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“When my younger self complained angrily in the margins with scrawls of ‘where is this going?’, he missed the sights and insights that the journey itself provided.”
A kind of philosophical innocence is the subject of the following guest post by Bradford Skow, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Skow works mainly in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and aesthetics, and has a blog/newsletter, Mostly Aesthetics, on Substack, which I highly recommend.
This is the fourth in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[Posts in the summer guest series will remain pinned to the top of the page for the week in which they’re published.]
Herbert Morris read an essay titled “Lost Innocence” at the 1975 Oberlin Philosophy Colloquium. In it, he attempted an analysis of Adam and Eve’s loss of innocence, when Eve was tempted and they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge they acquired was not, obviously, perceptual knowledge, nor did they draw some new conclusion from their evidence. It is closer to say, Morris thought, that they acquired “a different way of feeling about what had been before them all along”: “[w]hereas one had earlier felt at ease, felt a kind of natural joy, one now is cursed with an absence of joy, perhaps more, with feeling anxious and bad.” But this itself is just a first approximation, and Morris steers us toward, and then away from, several more accounts of lost innocence, until, after a pause at his preferred one, he closes with a meditation on the nature of evil, and on the morally wise people who have “not been crushed by what they have confronted, but have emerged, in ways mysterious to behold, victorious, capable, despite and because of knowledge, of affirming rather than denying life.” Life-affirmation is not an ending that the essay’s opening paragraphs point you toward. Morris announces only that the essay was stimulated by reflection on the story of Adam and Eve, and he acknowledges early on the “serpentine nature” of his reasoning.
Every age has its favored philosophical templates. Readers of this venue are doubtless familiar, either as writers, or as readers or referees, with one in common use today:
I will argue that P.
Lo, notice that I am now arguing that P.
Reminder that Modus Ponens is valid!
In conclusion, I have argued that P.
On top of all this meta-signposting, not to be neglected is the obligatory here is the plan for this paper, placed at the end of the Introduction, and skipped over by every reader. The basic unit of philosophy is taken to be the argument with numbered premises and labeled conclusion, as the proof is the basic unit of mathematics. Of course books and papers in mathematics also have definitions and explanatory insertions, nor do works of philosophy consist only of arguments—not even Spinoza’s Ethics—but everything is built around them.
At sea between college and graduate school, I pursued a self-directed course of philosophical study, and focus on the argument was the straw keeping me afloat. When chance scudded me into Peter Unger’s paper “The Problem of the Many,” therefore, it seemed scandalous. “Although,” he wrote, “I think arguments are important in philosophy, my arguments here will be only the more assertive way for me to introduce the new problem, not the only way.” What an idea, that a philosophical goal could be achieved by other means.
I am just old enough to have had passed down to me, like myths of a lost age, other templates that were once more common. After his death, various collections of Wittgenstein’s notes and lectures were published, under titles like Remarks on Suchity-Such. A tradition began in which the basic unit of philosophy was—at least in presentation—the remark, sequences of which were presented in numbered paragraphs. On the surface this practice was more collegial and less aggressive, gentlemen (remember this was decades ago) lounging in tweed coats and exchanging thoughts between puffs of their pipes, but of course in reality a seemingly-anodyne “I would like to make a few remarks” was usually a preface to something devastating, or anyway intended to be so.
Because philosophy is so old, and because the ideas of the earliest philosophers are still alive today, it can seem that finding new philosophical positions, or new arguments for existing ones, requires a gold-medal performance, while those practicing other, newer disciplines languorously pick low-hanging fruit on their lunch breaks. I sometimes joke that, because of this, a career-making philosophical achievement can now consist in something as small as drawing a distinction. Or even in erasing one: I was once present when a famous philosopher complained, to the students in his graduate seminar, that one of his undergraduates could not grasp the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity, and I complained back that that student might just be a philosophical genius, seeing clearly that the alleged distinction Mr. Famous was trying to draw was not real. When Amos Tversky was a student, he chose psychology over philosophy in part because there were far fewer giants over whose shoulders one needed to see. However their eventual publications compare to Tversky’s Nobel-worthy life’s-work, I tell philosophy graduate students, they should take heart in the fact that he was a coward who could not muster the courage they have displayed.
Premise, premise, conclusion is the Freytag’s triangle of philosophy, and its de-throning in literary criticism may inspire. Jane Alison, in her book Meander, Spiral, Explode, explores a bunch of alternatives to the exposition, climax, resolution form, including the titular ones, which also makes good philosophical models. If Morris’s essay is a controlled and steady navigation by an experienced hand through a carefully surveyed territory, Arthur Danto is a great meanderer. In just the first few pages of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace he riffs on Euripidean and anti-Euripidean art, the imitation theory, and Sartre, and when my younger self complained angrily in the margins with scrawls of “where is this going?”, he missed the sights and insights that the journey itself provided.
The point is not, or not just, to have more fun, or to unleash unruly intellectual impulses that academic disciplines try to discipline. Form can be expressive in ways that matter aesthetically and even philosophically. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus sometimes achieves an austere oracular beauty that the philosophy-as-lab-report genre cannot equal and to which it cannot aspire. It is also, to some, offputtingly arrogant. To their temperament the Philosophical Investigations may be more congenial. “Bear in mind,” Kripke observed in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language,
that Philosophical Investigations is not a systematic philosophical work where conclusions, once definitively established, need not be reargued. Rather, the Investigations is written as a perpetual dialectic, where persisting worries, expressed by the voice of an imaginary interlocutor, are never definitively silenced… the same ground is covered repeatedly, from the point of view of various special cases and from different angles, with the hope that the entire process will help the reader see the problems rightly.
If for Herbert Morris the loss of moral innocence was “like the loss of peace of mind accounted for by acquiring anxiety,” the form of the Investigations—as it struck Kripke anyway, as it presented itself to him—is expressive of a loss of philosophical innocence, and the—possibly appropriate—gnawing philosophical anxiety and uncertainty that some of us cannot shake, but may hope not to be crushed by.
The post Some Remarks on Form in Philosophy (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
“There need not be strict disciplinary boundaries between philosophy and other disciplines.”
In the following post, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Professor of Philosophy at VU Amsterdam and Professorial Fellow at Arché at the University of St. Andrews explains and makes a case for synthetic philosophy.
This is the first in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[“Abandoned Schoolhouse” by Gary Simmons]
A few years ago, the philosopher (and prolific blogger) Eric Schliesser used the term ‘synthetic philosophy’ to describe the work of Daniel Dennett and Peter Godfrey-Smith. Schliesser presented synthetic philosophy as “a style of philosophy that brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both). Synthetic philosophy may, in turn, generate new research in the special sciences…” Schliesser did not coin the term itself: the once influential but by now largely forgotten polymath 19th-century thinker Herbert Spencer (of ‘survival of the fittest’-fame) titled his mammoth 10-volume work covering biology, psychology, sociology and ethics System of Synthetic Philosophy.
But Schliesser can be credited for re-introducing the term to denote an approach in philosophy that has become more pervasive and widely accepted over the last two decades, namely one where philosophers engage extensively with work done in relevant (empirical) disciplines to inform their philosophical investigations and theories. Other recent examples of synthetic philosophers include Neil Levy (see his Bad Beliefs) and Kim Sterelny, who describes his book The Evolved Apprentice in the following terms: “The essay is an essay in philosophy in part because it depends primarily on the cognitive toolbox of philosophers: it is work of synthesis and argument, integrating ideas and suggestions from many different research traditions. No one science monopolizes this broad project though many contribute to it. So I exploit and depend on data, but do not provide new data” (Sterelny, 2012, p. xi). If this is a good description of synthetic philosophy, then it is fair to say that I have been (trying to be!) a synthetic philosopher for about 15 years now, so when Schliesser introduced the term, I adopted it wholeheartedly. (It is for sure much catchier than alternatives such as the cumbersome ‘empirically-informed philosophy’.)
The idea that there need not be strict disciplinary boundaries between philosophy and other disciplines enjoyed some popularity in the 20th century, in particular in the tradition of ‘scientific philosophy’ initiated by Bertrand Russell and continued by the Vienna Circle and later with their ‘heirs’ in the United States such as W.V.O. Quine (who used the ambiguous term ‘naturalism’ to describe the idea of continuity between philosophy and other disciplines) and Hilary Putnam. (Much before that, over the centuries, there was for the most arguably no strict separation between philosophy and other disciplines either; Aristotle was first and foremost a biologist.) But there was also much resistance within analytic philosophy to the idea that philosophical inquiry should in any way be informed by scientific findings (see this piece that I co-wrote on the dissonant origins of analytic philosophy). This resistance is to be traced back to G.E. Moore, who insisted that moral philosophy and ethics in particular were strictly non-scientific, purely conceptual domains. It continued with the so-called ‘ordinary language philosophers’, as exemplified by the damning critique of Carnap’s notion of explication in Strawson’s piece for the Carnap Living Philosophers volume.
To motivate a strict separation between science and philosophy, a point sometimes made is that scientists are involved in the merely descriptive inquiry of telling us how things are, while philosophers are involved in conceptual and (or) normative inquiry as well, which includes looking at how things ought to be understood, and how they ought to be. If true, this point has important methodological implications, as different methods are used for different types of investigation. Methods to investigate how things are include data collection, experiments, field work, etc. Methods to investigate how things should be include conceptual analysis, ‘intuitions’, thought experiments, etc. Some decades ago, however, this presumed neat separation was challenged by the so-called experimental philosophy approach, which prompted what might described as a small methodological crisis in analytic philosophy. Could philosophy be empirical/experimental after all? The X-Phi challenge made it clear that more sustained methodological reflection was needed, and philosophers spent much of the first two decades of the 21st century discussing the ins and outs of different methods for philosophical inquiry (see Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy and the Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology).
It is fair to say that scientific/synthetic philosophy ‘won’ the battle in that the Moorean rejection of engagement with empirical findings in philosophical inquiry has become much less widespread in the last decade. I speak from (anecdotal) personal experience: when I was working on the project that culminated in my monograph Formal Languages in Logic (2012), I often got remarks to the effect that it was all very interesting, but what I was doing wasn’t really philosophy. (My standard response was: well, I’m glad no one is saying that it’s all very philosophical, but not interesting.) By contrast, in later years the research that culminated in my monograph The Dialogical Roots of Deduction (2020) did not typically prompt the same kind of reaction, even though it was just as empirically oriented as my earlier work. The fact that The Dialogical Roots of Deduction won the Lakatos Award in 2022 (sorry folks, time for some shameless self-promotion!) attests to the widespread acceptance of synthetic philosophy as an approach to philosophical inquiry (though philosophers of science are, of course, from the start more amenable to the general idea of engaging with other disciplines).
In my opinion, philosophy is especially well-placed to facilitate much-needed interdisciplinary collaboration between different disciplines. It is now widely recognized that so-called ‘wicked problems’ require complementary approaches to be addressed, but each methodology has its limitations and dead angles. Experimental methods may lack ‘ecological validity’ (lab situations do not really reproduce the phenomena in the wild); quantitative methods are often not very fine-grained and may give rise to spurious correlations and ‘noise’; qualitative methods may be instances of ‘cherry-picking’ and have limited reach. Thus, what has become clear, in particular during the Covid-19 pandemic, is that triangulation of methods is essential for investigating complex problems.
It seems to me that philosophers have much to contribute to interdisciplinarity and triangulation efforts for two main reasons: philosophers are trained to engage in careful conceptual inquiry, clarifying and sharpening significant (scientific) concepts and sometimes introducing new ones (Carnapian explication, conceptual engineering); philosophers may be better able to see the forest rather than only the trees, as it were, by drawing on various scientific disciplines (as suggested in the Sterelny quote above) and noticing connections that may remain unnoticed within each specific discipline. Philosophy has much more potential for synthesis than is often recognized (even by us philosophers), and this is perfectly compatible with the centrality of analysis in analytic philosophy. (Traditionally, analysis and synthesis were viewed as two complementary rather than incompatible processes: you break things down to them put them back together again, usually in a different, more fruitful configuration.) (Note: commenting on an earlier draft of this post, Eric Schliesser remarked that my conception of synthetic philosophy differs in some important respects from his. He thinks that my conception resembles that of Kitcher’s, which he discussed in this blog post.)
True enough, there are also a number of difficulties, pitfalls and risks involved in attempting to do synthetic philosophy. For starters, the approach requires that the philosopher be conversant with various different scientific disciplines; she has to be a ‘polymath’ in some sense, which in the current scenario of scientific hyper-specialization is a formidable challenge. Secondly, there is a perennial risk of conceptual confusion/equivocation and ‘talking past each other’ for lack of a common vocabulary (a familiar problem in interdisciplinarity studies). Third, scientific studies themselves are not always reliable guides, with many important results not being replicated (see the famous ‘replication crisis’ in psychology and other disciplines).
However, while these issues are real and must be taken seriously, I submit that they should not be viewed as knock-down arguments against synthetic philosophy. (I have responses to each of them but I’m running out of space!) Sustained methodological reflection on the ins and outs of synthetic philosophy is still needed, but I hope to have established here at least that synthetic philosophy is an interesting and viable approach for philosophical inquiry.
The post A Plea for Synthetic Philosophy (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Frances Gavin’s recently declared that “the gap” between policymaking and academic research “has been bridged!” As evidence of International Relations’ newfound influence on the making of U.S. national-security policy, Dr. Gavin points to a handful of scholars who, having crossed the Gap on their own two feet, now occupy prominent government positions. This underscores, he argues, that programs like the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network and the Nuclear Studies Research Initiative—as well as his own Texas National Security Review—have successfully constructed a communications channel between academia and policymakers.
This is a common line of argument among “gap-bridgers”—scholars who emphasize the importance of forging close connections between the academic study of international relations and the world of policymaking. The Bridging the Gap team’s recent, thorough review provides a good example. It focuses on opportunities and challenges for connecting academic knowledge to policymakers, while also celebrating the influence of a number of scholars on the policy landscape.
The gap-bridgers do, indeed, have much to celebrate. But I worry that the bridges that they aim to construct and maintain suffer from some critical design flaws. Chief among them: they are made by academics for academics. The engineers ask little of the policymakers on the other side.
Bridge-building must move beyond catering to policymakers. Academics bridge no gaps if they, for example, content themselves with providing validation for policymakers’ existing beliefs. It means little if someone with an academic background occupies an influential policy position if they perform their role no differently than would any other appointment.
The problem is that gap-bridgers tend to start with the wrong set of questions. Instead of asking “What do policymakers want from us?” we need to ask ones like “What should policymakers want from us?” and “What do we want from policymakers?”
Perhaps no scholar did more to advance the conversation about the divide between academia and policymaking than Alexander George. In Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy, he identified three types of policy-relevant knowledge: abstract conceptual models of foreign policy strategies, generic knowledge (that is, empirical laws and causal patterns), and actor-specific behavioral models.
Other scholars have built upon George’s arguments. Dan Reiter wrote that scholars help policymakers know their tools. Michael Horowitz offered four measures of policy-relevant knowledge: policy significance, accessibility, actionability, or agenda-setting impact on the public debate.
None of this knowledge matters, however, if government officials ignore it. Henry Kissinger, perhaps the most (in)famous academic-turned-policymaker, noted that policymakers have no time to study while on the job; they can only bring to the table what they learned before entering the policy arena.
Bridge-builders encourage scholars to ‘hide’ their methods and evidence
“Even the most highly developed general knowledge of a strategy cannot substitute for competent policy analysis within the government,” Alexander George wrote. But participants in the policy process suggest that, in recent years, it has gone from bad to worse. A report from two influential officials called the State Department’s clearance process “hell.” Putatively serious analysis in foreign policy occurs infrequently, and much of what does emerge is ad hoc rather than rigorous and systematic. It almost never includes consultations with academics or draws from scholarly research.
Even if policymakers do engage with academic work, there’s no guarantee that officials will understand it. Preparation for careers in foreign policy rarely emphasize training in methods and methodology. Surveys of policymakers demonstrate their deep distrust of social science methods.
Many, as I have learned in my frequent interactions with policymakers, are downright hostile to them.
Gap-bridgers must pay more attention to the degree that the foreign policy community simply dismisses much of the knowledge produced by social scientists. “It’s almost impossible to quantify what we do, and in fact, I think that there’s a great danger in trying,” said an influential former Ambassador at a recent event on the State Department’s Congressionally-mandated Learning Agenda. A high-ranking official concurred, “Diplomacy is an art, not a science.”
When policymakers extol the art of foreign policy, they are advancing a theory of knowledge—that is, they are taking a position on epistemology that ex ante rejects a lot of what we do in social-scientific research.
This is not, at heart, a matter of ‘qualitative versus quantitative methods,’ or ‘constructivism versus rationalism.’ Rather, their stance entails a rejection of the usefulness of systematic method altogether. It is a claim that the most important tools for policymaking are rooted in the ‘gut instincts’ and idiosyncratic beliefs of professional policymakers—and that the only ones qualified to assess foreign-policy decisions are, naturally, those who share the necessary experience to develop comparable instincts and hunches.
Dominant methods of policy analysis and decision making are badly outdated
The epistemology of the U.S. foreign-policy community bears a strong resemblance to what scholar Robert A. Kagan termed “adversarial legalism.” Instead of prioritizing solutions aimed at achieving policy objectives, the policy process weighs legal and political risks between entrenched bureaucratic interests. The “right policy” is whatever emerges from that process. The “top expert” is the official who has achieved decision-making authority.
Social-scientific epistemology is very different. Its goal is to produce the “right” answers. Even if one believes—as many academics do—that we will probably never know the exact “truth” or provide the “best” answers, social-scientific training emphasizes self-consciousness and transparency when it comes to epistemic choices.
The defining features of academia—the practices of citations, peer-review, hypothesis testing, university training and certification, a focus on methodology, and so on—aim to facilitate intellectual progress. In principle, scholarly authority derives from the quality of scholarship, not the other way around.
Efforts to “bridge the Gap” need to better wrestle with these differences.
Bridge-builders often encourage scholars to ‘hide’ their methods and evidence when speaking with policymakers. But this renders even the best scholarship indistinguishable from opinions, guesses, and even misinformation.
It is this state of affairs, not the nature of social science itself, that makes “lab leaks” from social science so dangerous.
At the very least, academics should avoid validating the anti-scientific views of many policymakers who dismiss social science as irrelevant.
Alexander George understood the challenge. In Bridging the Gap, he explained:
Quite obviously, substantive knowledge of foreign affairs can have no impact on policy unless it enters into the process of policymaking. Substantive knowledge must combine with the effective structuring and management of the policymaking process in order to improve the analytic (versus the political) component of policymaking.
But George never answers the question of how policy analysis within the government should work. One of the most important tasks of bridge-building involves providing answers.
Scholars should push policymakers to think more like scientists.
At the very least, scholars need to use their privileged position to hold policymakers accountable for making decisions that violate basic scientific norms. They must speak up when officials subordinate hard-won substantive knowledge to intuitive judgment and parochial political considerations. In the words of the longest-serving member of Congress in history, John Dingell, “If I let you write the substance and you let me write the procedure, I’ll screw you every time.”
Dominant methods of policy analysis and decision making are badly outdated, if not outright anti-scientific. Rather than expecting scholars to conform to policymakers’ ‘ways of seeing,’ scholars should push policymakers to think more like scientists.
If social scientists believe their work has value, then they (necessarily) believe in the value of their methods and epistemological beliefs.
Scholars have the tools and training to help improve every stage of the policy process. An improved foreign policy epistemology must:
Upgrading policy processes might include finding ways to improve, for example:
In short, a true “bridge” between scholarship and foreign-policy making should be constructed around the evidence-based policy movement and other efforts to improve the effectiveness of foreign policy.
The U.S. foreign policy community can learn a great deal from those other sectors of government that foster a much closer connection between research and practice, including public health, economic policy, and education. Even within the national security community, some agencies do a better job than others. Evidence-based methods play a larger role in international development, the intelligence community, and the Department of Defense than in the State Department or the National Security Council.
The good news is that bureaucratic footholds are emerging for scholars interested in advancing more scientific foreign policymaking. The Department of State recently launched its Learning Agenda, which Congress requested in the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018. The Global Fragility Act is prioritizing evidence and learning to reform the way the US government prevents and responds to conflict. Both the Departments of Defense and State are making high-profile investments into analytics and data.
Ultimately, the responsibility of building a bridge does not lie solely with academics. Those of us who care about the quality of foreign policy must help policymakers help close the Gap between research and practice. Neither academics nor policymakers have all the answers. But Americans – and billions around the globe affected by our decisions – deserve the best possible foreign policy.
By Erik Gustavsson and Lars Lindblom.
If you visit a conference or workshop on priority setting there will most certainly be several slots on empirical studies exploring public values about principles for priority setting. Over the last 20 years, there has been numerous such studies, and the interest among researchers to perform such studies accentuated during the pandemic. If you attend one of these slots and stay around for the discussion you will notice that questions and comments tend to focus on methodological design. Indeed, these issues are of general importance for the research community – but why are the results from these studies relevant? If you have some background in ethics you might, for example, wonder what weight should be ascribed to these studies when making moral judgments about how priority setting should be done. When one faces this question, one may start to reason along the following lines.
On the one hand, public values cannot reasonably tell the whole story about the ethical question: how scarce health care resources should be distributed. For example, suppose a majority in your country believe that people with red hair should be denied intensive care. Such a conclusion seems counterintuitive, to say the least. The mere fact that people express discriminatory views cannot reasonably have anything to do with the moral rightness of such views. On the other hand, public values cannot reasonably have nothing to say about how scarce resources should be distributed. This seems especially strange in a democratic society. Some people think that this discussion can stop here. The conclusion is quite straightforward they say: public values carry some weight for the moral question about how resources should be distributed. We found it difficult to accept this conclusion.
Therefore, we went back to Rawls’ notion of reflective equilibrium. Drawing on these Rawlsian ideas, we discuss the relevance and roles that empirical studies may plausibly have for the justification of principles for priority setting. Our paper develops a framework that can articulate these different roles in relation to empirical studies of public values and make explicit how different empirical results may have different implications for justification.
The framework distinguishes between four steps in the reflective equilibrium process: i) filtering moral judgements, ii) formulating principles, iii) working back and forth between (i) and (ii), and iv) from the individual to the social.
We also realized that it adds to the richness of the framework to distinguish between the content of moral judgements and the process according to which people arrive at those judgements. Four times two is eight which gave us a matrix of eight positions. Accordingly, there are at least eight different ways in which empirical studies of moral judgment may have relevance for moral justification.
With this matrix in hand, we show, for all eight of the positions in this matrix, how empirical results can inform moral deliberation. This, in turn, indicates several perhaps surprising ways that ethicists should be interested in empirical results. For instance, empirical research on the content of peoples’ judgements regarding priority setting forms input into the process of moral deliberation. Moreover, empirical work with relevance for the process of formulating principles will be important for that stage of the reflective equilibrium process. The matrix also suggests a number of interesting avenues for empirical researchers to pursue in order to enrich normative work on priority setting. For instance, empirical research on possible propensities to commit fallacies in the process of working back and forth between judgements and principles regarding priority setting would potentially seem very useful. Moving from the individual to the social level, further work on the content of social equilibria regarding priority setting would also seem highly important. The answer, then, to the question of why it would be important to study public values regarding priority setting principles is that empirical results play important roles at all levels of moral deliberation.
Title of paper: Justification of principles for health care priority setting – the relevance and roles of empirical studies exploring public values
Authors: Erik Gustavsson [1, 2], Lars Lindblom [1],
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
The post It seems important to study public values regarding priority setting principles, but why exactly? appeared first on Journal of Medical Ethics blog.
by Roger Crisp
This may be an odd thing for a moral philosopher to say, but I think that morality is not fundamentally important. In fact, I think it would be helpful if we stopped using, or at least drastically cut the use of, moral language in philosophical ethics, unless we are engaged in some non-normative enterprise, such as describing a particular morality, that of common sense, for example, or of some particular group or individual. This is not because I am some kind of normative nihilist, or rational egoist. I accept that we should do many things that morality requires us to do, such as not to inflict pointless suffering on non-human animals, but not that we should do them because morality says we should. Morality is a social phenomenon analogous to law, and in the case of law also I see no reason to do anything merely because the law requires it.
Another reason to avoid moral terminology in philosophical ethics is that morality functions through the emotions, especially that of anger, of which the primary moral species is blame. The emotions, though they may have some cognitive content, are passions, and in most areas of philosophy it is rightly thought that arguments should be assessed in the light not of emotion, but of calm rational reflection. Blame is not entirely irrational, of course, but as Aristotle says, ‘it seems to listen to reason to some extent, but to hear it incorrectly; it is like hasty servants who rush off before they have heard everything that is being asked of them and then fail to do it, and dogs that bark at a mere noise, before looking to see whether it is a friend. In the same way, spirit, because of its heated and hasty nature, does hear, but does not hear the command, and so rushes into taking revenge’ (EN 1149a).
This is not to say that there could not be fundamental moral reasons. That is to say, morality could be more than a social phenomenon, constituting a set of independent norms which must be characterized in moral terminology. (This picture of morality is analogous to the picture of law in natural law theory, according to which positive law – the social phenomenon – can be assessed in the light of natural laws independent of positive law.) But we should not begin, as so many philosophers have done and continue to do, with the assumption that there are fundamental or ultimate reasons for action the content of which can be captured only by using moral terminology. We should introduce such reasons into our account only if they are independently justified and required to answer our ultimate practical question: what does one have reason to do? One can say, for example, that each of us has an ultimate reason not to inflict pointless suffering on a non-human animal without using any moral terminology. Someone might wish to add: ‘It is wrong to do so, and hence this reason is a moral one’. But since this introduces a whole set of moral notions, and raises many questions about the nature and status of moral properties, the onus is on this person to explain the value of their suggested addition.
Moral language, then, including the notions of right and wrong, duty, rights, justice, the virtues, and so on, is best avoided as far as possible in fundamental normative ethics. If someone claims that f-ing is wrong, for example, we should translate that as the claim that there is a reason, perhaps an overriding reason, not to f, and then ask why. If the answer comes in moral terminology, that will need to be translated as well. By ‘demoralizing’ such language we may arrive at what really matter – our reasons for action and what grounds them – and we will also be less likely to be misled by emotion.
What, then, does ground reasons? Nothing other, I suggest, than the welfare or well-being of individual sentient beings. This is not a commitment to utilitarianism, since welfarism does not imply that the only grounding relation is that of impartial maximization, though I suggest that any plausible form of welfarism will allow that this is one way in which well-being can ground a reason. But there may be others; it may be, for example, that we should give some priority to those who are badly off, or that we should be especially concerned about the well-being of those affected by our own agency. Nor are the only issues here purely ‘ethical’: matters involving, for example, the metaphysics of personhood or the theory of decision are bound also to arise.
The paragraphs above come from the beginning of a paper I recently published on religious pluralism in health care, in an excellent special issue of Bioethics, edited by Justin Oakley, C.A.J. Coady, and Lauren Notini. In that paper, I go on to explain why the case for welfarist demoralizing seems especially strong when dealing with issues such as that of religion in health care, where emotions run high. I also point out that, though I’m primarily recommending demoralization in philosophical ethics, I recognize the instrumental value of a good deal of morality (as I do that of law), and believe that there may be a place for (careful) demoralizing in thought, discussion, and action more generally.
(Thanks to the editors for publishing my paper. Further discussion of demoralizing can be found in the first chapter of my book Reasons and the Good (2006) and in another (excellent!) special issue — of the journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice — edited by Tyler Paytas, Richard Rowland, and me.)
In Part One, I discussed Sonam Kachru’s criticisms (Kachru 2021) of some of my earlier work on Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses (Mills 2017).
I ended the previous post with a question: what if we were to listen carefully to Vasubandhu in his own terms, and learn from what he has to say?
This attitude toward the text can challenge understandings of Western categories. Whereas most pragmatists, phenomenologists, and a certain type of analytic philosopher diagnose external-world skepticism as a metaphysical failure to appreciate the entanglement of mind and world, I think Vasubandhu suggests that entangled though mind and world may be (and it’s hard to imagine them being more entangled than in Mahāyāna Buddhist non-dualism!), the cognitive failure of regular human experience is a failure to appreciate how fundamentally mistaken we are in our regular cognitive lives—in light of the fact this very entanglement.
It may be that Vasubandhu shows us something about skeptical inquiries into perception, broadly construed: such epistemological inquiries do not rely on any particular metaphysical framework. (I personally have long thought the anti-skeptical strategy of trying to reduce the epistemological problem of skepticism about the external world to a metaphysical problem of mind and world is a huge mistake, but that’s somewhat besides Vasubandhu’s point as he seems to be doing something more like working out the epistemological consequences of the metaphysics of non-dualism).
I think some contemporary interpreters fail to understand how thoroughly revisionary and revolutionary Vasubandhu’s philosophy is; whereas most contemporary anti-skeptical strategies seek to preserve regular human experience against a philosophical abstraction, Vasubandhu wants to challenge the dogmatic attachment inherent in the regular human experience of thinking our way of seeing things is the right way or the only way (a point I think Kachru and others could make better without appeals to contemporary anti-skeptical strategies!).
So, am I saying, after all this, that Vasubandhu really is a skeptic, just not as we know it? (“We” here means, I guess, 21st century academics writing in English). Maybe. I don’t know.
My own attempts in the past to argue for skeptical interpretations of classical Indian philosophers (e.g., Mills 2018) have often met with resistance precisely because most contemporary philosophers have a (dare I say it?) dogmatic attachment to a specific version of external-world skepticism inculcated in them by contemporary interpretations of Descartes and in contemporary analytic epistemology (this modern view of skepticism is in my opinion also deeply at odds with ancient “Western” skepticisms like Pyrrhonism and Academic skepticism).
At this point I’m willing to cede the label “skepticism.” I no longer care whether Vasubandhu or any other classical Indian philosopher is a “skeptic,” partly due to the unwillingness of my academic colleagues to rethink their own definition of skepticism as a category, but mostly because whatever Vasubandhu and others are doing is philosophically interesting no matter what Western categories we apply to them.
It’s time to stop pretending that classical Indian philosophers have to be subjected to the procrustean bed of Western categories to be interesting or worthy of study or respect in the discipline. I study Indian philosophy because it’s philosophically interesting in its own terms, not because it can glom on to whatever’s popular in mainstream analytic or continental philosophy this month.
While I’ve moved more in the direction of the type of textual work that prevails in Indology or Area Studies, I’m not quite there, either (I never make things easy for myself!). While understanding texts in their historical context is important, at times this approach can leave one a bit too limited by linguistic history or the traditions of interpretation that came before and after a text, leaving little room for innovative philosophical understandings of individual texts (European Indology has its own problematic Orientalist history to contend with as well).
Vasubandhu was obviously responding to the Buddhist traditions before him and he has been taken up in certain ways by centuries of Buddhist and non-Buddhist scholars that have come after him, but I also think Vasubandhu has something unique to say that is not captured by Buddhism in general or even Yogācāra in general. At least if we bother to listen to him carefully.
Nor am I denying that all interpretation today takes place in a postcolonial political context or that each reader doesn’t bring their own preconceptions (in a Gadamerian sense) to the text (my own philosophical preconceptions have been shaped by Buddhism as much as anything else; I learned about the Four Noble Truths long before I learned about semantic realism). I’m not saying we should assume we 21st century scholars have a transparent insight into the one true nature of a text for all times. Such would be hopelessly naïve, and in any case goes against the very spirit of what Vasubandhu is telling us about normal human experience!
Going forward, maybe I’ll say Vasubandhu was working out the epistemology of non-dualism, or maybe we can just call it early Yogācāra and let it speak for itself (even if later Yogācāra philosophers do come close to the Western category of “idealism,” I think reducing Vasubandhu to “idealism” is just as problematic as reducing him to “skepticism” or “phenomenalism” or “phenomenology”). I don’t know where I will go next, but I will keep trying to think with Vasubandhu as best I can.
Helpful though comparative philosophy can be at times, sometimes it can be yet another problematic causal factor in our experience of ancient texts. I thank Sonam Kachru for his part in inciting me to think more deeply about my own previous scholarly experience of Vasubandhu and other classical Indian philosophers, moving instead toward listening carefully to what these texts have to say for themselves.
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Works Cited
Kachru, Sonam. 2021. Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Mills, Ethan. 2017. “External-World Skepticism in Classical India: The Case of Vasubandhu.” International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 7 (3): 147-172.
——. 2018. Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi, and Śrī Harṣa. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
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