A Place For Public Philosophy: Reviving A Practice

By Andrea Houchard

I was the last person to be dropped off on a shuttle from Phoenix to Sedona. The shuttle driver, who was friendly and decidedly chatty, asked, "So where do you work?" "NAU," I replied. "What do you do?" "I teach." "What do you teach?" "Philosophy." Silence followed. On a two-hour drive, philosophy was the only topic that left this driver speechl

• Language: English
• Publisher: seeken
• Release date: Jan 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805240365

Book preview

A PLACE FOR PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY:

REVIVING A PRACTICE

ANDREA HOUCHARD

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1

PHILOSOPHY—A CHANGEABLE PRACTICE

Chapter 2

PHILOSOPHY NOW

Chapter 3

PUBLIC PHILSOPHY

Chapter 4

THE BENEIFTS OF PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY PROGRAMS

Introduction Why This Project?

I was the last person to be dropped off on a shuttle from Phoenix to Sedona. The shuttle driver, who was friendly and decidedly chatty, asked, So where do you work? NAU, I replied. What do you do? I teach. What do you teach? Philosophy. Silence followed.

On a two-hour drive, philosophy was the only topic that left this driver speechless. There was a long pause as we continued north on Highway 179 with Bell Rock, Courthouse Butte, and Cathedral Rock coming in to view. Sure is pretty out here, he finally managed. This is a guy who had something to say about every topic under the sun since we left Phoenix. But when it came to philosophy, well, he just couldn’t think of a thing.

I think my driver’s reaction to philosophy is representative of what the average American thinks when it comes to philosophy—not much. Americans do not think much of philosophy in that they do not have a high regard for it. Further, Americans do not think much about philosophy because, for the most part, they do not think philosophically.1 To the extent that they do, they often confuse philosophy with one of the following: self-indulgent navel-gazing ( what would you do with that major? ), a motto we live by ( Early to bed, early to rise…), or abstruse musings that lack practical significance ( …so for knowledge of myself I require, besides the consciousness, that is, besides the thought of myself, an intuition of the manifold in me…).2 Philosophers seem either unable to articulate—or are perhaps just uninterested in articulating—the value of philosophical activity to a more general audience, i.e., to those other than professional academic philosophers.

1 Cf. Carlin Romano, America the Philosophical (New York: Knopf, 2012).

2 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 158.

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The lack of public appreciation for philosophy limits the profession and deprives the public. It limits the profession because, in a higher education climate that is being increasingly driven by the values of efficiency and assessment, philosophy can easily be underappreciated unless philosophers make a case for why these measures fail to capture the benefits of philosophy. It deprives the public of a good, because philosophy is a resource that can improve our thinking about many of the issues that affect our daily lives. The importance of friendships and family, why we should tolerate people who disagree with us, whether or not we have an obligation to help those who are less well off—these are issues that people care about. What people often miss is that philosophy can help them do a better job of thinking these issues through. Put plainly, philosophy has the potential to help people articulate and evaluate reasons for behavior (or possible behavior) and to live better lives.

Though people often clamor for studies and statistical analyses, many issues are not amendable to measurement. Despite the cultural obsession with statistics, assessment, and big data, we cannot mathematically calculate solutions to most questions of enduring human interest.3

Which political system is best? Is there a moral obligation to value natural beauty? How should I treat other people? These are perennial questions that are not susceptible to being settled. Data are (or sometimes can be) useful. But data are no substitute for discernment. Our day-to-day lives call on us to make judgments. Studies do not speak for themselves.4 Furthermore, much empirical data are presented to the public without critical analysis. Philosophical conversations might uncover background assumptions that are behind information that comes to us via science and social science research. For example, philosophers could identify and help people think about the structure, assumptions, and biases of studies, explore the limitations of research, and ask whether the questions were framed in a way that elicited a certain type of answer. Philosophers have 3 Brian Bergstein, The Problem with Our Data Obsession, MIT Technology Review, February 20, 2013,

http://www.technologyreview.com/review/511176/the-problem-with-our-data-obsession/.

4 John Stuart Mill and Alan S. Kahan, On Liberty (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008). As Mill pointed out ,

Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning, 35.

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training that would enable them to enhance empirical research findings in at least two ways. First, they could ask questions that are not often asked when it comes to empirical research. Second, they could relate how scientific studies relate to more general questions in life.

Another way philosophy could benefit the average citizen is by having philosophers facilitate forums that allow people to discuss and think through the political issues that they find most important. This is not meant to suggest that people should spend time learning about every policy issue under review. Rational ignorance is a concept that explains why it is inefficient and unrealistic for ordinary people to deliberate about most technical policy issues. In most cases, it is not worthwhile for citizens to spend time understanding government policy when they have limited or no discretionary power.5 Rational ignorance also reveals that it is not merely political apathy, but a practical impossibility, for the general public to engage deeply in a broad cross section of issues. While it may not be rational, never-mind possible, for individuals in a democracy to become acquainted with every policy issue that affects them, there is value in public forums that afford the public an opportunity to carefully consider the issues about which people are most curious or interested. If a group of citizens convenes to discuss a topic of mutual interest, for example, whether or not the Affordable Care Act is the right move for America, having a philosopher available to facilitate the discussion could help them articulate and assess arguments with greater skill and facility. The conversation could be structured so that no position is privileged. The merits and demerits of the Affordable Care Act could both be given fair attention. While every person cannot master the details of every policy issue, average citizens may want to get a better picture of political problems that they care most about.

In many cases, ordinary citizens have a strong desire to engage in political advocacy.

Currently we find an example of this in the proponents and opponents of gay marriage. Those 5 Guido Pincione and Fernando R Tesón, Rational Choice and Democratic Deliberation: A Theory of Discourse Failure (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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who invest resources in advocacy issues have reason to be better informed. Many want to know what their time, money, or other capital supports. When someone chooses to invest his or her personal time and resources to further a cause, ignorance about that cause is irrational. To the extent it is rational or desirable for the public to engage in discussions about politics and policy, philosophy brings an analytical skill set that can improve deliberation and analyses in public forums.

Philosophers can assist people in thinking these things through without actually taking a position on the issue themselves. In an unpublished article, Bas van der Vossen argues that political philosophers and others who study politics have a professional responsibility to refrain from political activism. He draws on empirical studies that identify positive correlations between political activism and political bias to support this view.6 However, facilitating a conversation among people with different political positions is not activism, it is encouraging those who are engaged to think through the different positions and perhaps discover strengths in opposing views and weaknesses in their own. Of course participants might just as easily fortify their original view. The goal of public philosophy programs is not to change anyone’s mind, though such programs do not try to prevent individuals from changing their minds either. The point is to encourage people to be more informed about a range of views and to think about them more carefully. The value of doing this is that it may increase public understanding about the merits of competing positions. The programs also aim to build deliberative, critical, and creative skills among participants.

Philosophy Improves Deliberative Skill

When we give the general public an opportunity to engage in a philosophical discussion, in most cases anyway, it improves the rational and deliberative capacities of the individuals who participate. This opportunity benefits individuals as such and, ideally, raises the caliber of 6 Bas van der Vossen, In Defense of the Ivory Tower: Why Philosophers Should Stay Out of Politics,

unpublished manuscript, last modified December 3, 2013. Pdf file. I discuss van der Vossen’s work further in chapter 2.

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political thought and discussion in society. We should have more opportunities for people to develop their skills to think about issues in a careful, creative, and nuanced way. Pointing out fallacies and explaining why fallacies are effective rhetorically are examples of how philosophers might improve deliberative capacity among the public. Another general strategy philosophers are well-positioned to deploy is helping people distinguish between types of claims, such as moral and legal. While such things are elementary for academic philosophers, they are valuable reminders for public audiences.

Philosophy is Revealed

There are often philosophical considerations embedded in questions that appear to be more technical in nature. For example, when economists assign a discount rate, they ascribe a present value to future goods. Assigning a discount rate involves comparing current and future value, which can affect people living at those times differently. The assumption that is built into the discount rate is that the value of what is realized in the future is not as great as the value of what exists now. We cannot be certain about the future. We can have informed speculations about the future, but the future us always an unsettled matter. This uncertainty is another reason we value future goods less than present ones. The less we value future goods or states of affairs, the higher the discount rate will be. Becoming aware of this would help people see how value judgments can be hidden in what is putatively technical.

In his book Climate Matters, John Broome argues that economic experts should emphasize that assigning a discount rate is not merely a technical question. Assigning a discount rate involves moral issues that are rarely represented as such. One well-known dispute over the discount rate is between The Stern Review and William Nordhaus’s, A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies. The Stern Review assigns a lower discount rate than Nordhaus, meaning that Stern et al., think future conditions should matter more to current decision-makers than Nordhaus does. Broome’s point is that the dispute between Stern and Nordhaus is influenced in part by views on what obligations presently existing people have to

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future generations, and whether people have an obligation to be good stewards on the earth.

"Different moral principles are largely responsible for the difference between these authors’

conclusions. It is therefore essential that we do not leave the important questions of climate change entirely in the hands of the technical experts."7 Broome is making a case for philosophers to work with economists (Broome himself is both a philosopher and an economist) so that both the moral and technical issues have been considered by experts in their respective fields.

Recognizing that economic decisions may be grounded on contested ethical grounds is something that philosophers could better articulate in the public sphere.

When we think of how philosophy can benefit people in everyday life it is often in terms of ethics and politics. It is what the ancients called practical philosophy, because such inquiries deal with how we should act in our personal and political lives. Practical philosophy has historically been distinguished from more theoretical enterprises such as epistemology and metaphysics. However, people stand to benefit from thinking about other areas of philosophy in addition to ethics and politics.

For example, we might consider whether sensory experience is best understood in terms of people having five sense organs and five senses. Perhaps we have several senses, many of which involve a complex interaction among our sense organs. While taste is most often associated with taste buds, it turns out what retronasal smell is also an important component of taste, and without it, we cannot distinguish a fruity jellybean from one that is anise flavored. An inquiry into the nature of sensory experience does not have immediate (or obvious) moral or political implications, yet there is value and pleasure in contemplating the way in which we 7 John Broome, Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 10, (emphasis mine). The discrepancy between Stern and Nordhaus has also been investigated as a problem that stems from disciplinary silos and the failure of economists and environmental scientists to appreciate one another’s work. Work in both fields should be relevant to the discount rate that is assigned.

See Fredrik Hansen, The Stern Review and Its Critics: Economics at Work in an Interdisciplinary Setting, Journal of Economic Methodology 18 (September 2011): 255-270.

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experience the world.8 Delving into topics about how people experience their lives has the potential to enrich those lives. The example of the complexity of sensory experience demonstrates that philosophy’s value to the general public is not limited to practical ethical and political considerations, but that people also profit from thinking about more theoretical questions.9

Another example of a philosophical question that people would benefit from discussing is, What counts as a person? This issue is raised by the movie Her, in which a writer falls in love with an operating system. As machines become more and more sophisticated and people become more and more dependent on them, our relationship of relating to the world, to other people, and to those machines will shift. We develop relationships with machines, and our relationships with other people often happen via machines. Her grants plausibility to the idea that we could have emotional and psychological attachments (to non-persons) that have been traditionally reserved for people. We have been fascinated by questions of how closely we can get a machine to behave like a person ever since the Turing Test. What counts as a person and whether non Homo sapiens can satisfy the criteria is a philosophical question, and it is one that people benefit from thinking through. People are likely to think about these new developments in a more interesting way with the aid of a philosopher.

Philosophy and Philosophers Benefit from Public Esteem

Philosophy as a discipline and philosophers as people benefit when those outside the discipline recognize that some of the questions they care about most, or that are interesting to them, are philosophical in nature. Creating more opportunities for the public to engage in philosophical conversations has at least two positive outcomes. First, it gives people an opportunity to engage in a worthwhile activity. Second, it increases public esteem for 8 I am grateful to Stephen Briggs of Iowa State University for leading a public discussion on this topic on April 20, 2013.

9 This is not to suggest that the technical theoretical work of academic philosophers would be accessible to the public, but merely that general interest in philosophy need not be limited to ethics and politics.

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philosophers specifically and academe generally. If people value philosophical inquiry, they are likely to value the training ground for it. This works against the view that the value of the humanities pales when compared to STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines.10

The humanities generally and philosophy specifically would benefit from increased public awareness of their value. It is one thing to talk in the abstract about the value of critical thinking skills, and quite another thing to put people in a room where they experience it firsthand.

Creating opportunities for the general public to appreciate philosophy happens best when they are active participants and accrue benefits, such as gaining practice and skill expressing themselves, as they think through complex