Getting My Head Straight

Bit of a long one this. Below the fold is the full text of an essay I wrote for my ethics module last semester which I got a first for. It has various issues which i should probably resolve before publishing it but i decided instead to present the text as i submitted it.

In the interests of self-deprecation I must call attention to the fact that this is pretty shamefully badly written, capitalisations are missed, spelling and grammar mistakes are abundant, the whole last paragraph got left in from an early draft and has nothing to do with the rest of the essay. That said, don’t think it was a bad first attempt at philosophical writing and I still agree with most of the arguments I put forward. Anyhow, you can either read on or download the text as a pdf.

(Read on …)

When we talk about things that we know, there are various levels to which it’s almost impossible not to allude - do we know that which we sense? What about that in which we have faith? What about our opinions?

In my understanding, an opinion is best defined thus:

A belief or judgement that is strongly held, but without actual proof of its truth [1]

This contrasts with some conceptions which I have heard that consider opinion as being of a nature where they cannot be assigned truth values. This definition sees opinion as being a purely internal affair; having no relation to the real world. However this is clearly not the case, any meaningful opinion has a subject and any expressable opinion has a subject which can be externalised. This means that the opinion can be held to account against either empirical testing or rational investigation and has a truth value.

Recently I was engaged in a reasonably impassioned debate about why anyone should wish to philosophise. The question had never really occurred to me before since I’m not entirely sure it’s possible to live life without doing it. To me philosophy is a natural consequence of the ability to think and our existence as part of society.

What is Philosophy?

This is a question I can’t hope to answer definitively, in fact the distrust in which philosophy is held in many parts may be rooted in the difficulties of answering this question. However, I shall give use the term as defined as:

The systematic inquiry of the fundamental questions concerning, among other things, the nature of reality (metaphysics), the justification of belief (epistemology), and the conduct of life (ethics). [1]

This definition has the consequence that even the dismissal of philosophy as a nonsense has to be considered a philosophical view and is thus self defeating since the only way to justify it would be to use philosophical arguments to do so and an unjustified argument has little basis on which to be considered persuassive.

How is Philosophy Actually Helpful?

Well, for one thing it’s the fundamental base of our political and legal systems. There can be no normative political theory which is not based in ethical theory and theories of human nature. These subjects certainly overlap with the sciences - biology and psychology in particular - however, this doesn’t negate philosophy as a subject, it just assures its position within the realm of human thought.

Similarly, philosophical thought can bridge the divide between science and reality and, through logic, underpin all of our mathematical and scientific progress.

Why Should Philosophy Replace Intuition?

Short answer: it shouldn’t. However we have to understand both that intuition has limits to its applicability and that intuition is not universally shared. I’m almost certain that my ethical and political intuitions are different to those even of my closest peers and if we’re to form a society based on these then we have to find a common basis in which to ground these. Since intuition is inconsistent and neither psychology nor biology have anything definitive to say on the matter, the only thing we can turn to is reason and rationality. There are those who think rationally about these issues and come to the conclusion that we really should derive our legal systems from our intuitions, however this does not preclude philosophy since their arguments for this position are necessarily philosophical.

Is Philosophy an Atheistic Religion?

This is another common misconception about philosophy which has two main facets.

First, there’s the idea that because philosophy is concerned with similar notions to theology, that it shares characteristics with them. This is simply not the case, if it were then all of the physical sciences would be theological in nature as well since religion frequently overlaps here as well - for example the intelligent design debate.

Second, there’s the idea that philosophy is a dogmatic discipline. This is also untrue, most philosophers would consider themselves as approximating the truth in just the same way that any physical scientist aims to do. The problem lies in the fact that philosophical theories are considerably harder to prove than scientific ones and that as soon as they are proven they are typically seen as falling outside the realm of philosophy. Examples here include incompleteness theories and early theoretical physics (note that until recently, physics was more commonly termed natural philosophy).

Why Philosophy?

Philosophy is not a doctrine, it’s a dialogue; one in which we all participate whether conscious of it or not. Those who choose to study it do not do so because they wish to convert the world to their way of thinking. They do so to understand why they think like that and to challenge their own preconceptions. To dismiss it as an irrelevance is to dismiss our own intellect as irrelevant: a fair position no doubt, but one you must be prepared to defend.

Over the last 21 years, I’ve experienced a fair range of different educational styles. The thing which seems to me to be most apparent from this is that those who teach are terrified that their students might make mistakes. This is an understandable concern of course, it would seem to reflect poorly on the teacher if the student doesn’t fully understand their subject. However, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that education should promote rational thinking and the ability to defend a position. Too much of education strikes me as being about the facts and not enough about the method that accompanies them.

Even at university I’ve found massive focus on the facts and less on their basis. On my maths course last year I was frequently using concepts which I neither understood nor appreciated the value of, they were merely means to an essentially meaningless end. I think this lack of engagement was ultimately responsible for my disillusionment with the subject and my subsequent abandonment of it.

It’s been welcoming therefore to be allowed to form my own ideas this year, specifically in the philosophy portion of my course. My last ethics essay* was written with the intention of seeing whether I could come up with my own philosophical ideas and then defend them with reference to the course materials and other literature. I freely admit that my essay wasn’t philosophically perfect and may have contained some arguments which were little more than straw-men for those more informed than me, but it was mine. I formed a new argument based on what I’d been told then justified it to the best of my abilities, and I loved doing it! After 17 years of regurgitation in school, being given the freedom to think for myself in my work has been a revelation. Incidentally, I got a first for this paper, which was nice.

So for me then, education is at its best when it lets us think for ourselves and then critically appraises what we come up with. This is not to say that facts are unimportant, just that without knowing how to use and interpret them, they have no value. So basically what I’d like to see is more discussion and more interpretation in education and less believing of things just because it’s what we’re told is true.

*I may post it here at a later date

The question of consent has been on my mind of late. depending on its scope, it can have radically different meanings and form.

Political Consent

Can we ever really consider tacit, situational consent as valid as explicit, voiced consent? this question is of immense importance since it is at the heart of the notion of representative governance. In our parliamentary system, we give explicit support to our government only at election times, beyond this, our consent to obey their laws is a consequence of our existence within the society. I believe that this is based upon the idea that we freely choose to live in a democratic society and so we freely choose to abide by its rules. This consent is implied by our situation, not by our actions. Indeed, those who are inactive with regards to the electoral process may never actually give explicit consent to their government.

The idea of tacit consent is necessary if we’re to invest our sovreignty in a body. It is impractical to consider that we could all explicitly accede to every piece of legislation passed, this would merely seem to add a level of abstraction to a direct democratic system. So then, is this valid? The notion that at the time of coming of age we should leave the country if we do not agree with its social structure is impractical, especially when we consider that there may be no nation that provides the structure we choose to support. Those who oppose a political system are therefore constrained to three courses of action. The first- compliance, the second - undermining from within, the third - open rebellion. None of these are appealing prospects, the first two force us to compromise our political integrity, whilst the latter may be impractical and bloody.

I shan’t try to draw any significant conclusions from this, I merely intend to express an interest in the subject. It strikes me though that since a significant part of the liberal picture of human nature is free will, it is necessary that the world never be wholly democratic. We need to allow people that small, though impractical, act of rebellion that can only be made by withdrawing from a democratic society.

I aim to think about this rather more and form a vaguely coherent argument instead from this, which is currently little short of a rant. That however, is for another time.

Cheers,
Sam

I thought I’d start here since it seems to be the crux of much of the ethical debate which goes on over the internet and also because it’s such an appealingly simple theory.

Moral relativism can be roughly characterised as saying that any moral position is as valid as any other and thus an action can never be universally right or wrong, only permissible or otherwise as defined by the society in which the action is performed. For more details see the Wikipedia article.

So why is this important?

Well, at first glance, it can be difficult to spot the difference between a moral relativist and someone who is merely tolerant of other cultures. This point is commonly used by conservative and libertarian thinkers to criticise those to their left.

Why is this considered such a criticism?

At first glance, relativism is an appealing philosophy: I’ll admit that initially I had some sympathy with the theory. This appeal seems to stem from the fact that it appears to promote tolerance and understanding of disparate cultures since it limits our ability to criticise them, but can this really be considered tolerance? I would suggest that no, it cannot. If we refuse to judge a practice against our own ethical standpoint then in fact we can make no ethical claims about it whatsoever: relativism therefore makes any study of ethical theory impossible.

This is an extremely unwelcome conclusion, without the study of ethics, how can we ever praise or condemn anyone. Moral relativism considers Hitler to be of equal moral worth to charity workers or medical researchers. Because of this, it has in general be widely denounced as a normative ethical theory.

Relativism in Contemporary Debate.

It is hard to see where right wing thinkers would develop the idea that socially minded thinkers are naturally relativists. It could be a simple misunderstanding of welfare liberalism’s nature: confusing the idea of positive equality with anti-judgementalism. It could be a deliberate attempt to poison the idea of tolerance by association with a demonstrably flawed ethical theory, though this only serves to highlight the intolerance of those performing the characterisation. It could even be a misidentification by left wing thinkers who, without looking deeper, seized upon relativism’s lack of prejudice as complimenting their own freedom of thought.

At the heart of the debate seems to be the notion that any thinking which is not in some way chauvinistic is automatically relativistic. This is a clear cut example of false alternatives. It is perfectly possible for me to argue from a utilitarian or deontological perspective against aspects of british law without my automatically deciding that there is no valid way in which to implement said laws.

Conclusions

Moral relativism is a poor piece of normative ethical theory. Alongside the objection outlined above, there are a number of others I have omitted in the interests of brevity. The association of social liberal, feminist or communitarian theories with it does not flatter them in any way. However, this association is utterly false, there is no need to invoke relativism to support these positions, indeed it may be impossible to reconcile one with the other. The curious notion of relativism as a plague which is damaging the fabric of society stands up to little scrutiny, especially when you factor in the far greater issues of apathy and disillusionment. Those are for another time though.

Cheers,
Sam

Hi, I’m Sam Cartwright, a student at The University of Leeds. I’ve started this blog to try and work out where I stand on various issues relating to my programme, Philosophy and Politics, mostly to stop me pestering my friends about it.

I realise this makes me dangerously similar to, well, every blog in the world. But if it makes any difference I’m less interested in bitching about Bush, Blair and moral relativism and more in discovering where I think the limits to personal freedoms lie and in how we derive normative ethical theory from both our society and our position as indivduals within it.

Anyway, I’ll endeavour to punctuate well enough to make this legible, just in case anyone stumbles across it.

Cheers,
Sam