Teach Philosophy in Schools

For a better world

The world has a lot of problems. Billions of people live in poverty—hundreds of millions on less than 2 dollars a day. We subject tens of billions of farmed animals to horrendous conditions and then kill them every single year. Our political decisions are made in almost comically stupid ways. And we’re currently in the process of building AI that might kill everyone! Even if it doesn’t kill everyone, we’re pretty likely to squander nearly all future value, and we might all die in some other way.

Now, I don’t want to sound too gloomy. I think the future in expectation is very good. Probably things will end up good—vastly better than our current world, just as things have gotten better over time. But things are much worse than they might be, and that is in large part because of poor decisions we make as a species. As a species, we are cursed with muddled thinking, and it is the cause of our worst problems.

Take factory farming, as an example. Most people think it’s bad to be cruel to animals. The core intuitions that vegan arguments appeal to are widespread. But people’s brains malfunction in very strange ways when vegan arguments are presented, leading them to mutter something about lions, and continue gorging on the corpses of tortured animals.

The problem is confusion, not just apathy—it’s the fact that people are very mentally muddled on all sorts of important subjects. Practices that are so ghastly that everyone would support jailing someone who inflicted them on dogs are routine, and nearly everyone funds their continuation.

And the human race is getting more powerful. For most of history, we didn’t have the ability to radically upend the natural world and erect gigantic multi-story pig torture factories. When one gains immense power, being measured, careful, and thoughtful becomes more important. It is bad for an individual to be a fool, still worse for a mayor to be foolish, and worse than that for the president to be foolish. As the human race gets more powerful, the cost of our ethical folly will grow. Already, our ethical errors’ victims number in the trillions. Things could grow much more dire.

We might, for instance, create oodles of digital minds and neglect their interests almost entirely. Or we might not take much care to optimize for value and lose out on almost all future value. One of the most important causes of our time is improving our collective decision making so that we don’t make horrendous errors.

For this reason, I propose philosophy be taught in schools, ideally from kindergarten through high school. People should spend many years thinking in a rigorous and philosophical way about the world’s most pressing problems. People should be exposed to debates around God’s existence, which theory of morality is right, whether it’s alright to eat meat, and so on.

Thinking about philosophy has a unique way of dissolving confusion and wrongheaded thinking. It’s not, of course, the only way to do that, but it is an effective way. Even when philosophers are wrong, the quality of their thinking is much higher than that of non-philosophers. Michael Huemer put it well when describing the benefits of philosophy in Knowledge, Reality, and Value:

Second, studying philosophy helps you think better. Right now, you probably don’t know what I mean by that, and I can’t adequately explain it, but I will inadequately explain it presently. I can’t prove it to you either, since appreciating the point requires, well, studying philosophy for a few years. So I’ll just tell you my assessment based on my experience. I saw it happen to myself, and I have seen it happen to students over the years. I came to the subject, at the beginning of college, in a state of confusion, but I did not then comprehend how confused I was. I had some sort of thoughts about great philosophical questions, but these thoughts very often, as I now believe, simply made no sense. It was not that they were mistaken, say, because I was missing some important piece of information. It was that I did not even really know what I was thinking. I used words but did not really know what I meant by them. I confused importantly different concepts with each other. I applied concepts to things that they logically cannot apply to. I might seemingly endorse a philosophical thesis at one moment, and in the next endorse a related but incompatible thesis, without noticing any problem.

I was not, I stress, an unusually confused student; I am sure I was much less confused than the average college student. It just happens that virtually everyone starts out extremely confused. That is our natural state. It takes effort and practice to learn to think clearly. Not even to get the right answers, mind you, just to think clearly. To know precisely what your ideas are, and not be constantly conflating them with completely different ideas.

By the way, it is not just studying in general or being educated in general that is important. The point I’m making is specifically about philosophy, and about a particular style of philosophy at that (what we in the biz call “analytic philosophy”). When I talk to academics from other fields, I often find them confused. That is a very common experience among philosophers. To be clear, academics in other fields, obviously, know their subject much better than people outside their field know that subject. That is, they know the facts that have been discovered, and the methods used to discover them, which outsiders, including philosophers, do not. But they’re still confused when they think about big questions, including questions about the larger implications of the discoveries in their own fields. Whereas, when philosophers think about other fields, we tend to merely be ignorant, not confused

There is some empirical evidence for this thesis. Studying philosophy improves scores on verbal and logical reasoning tests. I don’t find this at all surprising. When I talk to someone about abstract topics—e.g. the case for giving to shrimp—almost all the people who are thinking sensibly about it have studied philosophy. And note: I’m not assuming that everyone who thinks sensibly has to agree with me.

Or take a topic like whether morality is objective. Almost every non-philosopher, when discussing the topic, says things that make no sense, and is totally blind to the fact that they’re talking nonsense. I recently talked to someone who studied psychology and claimed that her studies informed her that morality is subjective because societies classify different things as mental illnesses based on normative considerations. What? How does that mean that morality is subjective? Societies also take into account descriptive considerations when deciding what’s a mental illness, but those aren’t subjective. The same confusion is common on lots of other topics: abortion, meat-eating, Longtermism, and more.

I once had a philosopher say to me that Scott Alexander is the best non-philosopher at thinking. The funny part: Scott has a degree in philosophy. When I find people on the internet with unusual mental clarity, more than half the time they studied philosophy in undergrad! The people who think sensibly about philosophy—even who aren’t philosophers—tend to have studied some philosophy.

It isn’t just that philosophers are good at thinking about philosophy. They’re also clearer in their thinking on factual subjects. Philosophers may be wrong about politics, but they usually have a kind of humility that most people lack. If there was a virus that wiped out all and only non-philosophers, our politics would be a lot less divisive and a lot more sane. Most people, on political issues, don’t even consider counterarguments. Philosophers do.

Now, what kinds of philosophy should be taught in schools? I think we should provide people with a general overview of contemporary issues. Students should think about and debate ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. I’d like schools to cover the same sorts of things as are covered in an undergraduate philosophy course.

It isn’t as important to cover history of philosophy because, while history of philosophy can sometimes provide key insights, it doesn’t help erode unclear thinking in the ways other studying of philosophy does. Reading Plato, if anything, has a tendency to make people more confused, not less. What’s true of Plato is true broadly of the ancients. Similarly, we should not teach continental philosophy in schools for obvious reasons.

Philosophy also discusses important topics at a higher rate than other school subjects. In English classes, there’s lots of discussion of the important themes in various works of literature, but almost no discussion of the substance behind the themes. You’ll hear what Dostoevsky thinks about God, but not discuss whether God exists—or think about the arguments for and against his existence. A random philosophy class will most likely be about something that genuinely matters, in a way a random English or history class won’t.

Because philosophy gets people thinking clearly and seriously about important issues, it makes them likelier to do good things. Philosophy majors are likelier to be vegan and give their money to effective charities than non-philosophy majors. It is no surprise that the animal rights and effective altruism movements both grew out of philosophy.

In addition, philosophy captures the interests of young people in a way that other subjects don’t. My high school offered a philosophy class, and in it, the students were much more interested than they were in other subjects. They weren’t always interested, of course—students tend to dislike school—but they were way more engaged in class discussions when talking about philosophy than when talking about, say, Of Mice and Men.

One of the chief determinants of whether the world goes well—especially as we make increasingly consequential decisions—is whether the human species thinks through our decisions carefully. Studying philosophy is a good way of improving our ability to think rationally. For this reason, any intervention to expose students to philosophy in schools could be enormously impactful.