5 ms·

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 answer

by 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.
      - siglesias 15y ago
        Anybody using that argument is talking nonsense. There is no evidence that cutting a cabbage causes it pain and suffering. On the other hand, you can look at the vast similarities between our nervous systems and those of other vertebrates as well as their behavior under pain (squealing and so on) to reasonably conclude that these animals feel pain like we do.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Funny, then, that I, armed with the same arguments, just had a delicious steak for dinner. I imagine many a philosopher has considered Singer's arguments and had a delicious steak nonetheless; mathematicians and scientists don't have this problem. The problem with ethics is that you can't show systematically that meat, closed source software, homosexuality, infanticide, government, self-defense, or torture are justified or unjustified. You have to have some type of basis for logic, and even if you come up with some sort of foundational principle, there's nothing special about foundational principles that makes one any more or less likely to reject them than the conclusions you reach from them. The history of ethics is a history of people working out logically consistent ethical systems only to discover that they justified things like kidnapping strangers and killing them for their organs, and based on the "moral intuition" that it's wrong to kidnap strangers and kill them for their organs, the logically consistent ethical system was amended. The history of philosophy is filled with this kind of thing, but let's think about what we're doing here! What do we need ethics for if all we're going to do is change them when they end up having unintuitive results?
  - impendia 15y ago
    You might read Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit if you haven't already. Not that he offers solutions per se, but he starts from a similar view of the subject.
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'.

by 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.
    - siglesias 15y ago
      Anybody using that argument is talking nonsense. There is no evidence that cutting a cabbage causes it pain and suffering. On the other hand, you can look at the vast similarities between our nervous systems and those of other vertebrates as well as their behavior under pain (squealing and so on) to reasonably conclude that these animals feel pain like we do.
philwelch 15y ago
Funny, then, that I, armed with the same arguments, just had a delicious steak for dinner. I imagine many a philosopher has considered Singer's arguments and had a delicious steak nonetheless; mathematicians and scientists don't have this problem. The problem with ethics is that you can't show systematically that meat, closed source software, homosexuality, infanticide, government, self-defense, or torture are justified or unjustified. You have to have some type of basis for logic, and even if you come up with some sort of foundational principle, there's nothing special about foundational principles that makes one any more or less likely to reject them than the conclusions you reach from them. The history of ethics is a history of people working out logically consistent ethical systems only to discover that they justified things like kidnapping strangers and killing them for their organs, and based on the "moral intuition" that it's wrong to kidnap strangers and kill them for their organs, the logically consistent ethical system was amended. The history of philosophy is filled with this kind of thing, but let's think about what we're doing here! What do we need ethics for if all we're going to do is change them when they end up having unintuitive results?
- impendia 15y ago
  You might read Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit if you haven't already. Not that he offers solutions per se, but he starts from a similar view of the subject.

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'.