Thu Mar 16 12:00:00 EDT 2017

Philosophy cynicism

Links reflecting my cynicism about philosophy.

  • Five part series about What Is Philosophy's Point? by John Horgan in Scientific American:
    1. Part 1 (Hint: It's Not Discovering Truth)

      Philosophy can still serve many purposes, even if it can't compete with science as a method of accumulating knowledge

    2. Part 2--Maybe It's a Martial Art

      Philosophers sometimes seem more concerned with winning than wisdom

    3. Part 3--Maybe It Should Stick to Ethics

      Philosophers keep giving us moral advice in spite of their doubts about all ethical systems

    4. Part 4--Maybe It's Poetry with No Rhyme and Lots of Reason

      The line between philosophy and the arts can get awfully blurry

    5. Part 5--A Call for "Negative Philosophy"

      Philosophy's chief value is countering our terrible tendency toward certitude

    Followed by: Philosophers Push Back

    Philosophers react to a science journalist's critique of their calling

  • Philosophers' biased judgments persist despite training, expertise and reflection.

    We examined the effects of framing and order of presentation on professional philosophers' judgments about a moral puzzle case (the "trolley problem") and a version of the Tversky & Kahneman "Asian disease" scenario. Professional philosophers exhibited substantial framing effects and order effects, and were no less subject to such effects than was a comparison group of non-philosopher academic participants. Framing and order effects were not reduced by a forced delay during which participants were encouraged to consider "different variants of the scenario or different ways of describing the case". Nor were framing and order effects lower among participants reporting familiarity with the trolley problem or with loss-aversion framing effects, nor among those reporting having had a stable opinion on the issues before participating the experiment, nor among those reporting expertise on the very issues in question. Thus, for these scenario types, neither framing effects nor order effects appear to be reduced even by high levels of academic expertise.

    Full paper (pdf).

  • Cheeseburger Ethics

    Are professional ethicists good people? According to our research, not especially. So what is the point of learning ethics?

    Ethicists do not appear to behave better. Never once have we found ethicists as a whole behaving better than our comparison groups of other professors, by any of our main planned measures. But neither, overall, do they seem to behave worse. (There are some mixed results for secondary measures.) For the most part, ethicists behave no differently from professors of any other sort -- logicians, chemists, historians, foreign-language instructors.

    Nonetheless, ethicists do embrace more stringent moral norms on some issues, especially vegetarianism and charitable donation. Our results on vegetarianism were particularly striking. In a survey of professors from five US states, we found that 60 per cent of ethicist respondents rated 'regularly eating the meat of mammals, such as beef or pork' somewhere on the 'morally bad' side of a nine-point scale ranging from 'very morally bad' to 'very morally good'. By contrast, only 19 per cent of non-philosophy professors rated it as bad. That's a pretty big difference of opinion! Non-ethicist philosophers were intermediate, at 45 per cent. But when asked later in the survey whether they had eaten the meat of a mammal at their last evening meal, we found no statistically significant difference in the groups' responses -- about 38 per cent of professors from all groups reported having done so (including 37 per cent of ethicists).

    ... We aspire to be about as morally good as our peers. If others cheat and get away with it, we want to do the same. We don't want to suffer for goodness while others laughingly gather the benefits of vice. If the morally good life is uncomfortable and unpleasant, if it involves repeated painful sacrifices that are not compensated in some way, sacrifices that others are not also making, then we don't want it.

    Can one blame physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson for Dismissing Philosophy As 'Useless'.


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