Wolterstorff on "doing" philosophy

From Nicholas Wolsterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Note that I am providing this for interest and/or comments, not because I endorse it, though there is clearly, I think, something to it:

Seldom anymore does the analytic philosopher assume that he is obligated qua philosopher to ground rationally what he says in certitudes; analytic philosophy as a whole is on the way to becoming "Anselmian." ... The philosopher, approaching the practice of philosophy from his life in the everyday, finds himself believing many things, both large and small. Perhaps he finds himself believing in physicalism. He then regards the challenge facing him as a philosopher not to be that of discarding all those convictions unless he can rationally ground them in certitudes; the challenge facing him is that of working out the nature and implications of his physicalist convictions in various areas of thought, doing so in such a way as to cope not only with the complications in his own mind but with the objections lodged against this line of thought by others. In principle these objections might prove so powerful that he gives up his physicalism. In place of the old foundationalist picture, the picture of an academic enterprise now being taken for granted by philosophers in the analytic tradition is what I call dialogic pluralism. The academic enterprise is a dialogue among persons of different perspectives. The goal of the enterprise remains to achieve agreement.

First, let me just note that the continual use of masculine pronouns is unfortunate. But having noted it, I'll pass over it.

I'll have some more to say about Wolterstorff over the next couple of days, but let me repeat that the passage has some force. It's not as if the man's a fool. On the other hand, there's something disappointing about it, and also something unnecessarily conservative: I just "find" myself with certain beliefs (perhaps, as in Wolsterstorff's case, religious beliefs), so I try to do philosophy in a way that, in the first instance at least, tries to sort out the ramifications of those beliefs. So it seems to go. To Wolterstorff's credit, he thinks that objections to my starting beliefs may, in principle, lead me to revise them, but note that my aim is not to interrogate my starting beliefs sceptically or ruthlessly, or even with any vigour. Objections will occur to me, and I'll hear them from others in the philosophical enterprise, but my goal is to work out a view of the world based on whatever starting point I happen to have.

The admitted force of this approach is that foundationalist enterprises have been unsuccessful over the past four centuries, and there is little prospect of agreement on what the foundations even are or on how they could ever be established in the face of disagreement (after all, the things to be established include the methods by which we establish such things).

Nonetheless, I doubt that philosophy has yet become so tame, or that it should do so. Sure, we have to start somewhere, if only tacitly. For example, it's hard to see how we'd get anywhere unless we assumed that it is legitimate to apply logical rules such as modus ponens; that the senses are, if not exactly reliable, at least sufficiently useful and open to correction to help us investigate the world; that our memories are, once again, not totally reliable, but not so wildly in error as to be useless. We may not be able to state in any exhaustive and convincing way what rock-bottom assumptions we wish to use, and the quest for foundations of this kind may well be frustrating. It has been to date.

Still, it seems a bit much, when doing philosophy, simply to start with whatever ideas we have been socialised into accepting, even though they may be quite remote from anything that looks even like a reasonable candidate for being foundational. There is a difference between taking a fairly pragmatic approach to foundations and giving a free pass, in the first instance, to whatever you find yourself believing, however unreliable may be the process by which you came to the beliefs, and however shaky may be your grounds for justifying them.

As so often with such issues, there's much to say, but I don't think Wolsterstorff can simply help himself to a whole heap of religious doctrine - as he does - simply because he "finds himself" believing it.

This is, I suppose, why I'll always be a sceptic about religions, moral codes, and the like. They contain claims that  are truly remote from ordinary beliefs about physical reality or social reality, and I think that we should do philosophy with a consciousness that the onus is on us to establish them in ways that are generally acceptable to others - not to people who are gung-ho epistemological sceptics, but at least to people who don't find themselves with whatever religious and moral convictions we happen to have been socialised into. Some morality may be indispensable, of course, to avoid disaster ... but much of it may not be.

When we engage in philosophical reflection, we don't have to start with something as comprehensive as physicalism, just with ordinary knowledge of the physical and social worlds, some widely-accepted assumptions about such things as sense perception, memory, and logic, and some of the healthy scepticism that has provided the fuel for science. Poke around, see what you find if you bracket off your more specific system of disbelief ... if you have one. Maybe you'll be surprised.

I think that philosophy is still a much more penetrating and unsettling enterprise than Wolterstorff wants it to be, and from my viewpoint that's the good thing about it.

Thanks to all who sent me that review of 50 Voices of Disbelief

Youse are great!

I'd actually seen this review somewhere along the line - I think an advance copy was sent to Udo or to Wiley-Blackwell - but confirming that is still useful.

Sample:

Whether you are an atheist or not this volume contains a plurality of viewpoints and certainly stimulates all readers concerned by providing challenging discussions on a variety of vital issues such as the problem of evil (theodicy), the plurality of religious beliefs in the world and religious fanaticism, the bad influence of religion on the social life of human beings, the suffering and pain of all animals (and human beings) in the past and present, the supposed validity of the different rational proofs of God’s existence, and personal stories of why atheism is the only reasonable stance.

Good! Overall it's a positive review, though it's a little on the lukewarm side. The author seems to be a liberal-ish Christian who bemoans the fanaticism of religious fundamentalists and other extremists. He is unwilling to acknowledge the tendency for comprehensive apocalyptic worldwiews to press in the direction of totalitarianism and fanaticism unless this is positively opposed. He also offers what strikes me as a remarkably lame response to the Problem of Evil, which I'll quote in the interests of fairness:

First, it would undermine the autonomy of human the sense that they are absolved from preventing evil deeds themselves; secondly, it would promote laziness in people with regard to solving moral problems themselves and thereby human beings would be unable to develop important social and ethical virtues such as compassion, care etc.; and thirdly, such a world would obviously face the same difficult problems utilitarians have when they try to prevent evil (what is morally bad for one person is not necessarily morally bad for another person).

Leave aside the fact that the contributors anticipate and reply to most or all of these points.

Briefly, you don't get let off the hook for allowing suffering that it was in your power to prevent on the basis that preventing it would absolve someone else of the responsibility. Instead, you do whatever you can. That is not usually regarded as taking away the autonomy of others who are not stuck with the problem. On the contrary, it would usually be seen as manipulating other people if you deliberately refused to prevent suffering that is within your powers, deciding instead to offload the problem on those others. In controlled circumstances, it is okay to delegate a problem to subordinates, but an omnipotent being does not need subordinates. It can also be okay to give certain kinds of problems to students or trainees for educational purposes, but that is a controlled and justifiable interference with autonomy ... and it's not something you do if serious suffering is at stake should they foul up.

The business about the virtues is unconvincing. First, it gets things horribly back to front: virtues such as kindness are valuable because they are needed to counter suffering. Arguing that suffering is valuable because it brings about, among other things, the development of kindness is, frankly, not only illogical but also morally abhorrent.

In any event, an omnipotent God could give us all the neurology, etc., on which virtues such as kindness supervene, without having to put us through some sort of history of encountering actual suffering. We could be equipped, in our "programming", for the counterfactual possibility of suffering without it ever actually arising, and we could even be offered choices whether or not to bring it about (we'd freely decide not to, because that's what we'd be like).

Indeed, God himself, if he existed, would presumably be kind or compassionate whether any actual suffering existed or not - it's not something God had to learn. So the theological story itself considers kindness or compassion something that a being could possess with no particular history. It could simply be part of our nature, as created by God, just as it is part of God's nature.

All this is not to mention the millions of years of suffering that existed before any beings with the capacity to decide to oppose it ever existed. Why all that suffering, on such a vast scale and for so long, when it had no formative or educational value?

I don't know what utilitarianism has to do with the isue. The important point in the vicinity is that allowing intense and extensive suffering that you could have prevented is regarded as morally bad (to say the least) by ordinary human standards, and is certainly not a hallmark of benevolence. There may be a thought lurking here, somewhere, that our moral norms for each other should not be so demanding as to require that we seriously think or act like utilitarians, always trying to maximise global utility, given that, as individuals, we have interests of our own to pursue and it may not be reasonable to demand that we drop these or divert too many of our resources from pursuing them. There's much more to say about this, but, in short, human moral codes should (arguably) make some allowances so that they are not too burdensome for finite creatures. Or rather, they are developed for the needs of finite creatures and inevitably contain trade-offs.

But none of this applies to God: God is not a finite creature with limited resources and specific interests of the ordinary kind. He is supposed to be omnipotent, transcendent, and all-benevolent. It's not just that he works within certain relatively lenient deontic constraints that are (arguably) reasonable for finite creatures like us. His goodness, or at least his beneficence, goes far beyond that.

Like so many theodicies, the one under discussion shows two vitiating tendencies. First, it assumes that it's okay to assign God human limitations (rather covertly), wherever needed, thus failing to take his superlative abilities (particularly his omnipotence) seriously. At the same time, secondly, it allows him motivations that would be seen as monstrous if they appeared in finite beings like us. Thus, God is actually held to a more lenient moral standard than the rest of us.

Believe in such a God if you wish, but don't be surprised if others find this being appalling even if he exists. It's logically possible, of course, that we live in a world that is controlled by a God who is morally horrible by our ordinary standards. Fortunately, the motivation for believing in any God at all starts to dry up once you realise that no such being meets the warrants offered by theodicists.

All in all, it's a thoughtful review, but none its criticisms do much to shake the arguments in the book.

A new review of 50 Voices of Disbelief, but ...

Apparently there's a new review of the book in the journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (Vol 13, No. 4, 2010).

I don't have easy access to this, so if anyone wants to let me know the gist of what is said (here or in an email) I'll be grateful.

Press release re World Philosophy Day (from the University of Queensland)

Sounds like an interesting talk if any of you can attend.

====

WORLD PHILOSOPHY DAY - THURSDAY 18 NOVEMBER

World Philosophy Day is a day for people to share thoughts, and to openly explore and discuss ideas and inspire public debate or discussion on society's challenges.

The objective is to make philosophy accessible and to create opportunities for rational reflection, discussion and to foster independent and critical thought.

Established by UNESCO in 2002, it is an international event observed annually on the third Thursday of November to honor philosophical reflection around the world.

Associate Professor William Grey will deliver an oration at the University of Queensland at 12 noon to mark the occasion. The lecture will take place at the St Lucia campus in Steele (Building 3) Lecture Room 206.

Dr Grey will reflect on 'What does it mean to be a Philosopher?' The role of philosophy and philosophers in contemporary society will be explored.

The significant social issue that Dr Grey will address concerns the challenge of ensuring a sustainable future. Dr Grey will question whether corporate-sponsored disinformation about the consequences of treating the atmosphere as an open sewer constitutes a crime against humanity, and perhaps also a crime against nature.

Dr Grey will also ask whether the misery and injustice inflicted on tens of millions by the Catholic Church's socially, ecologically and ethically indefensible ban on contraception may also come to be seen by future generations as a crime against humanity.

Following the talk there will be refreshments, light snacks and opportunity for philosophical discussion.

COPY OF PRESS RELEASE (FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE) DATED: MONDAY 15 NOVEMBER 2010

CONTACT: William Grey Philosophy, HPRC
University of Queensland
QLD 4072 AUSTRALIA
tel: +61 (0)7 336 52099
fax: +61 (0)7 336 56266
/

Opinions and information in this press release shall be understood as neither given nor endorsed by the The University of Queensland.

Jack Donnelly disses collective rights

For all the talk of excessive individualism, the problem in the world today is not too many individual rights but that individual human rights are not sufficiently respected. States and societies have a variety of claims on individuals and modern states have awesome powers to bring individuals to their knees; if necessary, to break their minds as well as their bodies. Human rights, and particularly legal rights, are among the few resources of individuals in the face of the modern state. The balance is already (always?) tilted against the individual. The only likely result of advocating collective human rights ... is a further strengthening of the forces of repression.

Every day we see individuals crushed by society. Rarely, if ever, do we see society torn apart by the exercise of individual human rights. Social disorder and decay are usually associated with the violation of individual human rights by the state or some other organized segment of society. Human rights are a rare and valuable intellectual and moral resource in the struggle to right the balance between society (and the state) and the individual. Unless we preserve their distinctive character and stand firm on their character as individual rights, their positive role in the struggle for human dignity may be compromised.

Discuss.

I'm not actually big on the misleading (IMO) expression "human dignity", but it'll do as a place marker in this context. I think these paras from Jack Donnelly's book on human rights sum up something important.

"Eudaimonism has no room for compassion" - wtf?

Nicholas Wolterstorff claims, "No version of eudaimonism has room for compassion." This seems like madness.

Discuss.

No post today (spot the paradox)

There's more I want to say about science, scientism, the supernatural, rational inquiry, etc., the recent dominant themes of the blog. I'd like to bring it all together in one place, but have been spending time in the various threads rather than pulling it all together. Maybe I can get to that soon, especially since some of the reactions suggest that I need to spell out a bit more about the context of my thinking on these issues.

But this is it for today. I have Jenny getting home from the US tomorrow - yay! - should get to bed now, and have also been juggling some other things, so I guess I can look forward to a new batch of comments on the last two threads when I check in the morning.

A nice para from Harris

For the purposes of this discussion, I do not intend to make a hard distinction between "science" and other intellectual contexts in which we discuss "facts" - e.g. history. For instance, it is a fact that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Facts of this kind fall within the context of "science," broadly construed as our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality. Granted, one doesn't generally think of events like assassinations as "scientific" facts, but the murder of President Kennedy is as fully corroborated a fact as can be found anywhere, and it would betray a profoundly unscientific frame of mind to deny that it occurred. I think "science," therefore, should be considered a specialized branch of a larger effort to form true beliefs about events in our world.

So, there is science as "broadly construed", which is our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality, and there is science as "a specialized branch" of that effort. That seems fair enough to me.

We just need to be clear what we're talking about in a given context. E.g., if I ask a friend what she's studying at university, and she says "science", I'll assume with some confidence that she's referring to stuff she's doing in the science faculty - she's probably not, for example, majoring in French literature or in constitutional law. She's doing stuff that falls in the "specialized branch" that Harris refers to (and there's other perfectly good stuff she could be doing which doesn't fall there). In most contexts when we talk about science, this is what we have in mind, and there are historical, pedagogical, etc., reasons for that.

But science in the sense of the specialized branch isn't radically discontinuous from everything else. Though we can point to it as something specialized, we also have to acknowledge that there's no "hard distinction" between it and the rest of rational inquiry. Or as I'd put it, science (the specialised branch of inquiry) is continuous with other branches of rational inquiry.

I think that Harris is pretty much correct on these points. Doubtless y'all can think of some additional subtleties, but Harris seems to get things about right, at least in this quote.

Opinion piece (forthcoming) at The Drum

Just letting y'all know that I have an opinion piece coming up soon at the ABC site The Drum, in support of The Australian Book of Atheism. I'll let you know more when I know a bit more.

These things I know - or do I?

Here are some claims that I am inclined to think true, and that I'm inclined, even after reflection, to think that I have justification or warrant for. In one or two cases, though, there may be some doubt about what is actually meant, let alone whether the claim is really true. Let's have a look:

"Right now, as I type this, the sun is shining outside my window."

"Macbeth is the main character in Macbeth."

"In Macbeth, Macbeth murders Duncan."

"Macbeth is a tragic hero."

"Macbeth loves Lady Macbeth, at least at the start of Macbeth."

"As I type, the US and Australian dollars are roughly at parity."

"Human reproductive cloning is illegal in Australia."

"I had spaghetti for lunch yesterday."

"Cheetahs are beautiful animals."

"Medellín was once racked by political instability and guerilla warfare."

"Maxwell Perkins was a great editor with a superb (if not unerring) ear for literature."

I've stolen the last couple of these, with minor modifications for concision and to make sure I think they are true, from Jerry Coyne's blog.

The first point I want to make about all the above is that, if I actually know these things to be true, it's not through science. My claim isn't necessarily that they are science defeaters, as if scientists are helpless to find out these sorts of things. I simply say that it wasn't through any distinctively scientific process that I found out any of the above. Nor did I find out these things by asking someone who did use a distinctively scientific process (or who in turn ... etc.). These are all things of a kind that could have been found out long before the methods that are distinctive of science coalesced into the beginnings of the institution or practice that we now know as science. Of course, we couldn't have known that human reproductive cloning was illegal, back in those days, because without science such a thing would not even make sense as something to ban. But we could certainly have consulted statute books, lawyers, and so on about various matters of law.

Nor could I have found out that it is illegal by looking it up on the internet ... not without the technoscience that makes the internet possible. But if I just go and look on a site like AustLII I am not doing anything distinctively scientific. I'm just doing the equivalent of reading a statute book, which could have been done in medieval times.

Whether there are some things that are, in principle, always going to be science defeaters is another thing. I don't make that claim and I'm not sure how exactly it could be settled. But I do, for example, claim that it would be impractical and unnecessary to try to use any distinctively scientific activities to find out whether or not Macbeth really is the main character of Macbeth. Just read the text or go and watch a production, and you'll come to that conclusion. Or ask someone who is trustworthy on such things.

But be warned, once you start drawing conclusions about Macbeth that go beyond the least sophisticated ("Macbeth is the main character of Macbeth"), you may need quite a bit of education in the English of the time, in the historical context, in the literary forms that had existed up until then, and so on. It's possible to pick that up in various ways, but there's a lot to be said for actual guided and formalised study with teachers who know what they're talking about.

Some of the other claims I've made are trickier: e.g. is it really true that cheetahs are beautiful animals?

Well, they sure look it to me. But there's still a nagging question about whether cheetahs are really beautiful and what the claim even means. Does it just mean that they have (perhaps unspecified) characteristics that strike "us" (whoever "we" are in this context) in a certain "aesthetic" way - or what? Some people may believe that cheetahs possess a rather spooky property of strongly objective beauty such that any rational being in the universe somehow makes an error about reality if it fails to see a cheetah as beautiful. I doubt, though, that many of us really think anything like that, even if people in some culturally-closed societies (and perhaps not just them) have thought that way.

Note that science may be able to do a great deal to clarify how many people really see cheetahs as beautiful, what is going on at the level of the functioning of the brain, what it is about cheetahs that produces these responses, etc. I'm not at all claiming that science has nothing to say about the beauty of cheetahs, or, indeed, about any of the issues raised by the statements I listed above. Still, these are all things that are known to me, if they really do constitute knowledge, with nothing distinctively scientific being involved in the way I found out.

I keep talking about "distinctively scientific", because I am well aware that scientists are able to look outside and see whether the sun is shining or whether it's a cloudy day. Or they can use indirect methods of various kinds to infer, "The sun is currently shining in Newcastle, Australia." However, I don't rely on anything especially scientific; I just look out the window.

Obviously I am talking about "science" in a sense that is narrower than "rational inquiry" (I'm prepared to assume that looking out the window is, or can be, an example of rational inquiry). As usual, I can't give you a precise definition. I don't think that phenomena such as science lend themselves to sharp definitions; they are inherently fuzzy, as are many of our concepts. However, it is possible to have a fairly rich conception of science that definitely covers some things and not others. For example, if I simply read Macbeth I am definitely not doing science in the sense under discussion. If I'm trying to work out stuff about the play as I read it (Who is the main character? Could it be Macbeth?), I am engaging in a form of rational inquiry, but it's a humanistic form of rational inquiry, not a distinctively scientific form. On the other hand, it seems to me that these can merge into each other. For example, humanistic scholars are quite capable of using more distinctively scientific approaches on occasion - computerised word frequency analyses provide one example where a scientific instrument is being used by textual scholars to assist with humanistic research. And of course, scientists can read texts, watch plays, learn languages and so on. No one has a monopoly on any of this.

I object to the expression "other ways of knowing" because people who use it tend to countenance methods, such as divine revelation and mystical insight, that seem to me to be pretty damn dubious as ways of finding out stuff. But there are obviously many things I can do to find stuff out - e.g. I can just go and look, in some cases, or read a novel in others, or rely on my memory. Scientists rely on a mix of these things as does everyone else. But not everyone else puts so much emphasis on studying phenomena that are very small, very ancient, or very distant, or using theoretical propositions about these phenomena as causal explanations, and not everyone else relies so heavily on such things as mathematical models, controlled experiments and hypothetico-deductive reasoning, and scientific instruments.

I view science as a distinctive phenomenon that arose in a recognisable form around the start of the seventeenth century, though of course it had precursors. Seventeenth-century thinkers realised that they were confronted by something new and powerful, though they did not invent the word "scientist" (that came much later).

The thing about science is that it's continuous with rational inquiry more generally. We need a word for the phenomenon that I've sketched in the last couple of paras, and "science" is the word we've inherited. So I prefer not to use the word to mean simply "rational inquiry" and I think there's at least some fuzziness about, for instance, whether what we call political science is really best classified as science (usually, in fact, it isn't for pedagogical purposes). The main thing, however, is to make sure that we're consistent in any given context as to how we conceive of science and use the word "science". As so often, we'll create confusion if we use the word in two or more diffferent ways in the same discussion, or within the same argument.

Now, I don't accuse Jerry Coyne of doing that over here. He makes clear that he is using a broad conception of science while I am using a narrow one. It follows that we are not necessarily disagreeing with each other on anything.

But if we're not all careful to define our terms - or at least give some indication of how broad our concepts are - we run quickly into the possibility of confusion. Let's all tread carefully here. Oh, and it might be a good idea to apply the principle of charity and assume that our interlocutors are not saying weird or extreme things.