The missing philosophy

How do you get to do philosophy? As a profession, I mean. How do you go from being genuinely interested in the stuff to doing it as a full time job? For an initiated look at the profession and some perfectly juicy gossip to boot, you would do well to turn to Leiter reports. If you happen to be female, or actually: no matter what you happen to be, you might want to look into the excellent but sometimes somewhat discouraging Being a woman in Philosophy. Talking to members of staff at your local, or any, department for philosophy is generally advisable. This being said, my academic advisor, when I asked about the prospect for a career in philosophy, said that it’s perfectly possible. If you’re independently wealthy.

Arriving at university very much a Man with Ideas, the question was mostly a practical one. How could I get to spend my days working on those ideas, ideally while getting paid and duly appreciated?

I find, and others have shared this experience, that it goes something like this. You read and you listen and you talk a lot. You are quite impressed, but not discouraged by the amount of excellent thinking that has already taken place. You’re not discouraged, either,  by the fact that the history of philosophy has an unfair advantage. Kant, the lucky s.o.b. had the good fortune of being born into a world where Kantian ideas had not already been developed and twisted and turned ever which way. You find something that’s particularly interesting. Your teacher, if you got one, has probably given you an assortment of topics to choose from, and you look around for stuff that treats the topic you find yourself drawn to.

And then it happens. You find that something is missing. Despite initial appearances, there are philosophical theories that have not been developed yet. This is the opening. If you are really lucky, the position is not only unoccupied, but also quite plausible.  And then you go about developing that missing theory, defending it’s merits over other, neighboring theories. More likely than not, you’re not going to convince anyone at this stage, but you may earn their respect, and the possibility to spend a couple of years making the best possible case for your theory.

Along the line, as you’re vacuuming of the field progresses, it is likely that you will find something that is awkwardly close to what you wanted to say to begin with. But then you’re already so von kopf bis fuss entrenched in it that you go on to develop an enhanced variation of it any way.

For me, the missing theory bit happened when I was dealing with preferentialism. The ongoing debate was between objective and subjective satisfaction versions of the theory:

Either it is good that what you want to be the case is the case no matter whether you know it or not, or the only thing that matters is that you think that your wish is satisfied: what is good is the conjunction of the desire and the belief that it is satisfied. Whereas the latter version struck me as more plausible, the mere conjunction of desire and belief did not seem to me to be close enough. It’s not enough that I have a desire that P while having the belief that P is the case. I may have those things, and fail to make the connection, so to speak. Neither would it be sufficient that I have the desire that P and the belief that this desire is satisfied. No, I thought there should be a more concrete relation between the two. Beliefs and desires being mental states, they had to actually meet up and a new mental state: the desire being satisfied as a result of the ingoing components meeting up was the real value-bearer here.

The ultimate result of that train of thought became part 1 of the dissertation, the theory of pleasure.

Stein on copying

There are many that I know and they know it. They are all
of them repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it. I love
it and now I will write it. This is now a history of my love
of it. I hear it and I love it and I write it. They repeat it.
They live it and I see it and I hear it. They live it and I hear
it and I see it and I love it and now and always I will write
it. There are many kinds of men and women and I know
it. They repeat it and I hear it and I love it. This is now a
history of the way they do it. This is now a history of the
way I love it

Gertrude Stein

Just to drive the point home, I copied that quote from the New Yorker book blog, which copied it from Marcus Boons book ”in praise of copying” which is available free of charge here. You really have to copy and paste Stein quotes because, with the possible exception of the really short ones, her sentences are impossible to remember. The style, however, isn’t.

One of my very few poems was a tribute to Gertrude Stein. It’s a rather bad poem, in particular as I’m pretty sure that should be ”contemporary with”, not ”contemporary to”.

Dear Gertrude.

How typical of you

to be contemporary to

so few of your contemporaries

For my students

On monday, the course I teach goes into second gear: Normative Ethics. First out is the doctrine of ethical egoism. Ethical egoism, the idea that you should do what lies in your own self-interest, is distinct from psychological egoism, the idea that in fact you are only motivated by your own self interest. In its strong version, this latter view has it that you cannot be motivated by anything else. Genuine altruism is impossible. Psychological and ethical egoism are two very different things, it is said. One is about what is the case, the other is about what ought to be the case.

Now, consider that ought implies can. I.e. it cannot be the case that you ought to do something that it is impossible for you to do.

So, if you cannot be motivated by anything else than your own self-interest, it cannot be the case that you ought to be motivated by something other than your own self-interest.

So it would seem that from ought implies can and strong psychological egoism it follows that you ought to be motivated by your own self-interest.

But note that this is not what ethical egoism claims: Ethical egoism says that you ought to promote your own self-interest, not that you ought to be motivated by your own self-interest. And even if we cannot be motivated to promote the greater good, our actions can certainly promote the greater good. Psychological egoism does not even seem to bar the possibility that we intend to bring about other results, only that we cannot be motivated to do so.

So, since we can promote the greater good, it is logically possible that we ought to. But, if psychological egoism is true, it is only logically possible that we ought to promote the greater good by accident.

See you monday!

On work and idleness

I’m coming to you from (blogging is live, no?) a coffee shop in Gothenburg, where I’m spending this morning preparing next weeks lectures on applied ethics. (First out is animal ethics, which I have to weave together with the ethics of abortion, since we didn’t manage to conclude that subject on friday. Luckily, this is not a hard thing to do.)

It’s a good morning. It’s a very good morning. In fact, I’ve done more work in the past two hours than I did all day yesterday. Which is good for present me, but also a bit annoying for that curmudgeon I was most of yesterday.

What it means is that if I knew how to get to this point of effectiveness, even if it took some time (in fact, if it took less than six hours), it would have been rational to spend the main part of the day doing that, and just work for two hours, rather than working at a much slower rate for eight. It would be rational for another reason to: I’ve found that the way to get to this point is to do things that are nice. Talking to friends and family, reading fiction, taking walks,  listening to music or watching television. Good television, I hasten to qualify, because it seems the assigned function of being ”relaxing” is actually not truly attributable to all, or even the majority of, TV-watching. We just think it is, because it make us tired, and then we come to believe that we really needed the relaxation in the first place.

Ideally, of course, I would spend my free time doing the things that make me work like this for the full eight (or so) work hours. But things are not, entirely, ideal. Knowing that, its important to leave your work place occasionally and be idle. Do what you feel like doing, if your conscience and work-ethic will let you. Some companies, famously Google, seem to have grasped this idea and achieve great results for that reason. Of course, this is only true if your work is such that how effectively you can do it depends crucially on your mood and creativity.

Bertrand Russell’s wonderful little essay In praise of idleness is about precisely this. People should have more time to pursue and develop their interests not only because it make them happier – and happiness is, after all, what we want them to achieve – but also because they work better if they’re allowed to do that sort of thing. The worry that the working class would be up to no good if given free time to conspire was based on the fact that as things were, they took to drink, say, or fighting when off work. But in so far that’s true, it’s because they were unhappy, and hadn’t had the time to develop worthwhile pastimes.

Stress is not primarily a consequence of having a lot to do, but a of getting nothing done, or getting less done than you imagine that you should (and having a lot to do may cause that, but need not, and should not. Extremely few of your tasks, I think you’ll find, is done better under stress).

I’ll return to those lectures now. Because I actually really like to.

Science and Morals

Can basic moral questions be answered by science? The, oh, how to put this nicely, vocal moral theorist Sam Harris believe so. And so, as I will keep reminding you, do I. But, hopefully unlike me, he seems not to make a very good case for it. The marvelous Kwame Anthony Appiah (whose book ”Experiments in Ethics” is a very good read indeed, if you’re interested in experimental moral philosophy. Good, but somehow non-commital) made that much clear in his review in the New York Times the other day (the equally marvelous Roger Crisp agreed).

I’m very much torn about this issue. First, it’s a good thing that the attempt to address fundamental ethical and metaethical questions with scientific means gets this much attention. But the key issue at this stage is in the justification of this project. If that’s lacking, the attention will just lead to people dismissing it and likewise dismissing any other, better thought through attempts which comes along later. This happens all the time, when something is claimed to be a cancerogen, and the study is shown to be flawed, next time around even if the study is better, people wont heed the warning.

So, while the meta-ethical framework required to justify the scientific approach to moral questions is highly controversial and far from settled, one wishes that Harris would have made at least some effort to provide us with such a framework. So what am I saying? ”Call me”, I guess.

Ethics month

I’m a big fan of october and november, and don’t care who knows it. September is nice to, and has that crispness of air which implies clarity of thought, If you’re into that sort of thing, but  then again, there’s all that fuss about the beginning of term and I’m no fan of fuss. October and november means business as usual. Things have achieved a state of being usual, enough for business to adjust accordingly. Oh, David. What are you on about?

Beginning today, we are into what I, assuming that the world pretty much revolve around me and my interests, am calling ethics month. It is the month during which I teach ethics at the department for philosophy, linguistics and theory of science. Today it’s ”introduction to ethics” or, informally: ”What’s all this, then?”. Tomorrow, it’s ”the meaning of life”. The course is very cleverly structured (I didn’t do it, but if I had, I still wouldn’t hesitate to call it clever. Try to keep up): It begins with applied ethics,  about selling organs, animal ethics, abortions and so on. When these questions turn difficult, we’ll turn to normative ethics, about what makes things right and wrong. The principles against which background applied questions may be answered. When this turns out difficult, we turn to meta-ethics, dealing with the meaning of moral terms and the nature of moral facts and moral knowledge, if such is to be found. When this turns difficult, which it does quite soon, the course is over and questions will have multiplied. If I’m any good, the students will have learned to cope with that fact.

Philosophy is often like that, as someone tweeted recently: climbing a very high tower, and then looking up.

Teaching this course here is fun for me, for personal reasons. I attended my first philosophy lecture here, at the age of 17 and got to talk to the professor who, merely by being nice, helped me decide to go into philosophy for my self. Secondly, it’s ten years since I first took this course which I’m now teaching. Having spent most of the time in between in metaethics, its great and very useful to become reaquainted with the applied and normative side of ethics. As a meta-ethicist, its often easy to forget that those things exist as well.