious ways (leading people to waste their time, money, and even their physical or mental health on things like tarot-card readers, bloodletting, barbaric 'cures' for diseases, etc.).
My worry then has always been that as fascinating as I personally found (and continue to find) various philosophical theories, philosophy based primarily or wholly on armchair speculation runs the same epistemic and moral risks. Consider the following passage of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy:
Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority…All definite knowledge—so I should contend—belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack on all sides; this No Man’s Land is philosophy. (p. xiii)
This has always seemed to me to be an admirably frank assessment of philosophy's epistemic credentials. Yet it did not put my epistemic or moral worries to ease. For what do we we do with prevailing methods, say in moral philosophy? We come up with all kinds of mutually incompatible theories, some of which seem plausible to some but profoundly implausible to others, and so on, without any kind of clear test (beyond the armchair beliefs of the authors and their readers) of which theories are actually likely to be true. For instance, in moral philosophy, some people are Kantians, other Aristotelians, others utilitarians, other feminist care ethicists, and so on. Yet, these philosophies, in one way or another (if only implicitly), affect people's lives. If you need any proof of that, consider how utilitarian calculations about Quality-of-Life-Years (QALYs) are already influencing how practitioners think about treating COVID-19, including in parts of Italy where practitioners have set a 65-year-old cutoff for treatment of people with co-morbidities. Or consider Nozickean libertarianism, which Nozick broadly bases on Kant's humanity formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Some people believe this view, and their beliefs presumably affect their political behavior--as do the beliefs of people who subscribe to Marxism, Rawlsianism, feminism, critical race theory, and so on.
Moral and political philosophy matter. They affect people's lives, especially as ideas popular in the academy filter (as they clearly do) in broader discourse. Yet, the way we do moral and political philosophy--primarily from the armchair--has long seemed to me to be dangerous, both epistemically and morally, in much the same ways that purely-armchair psychology was (and is). For example, when I teach a moral philosophy class, one common worry students raise (indeed, one raised it in class just this semester!) is, "Why do we learn about all of these theories if we don't know which, if any, of them is actually true?" I always struggle to give my students a good answer to this question. I usually give them the kinds of responses I've heard other philosophers give. Which are?
On the one hand, I've heard some philosophers say that they have a fairly good idea of which theories are better than which (e.g. some people are pretty confident Kantians, or Aristotelians, etc.). One problem, though, or so the philpapers survey indicates, is that philosophers are fairly evenly split between different theories:
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?
| Other | 301 / 931 (32.3%) |
| Accept or lean toward: deontology | 241 / 931 (25.9%) |
| Accept or lean toward: consequentialism | 220 / 931 (23.6%) |
| Accept or lean toward: virtue ethics | 169 / 931 (18.2%) |
Second, given these kinds of wide-splits--which are the norm within specialties (such as moral philosophy, philosophy of mind, etc.)--it is hard to see why this shouldn't make us skeptical about the truth-aptness of our methods.
On the other hand, I've then heard others say that, in their view, philosophy isn't about arriving at true theories, but instead about something like 'a deeper understanding of the issues' (viz. what is to be said for and against this or that theory or other). Part of me is a little sympathetic with both of these perspectives. Maybe speculation is what makes philosophy philosophy, and maybe 'better understanding' is the best we can do or expect. Still, given my epistemic and moral concerns about developing theories that can affect people's lives (viz. how they treat others), I've always wanted philosophy to do better: to come up with better methods for discriminating between what really is true (philosophically speaking) from what some group of philosophers might think to be true (or plausible) but nevertheless be profoundly wrong about. In this regard, my methodological concerns are not unlike those of Descartes in the Meditations. Descartes was, as I'm sure we all know, concerned with how uncertain commonsense beliefs are, and so he tried to come up with a new method--the method Cartesian doubt and 'clear and distinct' apprehension--that he thought solved these problems. But, of course, Descartes' method is problematic, as it seems is another more recent attempt to give philosopher firmer epistemic foundations: logical positivism (AKA logical empiricism).
Anyway, to make a long story short, because of the epistemic and moral concerns described above (which I detail further in Chapter 1 here), I've long thought philosophy should aim to do better than its prevailing methods. But how? My own first attempt to do better was my original book manuscript "Reconstructing the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals." In my next post in this series, I'll explain the methodology I pursued there, along with how I was eventually persuaded to abandon it (well, sort of, at least temporarily) in favor of a different methodology: the actual methodology I've pursued thus far in my two books. Whether that's the right methodology, of course, is a different story--but in a couple of posts from now, I'll explain it at some length and look forward to hearing what you all think!
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