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So there is some discussion in the other thread, but I'll add my own. You ask that philosophy be useful. Here then, is a useful question: Suppose that my mothe

So there is some discussion in the other thread, but I'll add my own. You ask that philosophy be useful. Here then, is a useful question: Suppose that my mother has Alzheimer's disease, and that I find the prospect of caring for her inconvenient, undesirable, and/or expensive. Do I have a responsibility to care for her anyway? It is "useful" because it could potentially describe a real-life situation in which one might have to make a decision. Analyzing this quickly leads one to a general discussion of ethics. As you point out, definitions are imprecise. What does it mean to say I have a "responsibility", or that I "ought" to do something? Logic and observation can get one to "If I do nothing, then my mother will suffer and/or die", but this is not the heart of the matter. I think there is no hope of a "solution", in the same way, say, that Fermat's Last Theorem was proved. But does that mean that studying ethics, and what the usual lineup of dead white males had to say about it, isn't worthwhile?

pg 15y ago
That sort of question is certainly important. I worry though that like most of ethics this is one of those cases where philosophers don't get any better answers than your grandmother.
- impendia 15y ago
  Hm. I agree with your worry completely. Still, personally I found great value in studying the subject. I find it difficult to say precisely what, though.
- siglesias 15y ago
  Paul, I don't think my grandmother could give me a very good justification for why she eats meat. I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation could show that eating meat needs to be justified and that I can't justify it. Same goes for whether profiting from closed source software is ethical. Same goes for whether homosexuality is evil. These are all cases in which it would be possible to show, systematically, how one's views are contradictory, or really empirical questions. This appears to be a philosophical task, not a common sense one.
  - Goladus 15y ago
    > I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation could show that eating meat needs to be justified and that I can't justify it. The amount of philosophy needed is not too significant. One needs to know enough logic to show that inability to find a justification doesn't mean a justification doesn't exist. So if someone is using Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation to persecute meat eaters and you want to do something about it, general skill at persuasion is more important than philosophy.
    - siglesias 15y ago
      I glossed over some of the subtleties. To show that eating animals needs to be justified requires extending our ethical framework to animals beyond humans. Nobody feels the need to justify eating vegetables, for example, nor have compelling arguments been presented that this is unwarranted. Also: most disciplines require "general skill at persuasion," philosophy being no exception.
      - Volpe 15y ago
        I think it's important to distinguish Philsophy from Critical thinking here. The practical skill Philsophy teaches is critical thinking and logical reasoning. But you don't need philosophy to learn either of those. "general skill at persuasion" sounds more like sophistry/rhetoric...
        Goladus 15y ago
        > "general skill at persuasion" sounds more like sophistry/rhetoric... Persuasive techniques can be used deceptively but that's hardly necessary. It's important to accept that people are emotional and simply proving them wrong is usually not sufficient to change their mind about something they've already decided.
      - jodrellblank 15y ago
        Nobody feels the need to justify eating vegetables, for example, To the contrary, almost every vegetarianism argument on the Internet has comments like "plants are living things which you slaughter for food", and they just get ignored. I suspect because if you seriously believed killing living things for food is wrong, it would be suicide, so the only conceivable answer is to reason in such a way that it comes out with the answer you want - draw your arbitrary cutoff between important-living-things and not-important-living-things somewhere above plants and bacteria while staying comfortably below humans. Then let the argument rage as if there was a real substantive difference between drawing the line above cow or below cow, or just diverting it around milk, or only around milk sourced in a particular way.
- derrida 15y ago
  In regards to philosophy having a 'use': I think philosophy should have a function/use. But does it? I think its functional importance is in asking questions in such a way they can be answered by experiment. So in the philosophy of mind, the functional role of philosophy is to refine concepts so there is a conceptual difference that makes a difference in experiment. The problem is, there is no way to tell if you are doing useful philosophy if we define its function as creating the conditions for experiment to take over. We can only tell if philosophy is useful in retrospect, by the impact a work has. Philosophy is not like science, where we know we are 'doing science' by performing experiments. But it also is like science, in that we judge it's use retrospectively. A good example of philosophy being useful is the case of Bertrand Russell's work on 'Russell's Paradox'. Russell's work in the Principia Mathematica was partially about formulating definitions that would free us of this paradox. PG says "Outside of math there's a limit to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings." Surely there is use in forming these precise meanings in the first place. Some (not all) of that work is philosophy. Russell's work was outside of math, or at a minimum it was 'Meta-math'. Russell was attempting to crystallize new logical definitions that could form precise definitions, and hence become mathematics. He was trying to create mathematics from philosophy. Did it work? No. The Principia Mathematica was a failure. But the way it failed, it failed as a piece of mathematics, at the hands of Kurt Godel. Here is a case of philosophy becoming mathematics. In short, Godel's work leads to the work of Church and Turing, which leads to the computer. So we can at least point to the concrete usefulness of some philosophy, retrospectively. This work was useful, even if its only effect was to shift around the conceptual landscape so non-philosophers could do 'serious work'.

pg 15y ago

That sort of question is certainly important. I worry though that like most of ethics this is one of those cases where philosophers don't get any better answers than your grandmother.

impendia 15y ago
Hm. I agree with your worry completely. Still, personally I found great value in studying the subject. I find it difficult to say precisely what, though.
siglesias 15y ago
Paul, I don't think my grandmother could give me a very good justification for why she eats meat. I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation could show that eating meat needs to be justified and that I can't justify it. Same goes for whether profiting from closed source software is ethical. Same goes for whether homosexuality is evil. These are all cases in which it would be possible to show, systematically, how one's views are contradictory, or really empirical questions. This appears to be a philosophical task, not a common sense one.
- Goladus 15y ago
  > I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation could show that eating meat needs to be justified and that I can't justify it. The amount of philosophy needed is not too significant. One needs to know enough logic to show that inability to find a justification doesn't mean a justification doesn't exist. So if someone is using Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation to persecute meat eaters and you want to do something about it, general skill at persuasion is more important than philosophy.
  - siglesias 15y ago
    I glossed over some of the subtleties. To show that eating animals needs to be justified requires extending our ethical framework to animals beyond humans. Nobody feels the need to justify eating vegetables, for example, nor have compelling arguments been presented that this is unwarranted. Also: most disciplines require "general skill at persuasion," philosophy being no exception.
    - Volpe 15y ago
      I think it's important to distinguish Philsophy from Critical thinking here. The practical skill Philsophy teaches is critical thinking and logical reasoning. But you don't need philosophy to learn either of those. "general skill at persuasion" sounds more like sophistry/rhetoric...
      - Goladus 15y ago
        > "general skill at persuasion" sounds more like sophistry/rhetoric... Persuasive techniques can be used deceptively but that's hardly necessary. It's important to accept that people are emotional and simply proving them wrong is usually not sufficient to change their mind about something they've already decided.
    - jodrellblank 15y ago
      Nobody feels the need to justify eating vegetables, for example, To the contrary, almost every vegetarianism argument on the Internet has comments like "plants are living things which you slaughter for food", and they just get ignored. I suspect because if you seriously believed killing living things for food is wrong, it would be suicide, so the only conceivable answer is to reason in such a way that it comes out with the answer you want - draw your arbitrary cutoff between important-living-things and not-important-living-things somewhere above plants and bacteria while staying comfortably below humans. Then let the argument rage as if there was a real substantive difference between drawing the line above cow or below cow, or just diverting it around milk, or only around milk sourced in a particular way.
derrida 15y ago
In regards to philosophy having a 'use': I think philosophy should have a function/use. But does it? I think its functional importance is in asking questions in such a way they can be answered by experiment. So in the philosophy of mind, the functional role of philosophy is to refine concepts so there is a conceptual difference that makes a difference in experiment. The problem is, there is no way to tell if you are doing useful philosophy if we define its function as creating the conditions for experiment to take over. We can only tell if philosophy is useful in retrospect, by the impact a work has. Philosophy is not like science, where we know we are 'doing science' by performing experiments. But it also is like science, in that we judge it's use retrospectively. A good example of philosophy being useful is the case of Bertrand Russell's work on 'Russell's Paradox'. Russell's work in the Principia Mathematica was partially about formulating definitions that would free us of this paradox. PG says "Outside of math there's a limit to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings." Surely there is use in forming these precise meanings in the first place. Some (not all) of that work is philosophy. Russell's work was outside of math, or at a minimum it was 'Meta-math'. Russell was attempting to crystallize new logical definitions that could form precise definitions, and hence become mathematics. He was trying to create mathematics from philosophy. Did it work? No. The Principia Mathematica was a failure. But the way it failed, it failed as a piece of mathematics, at the hands of Kurt Godel. Here is a case of philosophy becoming mathematics. In short, Godel's work leads to the work of Church and Turing, which leads to the computer. So we can at least point to the concrete usefulness of some philosophy, retrospectively. This work was useful, even if its only effect was to shift around the conceptual landscape so non-philosophers could do 'serious work'.