Over at Leiter Reports, a debate has erupted over a talk given by Carlin Romano, one of Leiter's favourite favourite punching-bags and philosophical provocateur of the highest order. In this talk, Romano accused analytic philosophers of being out of touch with social and historical reality, of being needlesly abstruse, and of employing techincal jargon that served to alienate them from the rest of humanity.
The following day, Peter Ludlow rose to offer a stirring defense of the philosopher's "toolkit", the concepts, distinctions and jargon that he or she uses to communicate to others in his or her special field. Not only did Ludlow argue that this form of linguistic expertise is essential to the "conceptual mining" that characterizes our field, but he also suggested that it was extremely unfair to require of philosophy (and not of physics or geometry) that it defend its use of specialized linguistic tools.
Now, if I wanted to defend Romano on this score, I might offer the following short argument. Ethics is a major part of philosophy. Therefore, if Ludlow is right about "philosophy", it must be the case that the philsophical ethicist is justified in using linguistic tools and contstructing theories that the rest of the population cannot use or understand. Yet, something insidious lurks in this suggestion. It is the thought that a trained philosopher can, simply by virtue of his training, know more about concepts like goodness, rightness and virtue than an untrained person.
This seems to follow from what has already been said. If a central purpose of philosophy is to clarify and extend our use of concepts, then the justification for constructing an abstruse specialized theoretical toolkit will presumably lie in the understanding and practical wisdom that it enables. Yet, ex hypothesi, this is a specialized toolkit, one which is designed to be for those who wish to study philosophy in an especially dedicated and rigorous way. It follows that specialists will know more about central ethical concepts than ordinary people, even intelligent and sensitive ordinary people. This can't be right, can it?
It will be objected that this is too quick: surely I am equivocating on two senses of "know". There is the philosopher's ethical knowledge, which involves a theoretical characterization of the ethical life, and there is the ordinary person's ethical knowledge, which is rightly nonreflective and "intuitive". Yet, consider what is being attributed to the two persons in such a description. The ordinary person lives and acts in a basically correct way, but she does not know what makes her actions and dispositions the correct ones to have.
Indeed, the reasons for which she acts will most often not connect up in any significant way with the philosopher's special theory1 (how could they?). This vision of specialized philosophical ethics still implies that ordinary people are quite often radically mistaken about why they are good. The mother believes that caring for her child is good, and she believes this because her child's welfare has, for her, intrinsic value. The Kantian, looking down from his vaunted position in the academy, knows that in fact she is fulfilling her imperfect duty of beneficence towards the needy. The consequentialist knows that she is acting on a character trait which, if generally shared, will tend to maximize general welfare. The virtue ethicist knows that what makes her caring right is that it instantiates a trait that will reliably lead to her flourishing. The meta-ethicist...
...well, this is too easy, isn't it?
By contrast, we readily accept the notion that scientific concepts and terminolology will almost certainly outstrip the ordinary person's understanding. This is because our conception of science builds in the idea that the scientist can improve ordinary thinking. That he can, in Sellars' words, displace the manifest image in favour of the scientific image. Similarly, the idea of an "easily understandable" language of metaphysics seems absurd. We suspect that a full description of "reality" is likely to require finer and more delicate tools than ordinary language can provide.
No such supposition is built into ethical thought. We do not generally suppose that there is ethical content lying below the caring mother's authentic expression of love. Her love is that foundational ethical content, the very stuff that ethicists are supposed to make sense out of. The suggestion that there is room to displace it seems at best dogmatic and at worst tyrannical. As soon as those ethicists begin to distance themselves from her lived experience and from her beliefs about what makes her life a good one, they begin to parody themselves.
A "toolkit" is just one of the ways that this absurd distance can be created, as is an ethical theory. It isn't necessarily the case that all specialized language must alienate in this way, but the tension here does appear to run very deep in ways that it may not for epistemology or metaphysics. I do not know how to resolve it, but I suspect that Ludlow's across-the-board dismissal of Romano's position only makes sense if we forget (as a frustrating number of philosophers seem to when talking about their discipline) that ethics is and has always been a central part of philosophy.
The following day, Peter Ludlow rose to offer a stirring defense of the philosopher's "toolkit", the concepts, distinctions and jargon that he or she uses to communicate to others in his or her special field. Not only did Ludlow argue that this form of linguistic expertise is essential to the "conceptual mining" that characterizes our field, but he also suggested that it was extremely unfair to require of philosophy (and not of physics or geometry) that it defend its use of specialized linguistic tools.
Now, if I wanted to defend Romano on this score, I might offer the following short argument. Ethics is a major part of philosophy. Therefore, if Ludlow is right about "philosophy", it must be the case that the philsophical ethicist is justified in using linguistic tools and contstructing theories that the rest of the population cannot use or understand. Yet, something insidious lurks in this suggestion. It is the thought that a trained philosopher can, simply by virtue of his training, know more about concepts like goodness, rightness and virtue than an untrained person.
This seems to follow from what has already been said. If a central purpose of philosophy is to clarify and extend our use of concepts, then the justification for constructing an abstruse specialized theoretical toolkit will presumably lie in the understanding and practical wisdom that it enables. Yet, ex hypothesi, this is a specialized toolkit, one which is designed to be for those who wish to study philosophy in an especially dedicated and rigorous way. It follows that specialists will know more about central ethical concepts than ordinary people, even intelligent and sensitive ordinary people. This can't be right, can it?
It will be objected that this is too quick: surely I am equivocating on two senses of "know". There is the philosopher's ethical knowledge, which involves a theoretical characterization of the ethical life, and there is the ordinary person's ethical knowledge, which is rightly nonreflective and "intuitive". Yet, consider what is being attributed to the two persons in such a description. The ordinary person lives and acts in a basically correct way, but she does not know what makes her actions and dispositions the correct ones to have.
Indeed, the reasons for which she acts will most often not connect up in any significant way with the philosopher's special theory1 (how could they?). This vision of specialized philosophical ethics still implies that ordinary people are quite often radically mistaken about why they are good. The mother believes that caring for her child is good, and she believes this because her child's welfare has, for her, intrinsic value. The Kantian, looking down from his vaunted position in the academy, knows that in fact she is fulfilling her imperfect duty of beneficence towards the needy. The consequentialist knows that she is acting on a character trait which, if generally shared, will tend to maximize general welfare. The virtue ethicist knows that what makes her caring right is that it instantiates a trait that will reliably lead to her flourishing. The meta-ethicist...
...well, this is too easy, isn't it?
By contrast, we readily accept the notion that scientific concepts and terminolology will almost certainly outstrip the ordinary person's understanding. This is because our conception of science builds in the idea that the scientist can improve ordinary thinking. That he can, in Sellars' words, displace the manifest image in favour of the scientific image. Similarly, the idea of an "easily understandable" language of metaphysics seems absurd. We suspect that a full description of "reality" is likely to require finer and more delicate tools than ordinary language can provide.
No such supposition is built into ethical thought. We do not generally suppose that there is ethical content lying below the caring mother's authentic expression of love. Her love is that foundational ethical content, the very stuff that ethicists are supposed to make sense out of. The suggestion that there is room to displace it seems at best dogmatic and at worst tyrannical. As soon as those ethicists begin to distance themselves from her lived experience and from her beliefs about what makes her life a good one, they begin to parody themselves.
A "toolkit" is just one of the ways that this absurd distance can be created, as is an ethical theory. It isn't necessarily the case that all specialized language must alienate in this way, but the tension here does appear to run very deep in ways that it may not for epistemology or metaphysics. I do not know how to resolve it, but I suspect that Ludlow's across-the-board dismissal of Romano's position only makes sense if we forget (as a frustrating number of philosophers seem to when talking about their discipline) that ethics is and has always been a central part of philosophy.
-----
1 I take this to be one of the major thrusts of Michael Stocker's paper, "The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories", though Stocker does appear to want to exempt Aristotle from the charge.
3 comments:
You say people accept jargon in science because it can "improve ordinary thinking", but I'd say we accept it because science gets results. We might not understand a word of a physics text book, but science put men on the moon and an iPhone in my hand - and that's a pretty knock-down argument.
Alas, philosophy doesn't have quite such a great track-record. It's slogan is "We're making progress towards an answer" but the answer never quite seems to arrive.
In such a situation you can't blame some people for getting suspicious and thinking that maybe all the jargon is a bit of a smoke-screen.
Romano's comments do seem to have been needlessly rude and dismissive. All the same I think analytic philosophy has a case to answer and "jam tomorrow" is not a particularly satisfying one.
BTW, your worry about moral philosophy is a pertinent one. And actually something similar applies to analytical philosophy as well - it takes a philosopher (or perhaps a scientist with a philosopher in tow) to show us what a word means.
I agree, but don't blame Kant. After all, he was the one who pointed out, long before Stocker, the absurdity in wanting to discover new truths of morality, as if people didn't already know what duty means.
Heh. I appreciate your comment, Anonymous, but there is hardly a philosopher in history who has obscured the concept of duty as Kant has. In order to actually understand why one's Kantian right action is right, one has to understand the noumenal self, the presuppositions of moral action (a benevloent God, immortality, freedom), one has to understand what a subjective maxim of action is, one has to know what it means to universalize a maxim (or, more correctly, to think one is universalizing a maxim), and, above all, one has to take even the deepest parts of one's motivational identity as alien forces--'inclinations' as Kant calls them.
Kant is happy to admit that most people don't need to know all of this, but the fact remains: they don't know it, and therefore if any one of those poor, untutored persons thinks he knows why what he does is right, then he is thereby mistaken.
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