More broadly I wonder what Bentham's Bulldog makes of a meta-observation, which is that super smart philosophers make extremely compelling arguments on both sides of every controversial issue. If I'm a not-so-good reasoner, I can look at that and throw my hands up and give up on the whole enterprise, instead opting for my basic intuitions, which I can be sure some philosopher will take up and defend more than adequately. I'm sure there is some brilliant philosopher somewhere who has a very compelling argument against shrimp welfare, even if most of the people replying to the recent essay on that topic didn't offer any such arguments.
Paul, I think you're onto something that needs to be discussed more in general. For the first time in human history, we're all constantly bombarded with intelligent arguments on both sides of a million arguments, and it can easily make even reasonable people despair. In that context, it takes such time and attention to be confident enough in your view to hold it even when you know lots of geniuses hold the opposite view.
That resonates with the case made by some Ivy law school that lawyers can usually make a pretty good case for either side of many questions. Seems adjacent.
Agreed. I think the explanation lies in the article itself. BB is actually only referring to analytic philosophy and dismissing the continental tradition entirely. What we need to realize is that a layman will take that very statement and use it to dismiss philosophy itself because “they don’t even agree with each other”. Most people don’t even know what’s the difference between the two traditions.
It’s a self-defeating loop because, to convince him he’s wrong, you have to get him to spend time analyzing philosophy which he already doesn’t want to do.
Most people have other worries (like providing for their families). So, if a field seems devoid of consensus and also does not produce clear material gains- like say, Physics- then it seems difficult to convince someone to spend time studying it.
1) As a decent chess player I like the chess analogy. I can only confirm what your friend said: when calculating/evaluating a position I am constantly thinking about things that sub 2000 players wouldn't even consider
2) I know you are not a fan of history of philosophy, but this all shows how right Plato was when he came up with the allegory of the cave thousands of years ago
There might be arguments, however, there is but one truly serious philosophical problem :D
I do have a question, though. Wouldn't every argument rely on some ultimately unfalsifiable axiom? For instance, you could make an argument regarding the personhood of a fetus, but that's still relying on someone's ability to place importance on the same metrics that you would, no?
If I bring up sentience, and someone's argument is that personhood doesn't matter, and that they subscribe to the violinist analogy, my axiom's not bound to convince them. They might even bite all the bullets that the bodily autonomy argument grants them (ie no compulsory vaccination), so I do wonder if there aren't limits to persuasion through philosophy...
“Unfalsifiable” isn’t the right word, though. Foundational premises aren’t indefeasible premises. You can find defeatists for foundational premises. This is a common mistake even among philosophers.
Would it be possible to prove / argue that a foundational premise is objectively false, though? I *am* curious about the reflective equilibrium aspect you mentioned; even finding the most plausible ethical principles would entail some existing commonalities with those you otherwise disagree with, no?
Sure - though it depends on what you mean by “foundational” and “prove.” Some premises are foundational although they in fact aren’t the correct foundational premises. E.g. an epistemic reliabilist holds to a foundationalist theory of justification, but if phenomenal conservatism is true, their theory is false and if they see a good defeater for their theory they’ll adopt that other foundationalist theory of justification.
In theory, one could have a crazy implausible view of foundational justification like “A proposition is justified if and only if the proposition contains the word ‘unicorn.’” Of course one could have a defeater for that foundational premise.
One could also have defeaters for *correct* foundational theories of justification. If phenomenal conservatism is true yet someone gives you what seems to be a good and sufficient argument against it, then you’d have a defeater for the correct foundational premise. If by proof you mean certainty, then you’re probably barking up the wrong tree - just the facts of peer disagreement for example should reduce certainty in most scenarios.
The point of disagreement surrounding foundational principles is still to find common ground to find what foundational premises are correct. For example, for a phenomenal conservative like me trying to convince a Unicornist that phenomenal conservatism is true, I’d present a thought experiment that phenomenal conservatism handles better than unicornism in the hopes of convincing them. E.g. the proposition “there appears to be an electronic device with a screen in front of me” appears true regardless of the lack of the word “unicorn” in that proposition.
If they disagree still (and for some reason we know that they *genuinely* disagree and aren’t just trolling), then we can just appeal to majority opinion of how implausible his view is. But ultimately practical matters of disagreement are (somewhat) beside the point. You’ll *always* find someone to disagree with a proposition (no matter how plausible). That doesn’t mean they’re right or that everything is subjective.
I think I follow your point when it comes to epistemology or metaphysics, but for ethics, I'll have to mull over that a bit more.
I'm still sympathetic to non-cognitivism (I wrote my sophomoric Musings a few months ago), and so it's likely more difficult for me to see it the same way. Will be sure to check out Huemer!
Also, similar principles hold for ethics and metaethics. When I disagree with a non-cognitivist, I present them the Frege-Geach problem and address any potential responses. For utilitarians I do the same with the organ harvesting thought experiment.
For ethics, I’m pretty sure he addresses non-cognitivism in Understanding Knowledge. If not, Knowledge, Reality, and Value, should address it. Ethical Intuitionism definitely addresses it, though it’s more aimed at academics and likely costs more. It’s definitely the most detailed about it, though.
There’s foundational propositions, yes, including of ethical propositions. The point is to do what Rawls called “reflective equilibrium” to find the most plausible foundational ethical principles and then find common ground with others to change minds and resolve disagreements. (Or something like that)
Any argument is going to rely on axioms, you just have to figure out which ones you agree on first. That establishes the arena in which the discussion can take place. If you’re both relying on different axioms that are nonnegotiable and fundamental to your worldview, there isn’t really a point. It’d be like one of you is playing baseball while the other is playing golf and you’re arguing about who has the better score.
I think it is driving me crazy. Maybe I should have become a math teacher instead of being interested in philosophy. At least I would not deal with people believing that their ignorance is worth just as much as my knowledge.
I think this continental-vs.-analytic mindset is probably way too simplistic.
1) A significant amount of contemporary literature on continental figures and engaging with continental ideas is broached in a broadly analytic style, with an emphasis on clarity and clear argumentation.
2) A number of the foundational figures of analytic philosophy (ex. Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein) write in broadly similar ways to philosophers commonly associated with the continental tradition. Husserl, someone who is credited with the split of analytic and coninental philosophy, is, for instance in direct conversation with Frege and writes in comparable ways, with a significant amount of shared vocabulary and ideas.
3) The fact that people like Richard Rorty exist prove that there's more overlap than you let on here. I don't dispute the fact that a lot of continental philosophy is poorly written, nor even that some of it is bordering on nonsense (I think of Deleuze), but this does not mean that there is not genuinely philosophical insight contained in some of it. I think if you're really going to claim something like that continental philosophy is nonsense, you will have to account for analytic thinkers who do take those thinkers seriously - Rorty (Heidegger), Brandom (Hegel), Leiter (Nietzsche), Dreyfus (Heidegger). Are they just totally confused or stupid?
4) This view relies on a way too rigid distinction between the two and unfairly "homogenizes" the philosophers within the traditions. Husserl and Derrida are as different as Dennett and Chalmers. If I read Dennett and then declare, "Analytic philosophy sux!" it seems to be the case that I have an incomplete picture of analytic philosophy.
Part of what makes it hard for continentals to read analytics and analytics to read continentals is a difference in vocabulary and basic conceptual familiarity. The basic terms for shared ideas are not mutually understood. Analytics do not understand what an eidetic reduction is, continentals don't always understand the syntax or semantics of modal logic. Yet, analytics constantly do "eidetic reductions" in some sense (ex. by isolating the necessary and sufficient conditions of some thing x to count as x), and continentals make cogent modal arguments all the time (even if it is not as symbolically clear as the work of a philosopher trained in Kripkean modal logic). There have been relatively successful papers that find meaningful overlap between continental epistemologies (a la Husserl) and analytic epistemologies (a la Huemer's PC). So, is it that continentals are just totally wrong, rife with nonsense, or is it that you haven't devoted any significant time studying them? To learning their vocabulary and basic theoretical orientations?
As someone who is trained in both analytic and continental philosophy, it's frustrating to see continentals with a naive view of analytics, just as it is frustrating to see analytics have a naive view of continentals. Quite simply, there are good and bad philosophers. It could be the case that there are a greater proportion of "bad" philosophers in continental philosophy, something which would actually require an engagement with the literature beyond just a passing glance, but this would not mean that the entire field is condemned to mediocrity or uselessness. But I highly doubt your conclusion is actually formed in this way, nor the conclusions of a number of other analytic philosophers. This strikes me as a kind of arrogant philosophical laziness.
These are all very good points, CD! In fact trusting that everything labeled 'Continental' philosophy shares some essence, and can be subjected to the same broad brush actually shows a lack of the conceptual sophistication analytic philosophy is supposed to produce. That said, there is much in the French or French-inspired philosophy, especially when treated as proven truth in all sorts of critical studies, that I am very wary of. I learnt a lot about how thinkers contradict themselves, and how to detect this, from Derrida. And I for instance find it provocative how he'll discuss the giving of gifts, and forgiving, while returning to the refrain 'IF it exists'. But so many things count against him: his dismissal, and probably ignorance of science; his overproduction of texts, as if one can think and write carefully at such speed; his never admitting that he was wrong in the past; his ascription of all sorts of things to Western metaphysics, without any attempt to show that they are absent or less in evidence in non-Western thought; the sheer amount of work that most of his texts require from the reader; his calling his thought 'deconstruction' and then in interviews ascribing every possible virtue to this fuzzy thing called 'deconstruction', and denying that it has any vices. I think that the belief in philosophy's independence of science, and ability to pass judgement over science (in Derrida''s case, as being situated 'within' Western metaphysics, and thus suffering from the fatal flaws W.m. has according to his analysis) is a common, and rather fatal, flaw in much 'Continental' philosophy. How can one not take as one of your central points of intellectual orientation the astonishing success of physics, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, etc.? Oh, the gymnastics of Newton, Einstein, Darwin, - how boring. Now, if you want to see some REALLY astonishing, jaw-dropping gymnastics, look to Heidegger, or Deleuze, or ... In opposition to 'Continental' philosophy, I am more drawn to naturalistic philosophy à la Dennett, than to analytic philosophy tout court.
i recommend wittgenstein if you haven’t read him. u could start with the “tractatus” cuz u seem to have more than a bent towards analytic but pls put the later “philosophical investigations” on your list. if you need credentials, logic daddy bertrand russell himself admitted to wittgenstein’s supercession of his work. cuz anyway, wittgenstein can communicate my problems with this piece better than i can in a comments section.
I agree with everything you wrote about the use of hypotheticals and would love it if people were better philosophers in general. I am also a vegan who paid reparations to the shrimp after reading your article, although I am much more inclined to longtermism.
However, I think smart people can become proficient in the skills you are referring to in less than a year, and without any training in philosophy. E.g., my impression is that the average LessWrong user of my acquaintance is at least as philosophically competent as you, in part because you frequently advance views that are literally unintelligible. E.g., https://youtu.be/qtsngogGKuo?t=422.
I also think at least smart people who put in the time are quite right to distrust the concept of philosophical expertise, in part because "philosophical" problems tend to be problems about which there has been persistent disagreement among apparently rational people for millennia, and about which there is no agreement today.
<<Another good indicator is if your ideas are fringe among philosophers. If when you present them to philosophers, the philosophers always find them clearly wrong, you should begin to grow suspicious. >>
If only it were that easy. There is wide inter-subjective disagreement amongst experts in all debates in philosophy.
For instance, there are still people who claim to be good at philosophy and profess a belief in a god - a fringe view in modern analytical philosophy by any standard.
Also people who are invested in professional philosophy will often claim that there are objective errors and progressive in philosophy but then profess their own views as the result of such progress.
Richard Chappell once cited his wife's papers as proving some sort of mistake - akin to Kant's criticism of St. Anselm's ontological argument. When I pointed out how self-serving this was, he blocked me from his blog.
You wrote "The overwhelming majority of people think that meat eating is permissible on the grounds that what one eats is a personal choice. Yet one can only sustain this assumption if they think that there can’t be arguments for the wrongness of eating certain things ..."
I'm not convinced of that. My guess is that for a *fair number* of people, they think that there are arguments on both sides, the arguments aren't anywhere near conclusive, so when it comes to figuring out what to do, the method of following arguments is pretty hopeless. So, we might as well just go with our personal choice.
No, that's not true of everyone. But I've taught a lot of students who come to think, very quickly, that arguments aren't really that strong in ethics, unlike in science, and so we can't rely on them.
I'm not saying they are right to think this. All I'm saying is that this captures some people's reactions to philosophical arguments in ethics.
I saw a survey saying nearly everyone agrees that whether to eat meat is a personal choice.
I don't think many people seriously think about the arguments before and against veganism and conclude they're both substantial. Many people don't think about the subjects for more than 2 seconds, and if they do, their analysis will reduce to some braindead and banal platitude like "lions eat meat."
I half agree with you. The vast majority of people don't "seriously think" about the pro and con arguments at all. Instead, they know, from their past education or from what they've simply been told, that ethical arguments almost always suck.
And sure, people will offer platitudes when challenged. But that hardly means that the platitude is what convinced them in the first place.
Again, I agree that there are plenty of braindead attitudes towards ethical issues. But there are plenty of "ethical arguments suck in general, so screw it" attitudes as well.
Once some makes an ethical argument they've deployed social capital. They are not incentivised to weaken that by a rethinking. Most people aren't convinced that philosophers like anyone else don't have feet of clay. The idea that philosophers think philosophers deserve special social standing goes back to Plato.
I also don't think the overwhelming majority of people think meat eating is permissible because it is a personal choice. They don't think you could make a personal choice to eat human flesh, for instance. Many people wouldn't even think you could make an acceptable personal choice to eat dogs.
>When I posted my article about the importance of shrimp welfare, lots of people triumphantly declared that they simply didn’t care about shrimp. They seemed to think that simply reiterating that you don’t value X ends a moral debate about whether to value X. This is a bit like thinking that repeating “I like Trump,” is a convincing response to an argument against Trump. They couldn’t seem to conceive of what it would be to argue that one should value X even if they don’t actually.<
Skimming back through the shrimp article, it looks to me like you indeed did not give any real argument for why shrimp matter. The closest I found was this passage:
>A final objection claims that shrimp welfare doesn’t matter. I think so long as shrimp can suffer, their suffering matters. Think about what it’s like to be in extreme pain—the sort of pain that characterizes suffocating or drowning. That’s a bad thing! What makes it bad isn’t our species or the fact that we’re smart but instead what the pain feels like.<
The closest this comes to an argument that shrimp matter is "so long as shrimp can suffer, their suffering matters," which doesn't address the objection in the first sentence at all ("shrimp welfare doesn't matter"). Implicit in the objection is that suffering doesn't matter to the person so long as it is happening to shrimp, so responding by re-stating your implicit belief that "all suffering matters" is a total non-response. It's just you repeating the point that the objection was originally made against.
With most issues you don't really have this problem because most things we talk about are specific to humans and no one (well, almost no one) would take the position that human welfare simply doesn't matter to them at all. But when you venture into the realm of animal welfare "I don't care about X species at all" becomes a much more serious hurdle to deal with. We can see that in the passage I quoted, you had to immediately fall back to making emotional appeals ("think about how much X hurts"), because there aren't really any good logical arguments against this sort of difference in first principles.
This is not to say that I think helping shrimp is bad personally, mind you. Out of all the random causes people devote their time and energy too, stunning shrimp is probably one of the more sensible ones. The analysis in this article just seems really wrong to me.
You just can't read! I didn't assert that shrimp suffering mattered, I gave reasons to think that it's not very unintuitive that it does, that the best account of the badness of suffering (it's bad because it hurts) would hold that it matters, and made the argument from marginal cases.
None of that responds to the objection that the person doesn't care about shrimp. Again, you appear to be just repeating yourself instead of introducing novel arguments. This is like saying to someone that they should donate to a charity for starving kids in Africa, the person responding that it's not their problem, and then you responding to that with "but think about how much it hurts to be starving!" Yeah no shit, obviously the guy knew that already when he responded to you.
The shrimp welfare objection seems to turn on whether flat-footed arguments are good arguments. Philosophers don't like flat-footed responses because they don't engage with the argument that they're meant to be responding to. Rather, flat-footed arguments trivialise the whole debate. Responding to an argument that, e.g. people who endorse temporal parts should be stage theorists, with "Ah, but temporal parts don't exist" is just a refusal to engage with the content.
You could present a paper on a very unpopular view, like moral or linguistic relativism, that argued moral/linguistic relativists entails P and P is correct. It would be unsophisticated and uninteresting to respond with "Ah, yes, but moral/linguistic relativism is false so I don't need to consider whether P". Of course it's a bit different here because you'd still be entitled to think this is a bad research program (why write papers assuming the truth of such a discredited view?), but a flat-footed response in a Q&A would be weird.
> BB wrote: "many people think that ethics is subjective [and is] beyond rational thought
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done studies showing that when people need to make a moral choice, they do so mainly through quick, intuitive emotional responses rather than careful reasoning. The rational reasoning comes later. The intuitions are primary and largely automatic. The moral reasoning that follows is more like lawyers defending a client than judges seeking truth.
First of all, I don't think relying on quick intuitions is irrational. Second, the fact that many people reason about a domain irrationally and based on emotions doesn't tell us whether it's objective. And the dual process literature seems to show that consequentialist intuitions are mostly not the result of automatic intuitive reactions.
Curious to connect this perspective with David Chapman's recent writings on the badness of philosophy, e.g. here (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/philosophy-doesnt-work).
More broadly I wonder what Bentham's Bulldog makes of a meta-observation, which is that super smart philosophers make extremely compelling arguments on both sides of every controversial issue. If I'm a not-so-good reasoner, I can look at that and throw my hands up and give up on the whole enterprise, instead opting for my basic intuitions, which I can be sure some philosopher will take up and defend more than adequately. I'm sure there is some brilliant philosopher somewhere who has a very compelling argument against shrimp welfare, even if most of the people replying to the recent essay on that topic didn't offer any such arguments.
Paul, I think you're onto something that needs to be discussed more in general. For the first time in human history, we're all constantly bombarded with intelligent arguments on both sides of a million arguments, and it can easily make even reasonable people despair. In that context, it takes such time and attention to be confident enough in your view to hold it even when you know lots of geniuses hold the opposite view.
wouldn't that also apply to itself?
That resonates with the case made by some Ivy law school that lawyers can usually make a pretty good case for either side of many questions. Seems adjacent.
Agreed. I think the explanation lies in the article itself. BB is actually only referring to analytic philosophy and dismissing the continental tradition entirely. What we need to realize is that a layman will take that very statement and use it to dismiss philosophy itself because “they don’t even agree with each other”. Most people don’t even know what’s the difference between the two traditions.
It’s a self-defeating loop because, to convince him he’s wrong, you have to get him to spend time analyzing philosophy which he already doesn’t want to do.
Most people have other worries (like providing for their families). So, if a field seems devoid of consensus and also does not produce clear material gains- like say, Physics- then it seems difficult to convince someone to spend time studying it.
1) As a decent chess player I like the chess analogy. I can only confirm what your friend said: when calculating/evaluating a position I am constantly thinking about things that sub 2000 players wouldn't even consider
2) I know you are not a fan of history of philosophy, but this all shows how right Plato was when he came up with the allegory of the cave thousands of years ago
What's your elo?
slightly above 2200 lichess, so probably something like 2000 FIDE
As a philosophy major I love this
There might be arguments, however, there is but one truly serious philosophical problem :D
I do have a question, though. Wouldn't every argument rely on some ultimately unfalsifiable axiom? For instance, you could make an argument regarding the personhood of a fetus, but that's still relying on someone's ability to place importance on the same metrics that you would, no?
If I bring up sentience, and someone's argument is that personhood doesn't matter, and that they subscribe to the violinist analogy, my axiom's not bound to convince them. They might even bite all the bullets that the bodily autonomy argument grants them (ie no compulsory vaccination), so I do wonder if there aren't limits to persuasion through philosophy...
“Unfalsifiable” isn’t the right word, though. Foundational premises aren’t indefeasible premises. You can find defeatists for foundational premises. This is a common mistake even among philosophers.
*find defeaters
Would it be possible to prove / argue that a foundational premise is objectively false, though? I *am* curious about the reflective equilibrium aspect you mentioned; even finding the most plausible ethical principles would entail some existing commonalities with those you otherwise disagree with, no?
For more on questions like this, read “Understanding Knowledge” by Michael Huemer.
Sure - though it depends on what you mean by “foundational” and “prove.” Some premises are foundational although they in fact aren’t the correct foundational premises. E.g. an epistemic reliabilist holds to a foundationalist theory of justification, but if phenomenal conservatism is true, their theory is false and if they see a good defeater for their theory they’ll adopt that other foundationalist theory of justification.
In theory, one could have a crazy implausible view of foundational justification like “A proposition is justified if and only if the proposition contains the word ‘unicorn.’” Of course one could have a defeater for that foundational premise.
One could also have defeaters for *correct* foundational theories of justification. If phenomenal conservatism is true yet someone gives you what seems to be a good and sufficient argument against it, then you’d have a defeater for the correct foundational premise. If by proof you mean certainty, then you’re probably barking up the wrong tree - just the facts of peer disagreement for example should reduce certainty in most scenarios.
The point of disagreement surrounding foundational principles is still to find common ground to find what foundational premises are correct. For example, for a phenomenal conservative like me trying to convince a Unicornist that phenomenal conservatism is true, I’d present a thought experiment that phenomenal conservatism handles better than unicornism in the hopes of convincing them. E.g. the proposition “there appears to be an electronic device with a screen in front of me” appears true regardless of the lack of the word “unicorn” in that proposition.
If they disagree still (and for some reason we know that they *genuinely* disagree and aren’t just trolling), then we can just appeal to majority opinion of how implausible his view is. But ultimately practical matters of disagreement are (somewhat) beside the point. You’ll *always* find someone to disagree with a proposition (no matter how plausible). That doesn’t mean they’re right or that everything is subjective.
I think I follow your point when it comes to epistemology or metaphysics, but for ethics, I'll have to mull over that a bit more.
I'm still sympathetic to non-cognitivism (I wrote my sophomoric Musings a few months ago), and so it's likely more difficult for me to see it the same way. Will be sure to check out Huemer!
Also, similar principles hold for ethics and metaethics. When I disagree with a non-cognitivist, I present them the Frege-Geach problem and address any potential responses. For utilitarians I do the same with the organ harvesting thought experiment.
For ethics, I’m pretty sure he addresses non-cognitivism in Understanding Knowledge. If not, Knowledge, Reality, and Value, should address it. Ethical Intuitionism definitely addresses it, though it’s more aimed at academics and likely costs more. It’s definitely the most detailed about it, though.
There’s foundational propositions, yes, including of ethical propositions. The point is to do what Rawls called “reflective equilibrium” to find the most plausible foundational ethical principles and then find common ground with others to change minds and resolve disagreements. (Or something like that)
Any argument is going to rely on axioms, you just have to figure out which ones you agree on first. That establishes the arena in which the discussion can take place. If you’re both relying on different axioms that are nonnegotiable and fundamental to your worldview, there isn’t really a point. It’d be like one of you is playing baseball while the other is playing golf and you’re arguing about who has the better score.
"If you’re both relying on different axioms that are nonnegotiable and fundamental to your worldview, there isn’t really a point."
This is what I was getting at! :D
I relate a lot to this post.
I want to ask you: how do you deal with it?
I think it is driving me crazy. Maybe I should have become a math teacher instead of being interested in philosophy. At least I would not deal with people believing that their ignorance is worth just as much as my knowledge.
Drives me a bit crazy too.
I think this continental-vs.-analytic mindset is probably way too simplistic.
1) A significant amount of contemporary literature on continental figures and engaging with continental ideas is broached in a broadly analytic style, with an emphasis on clarity and clear argumentation.
2) A number of the foundational figures of analytic philosophy (ex. Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein) write in broadly similar ways to philosophers commonly associated with the continental tradition. Husserl, someone who is credited with the split of analytic and coninental philosophy, is, for instance in direct conversation with Frege and writes in comparable ways, with a significant amount of shared vocabulary and ideas.
3) The fact that people like Richard Rorty exist prove that there's more overlap than you let on here. I don't dispute the fact that a lot of continental philosophy is poorly written, nor even that some of it is bordering on nonsense (I think of Deleuze), but this does not mean that there is not genuinely philosophical insight contained in some of it. I think if you're really going to claim something like that continental philosophy is nonsense, you will have to account for analytic thinkers who do take those thinkers seriously - Rorty (Heidegger), Brandom (Hegel), Leiter (Nietzsche), Dreyfus (Heidegger). Are they just totally confused or stupid?
4) This view relies on a way too rigid distinction between the two and unfairly "homogenizes" the philosophers within the traditions. Husserl and Derrida are as different as Dennett and Chalmers. If I read Dennett and then declare, "Analytic philosophy sux!" it seems to be the case that I have an incomplete picture of analytic philosophy.
Part of what makes it hard for continentals to read analytics and analytics to read continentals is a difference in vocabulary and basic conceptual familiarity. The basic terms for shared ideas are not mutually understood. Analytics do not understand what an eidetic reduction is, continentals don't always understand the syntax or semantics of modal logic. Yet, analytics constantly do "eidetic reductions" in some sense (ex. by isolating the necessary and sufficient conditions of some thing x to count as x), and continentals make cogent modal arguments all the time (even if it is not as symbolically clear as the work of a philosopher trained in Kripkean modal logic). There have been relatively successful papers that find meaningful overlap between continental epistemologies (a la Husserl) and analytic epistemologies (a la Huemer's PC). So, is it that continentals are just totally wrong, rife with nonsense, or is it that you haven't devoted any significant time studying them? To learning their vocabulary and basic theoretical orientations?
As someone who is trained in both analytic and continental philosophy, it's frustrating to see continentals with a naive view of analytics, just as it is frustrating to see analytics have a naive view of continentals. Quite simply, there are good and bad philosophers. It could be the case that there are a greater proportion of "bad" philosophers in continental philosophy, something which would actually require an engagement with the literature beyond just a passing glance, but this would not mean that the entire field is condemned to mediocrity or uselessness. But I highly doubt your conclusion is actually formed in this way, nor the conclusions of a number of other analytic philosophers. This strikes me as a kind of arrogant philosophical laziness.
These are all very good points, CD! In fact trusting that everything labeled 'Continental' philosophy shares some essence, and can be subjected to the same broad brush actually shows a lack of the conceptual sophistication analytic philosophy is supposed to produce. That said, there is much in the French or French-inspired philosophy, especially when treated as proven truth in all sorts of critical studies, that I am very wary of. I learnt a lot about how thinkers contradict themselves, and how to detect this, from Derrida. And I for instance find it provocative how he'll discuss the giving of gifts, and forgiving, while returning to the refrain 'IF it exists'. But so many things count against him: his dismissal, and probably ignorance of science; his overproduction of texts, as if one can think and write carefully at such speed; his never admitting that he was wrong in the past; his ascription of all sorts of things to Western metaphysics, without any attempt to show that they are absent or less in evidence in non-Western thought; the sheer amount of work that most of his texts require from the reader; his calling his thought 'deconstruction' and then in interviews ascribing every possible virtue to this fuzzy thing called 'deconstruction', and denying that it has any vices. I think that the belief in philosophy's independence of science, and ability to pass judgement over science (in Derrida''s case, as being situated 'within' Western metaphysics, and thus suffering from the fatal flaws W.m. has according to his analysis) is a common, and rather fatal, flaw in much 'Continental' philosophy. How can one not take as one of your central points of intellectual orientation the astonishing success of physics, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, etc.? Oh, the gymnastics of Newton, Einstein, Darwin, - how boring. Now, if you want to see some REALLY astonishing, jaw-dropping gymnastics, look to Heidegger, or Deleuze, or ... In opposition to 'Continental' philosophy, I am more drawn to naturalistic philosophy à la Dennett, than to analytic philosophy tout court.
i recommend wittgenstein if you haven’t read him. u could start with the “tractatus” cuz u seem to have more than a bent towards analytic but pls put the later “philosophical investigations” on your list. if you need credentials, logic daddy bertrand russell himself admitted to wittgenstein’s supercession of his work. cuz anyway, wittgenstein can communicate my problems with this piece better than i can in a comments section.
I agree with everything you wrote about the use of hypotheticals and would love it if people were better philosophers in general. I am also a vegan who paid reparations to the shrimp after reading your article, although I am much more inclined to longtermism.
However, I think smart people can become proficient in the skills you are referring to in less than a year, and without any training in philosophy. E.g., my impression is that the average LessWrong user of my acquaintance is at least as philosophically competent as you, in part because you frequently advance views that are literally unintelligible. E.g., https://youtu.be/qtsngogGKuo?t=422.
I also think at least smart people who put in the time are quite right to distrust the concept of philosophical expertise, in part because "philosophical" problems tend to be problems about which there has been persistent disagreement among apparently rational people for millennia, and about which there is no agreement today.
<<Another good indicator is if your ideas are fringe among philosophers. If when you present them to philosophers, the philosophers always find them clearly wrong, you should begin to grow suspicious. >>
If only it were that easy. There is wide inter-subjective disagreement amongst experts in all debates in philosophy.
For instance, there are still people who claim to be good at philosophy and profess a belief in a god - a fringe view in modern analytical philosophy by any standard.
Also people who are invested in professional philosophy will often claim that there are objective errors and progressive in philosophy but then profess their own views as the result of such progress.
Richard Chappell once cited his wife's papers as proving some sort of mistake - akin to Kant's criticism of St. Anselm's ontological argument. When I pointed out how self-serving this was, he blocked me from his blog.
You wrote "The overwhelming majority of people think that meat eating is permissible on the grounds that what one eats is a personal choice. Yet one can only sustain this assumption if they think that there can’t be arguments for the wrongness of eating certain things ..."
I'm not convinced of that. My guess is that for a *fair number* of people, they think that there are arguments on both sides, the arguments aren't anywhere near conclusive, so when it comes to figuring out what to do, the method of following arguments is pretty hopeless. So, we might as well just go with our personal choice.
No, that's not true of everyone. But I've taught a lot of students who come to think, very quickly, that arguments aren't really that strong in ethics, unlike in science, and so we can't rely on them.
I'm not saying they are right to think this. All I'm saying is that this captures some people's reactions to philosophical arguments in ethics.
I saw a survey saying nearly everyone agrees that whether to eat meat is a personal choice.
I don't think many people seriously think about the arguments before and against veganism and conclude they're both substantial. Many people don't think about the subjects for more than 2 seconds, and if they do, their analysis will reduce to some braindead and banal platitude like "lions eat meat."
I half agree with you. The vast majority of people don't "seriously think" about the pro and con arguments at all. Instead, they know, from their past education or from what they've simply been told, that ethical arguments almost always suck.
And sure, people will offer platitudes when challenged. But that hardly means that the platitude is what convinced them in the first place.
Again, I agree that there are plenty of braindead attitudes towards ethical issues. But there are plenty of "ethical arguments suck in general, so screw it" attitudes as well.
I don't think many people have that attitude. Most people just conform to whatever is convenient.
Well, I have seen the attitude in a significant number of students. Can't offer a percentage though!
Once some makes an ethical argument they've deployed social capital. They are not incentivised to weaken that by a rethinking. Most people aren't convinced that philosophers like anyone else don't have feet of clay. The idea that philosophers think philosophers deserve special social standing goes back to Plato.
I also don't think the overwhelming majority of people think meat eating is permissible because it is a personal choice. They don't think you could make a personal choice to eat human flesh, for instance. Many people wouldn't even think you could make an acceptable personal choice to eat dogs.
Tim Hsiao actually argues that eating dogs is permissible.
> It's [mental discipline’s] something every kid should learn in school.
By all means! We can surely fit it into the curriculum, right between “How to Dunk a Basketball” and “Being a Good Person 101”.
>When I posted my article about the importance of shrimp welfare, lots of people triumphantly declared that they simply didn’t care about shrimp. They seemed to think that simply reiterating that you don’t value X ends a moral debate about whether to value X. This is a bit like thinking that repeating “I like Trump,” is a convincing response to an argument against Trump. They couldn’t seem to conceive of what it would be to argue that one should value X even if they don’t actually.<
Skimming back through the shrimp article, it looks to me like you indeed did not give any real argument for why shrimp matter. The closest I found was this passage:
>A final objection claims that shrimp welfare doesn’t matter. I think so long as shrimp can suffer, their suffering matters. Think about what it’s like to be in extreme pain—the sort of pain that characterizes suffocating or drowning. That’s a bad thing! What makes it bad isn’t our species or the fact that we’re smart but instead what the pain feels like.<
The closest this comes to an argument that shrimp matter is "so long as shrimp can suffer, their suffering matters," which doesn't address the objection in the first sentence at all ("shrimp welfare doesn't matter"). Implicit in the objection is that suffering doesn't matter to the person so long as it is happening to shrimp, so responding by re-stating your implicit belief that "all suffering matters" is a total non-response. It's just you repeating the point that the objection was originally made against.
With most issues you don't really have this problem because most things we talk about are specific to humans and no one (well, almost no one) would take the position that human welfare simply doesn't matter to them at all. But when you venture into the realm of animal welfare "I don't care about X species at all" becomes a much more serious hurdle to deal with. We can see that in the passage I quoted, you had to immediately fall back to making emotional appeals ("think about how much X hurts"), because there aren't really any good logical arguments against this sort of difference in first principles.
This is not to say that I think helping shrimp is bad personally, mind you. Out of all the random causes people devote their time and energy too, stunning shrimp is probably one of the more sensible ones. The analysis in this article just seems really wrong to me.
You just can't read! I didn't assert that shrimp suffering mattered, I gave reasons to think that it's not very unintuitive that it does, that the best account of the badness of suffering (it's bad because it hurts) would hold that it matters, and made the argument from marginal cases.
None of that responds to the objection that the person doesn't care about shrimp. Again, you appear to be just repeating yourself instead of introducing novel arguments. This is like saying to someone that they should donate to a charity for starving kids in Africa, the person responding that it's not their problem, and then you responding to that with "but think about how much it hurts to be starving!" Yeah no shit, obviously the guy knew that already when he responded to you.
Sure, Ayn Rand was dumb, but let's not pretend the average philosopher is any better than Ayn Rand.
The average philosopher is much better than Ayn Rand.
The shrimp welfare objection seems to turn on whether flat-footed arguments are good arguments. Philosophers don't like flat-footed responses because they don't engage with the argument that they're meant to be responding to. Rather, flat-footed arguments trivialise the whole debate. Responding to an argument that, e.g. people who endorse temporal parts should be stage theorists, with "Ah, but temporal parts don't exist" is just a refusal to engage with the content.
You could present a paper on a very unpopular view, like moral or linguistic relativism, that argued moral/linguistic relativists entails P and P is correct. It would be unsophisticated and uninteresting to respond with "Ah, yes, but moral/linguistic relativism is false so I don't need to consider whether P". Of course it's a bit different here because you'd still be entitled to think this is a bad research program (why write papers assuming the truth of such a discredited view?), but a flat-footed response in a Q&A would be weird.
Matthew, wanna play?
> BB wrote: "many people think that ethics is subjective [and is] beyond rational thought
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done studies showing that when people need to make a moral choice, they do so mainly through quick, intuitive emotional responses rather than careful reasoning. The rational reasoning comes later. The intuitions are primary and largely automatic. The moral reasoning that follows is more like lawyers defending a client than judges seeking truth.
First of all, I don't think relying on quick intuitions is irrational. Second, the fact that many people reason about a domain irrationally and based on emotions doesn't tell us whether it's objective. And the dual process literature seems to show that consequentialist intuitions are mostly not the result of automatic intuitive reactions.