Category Archives: Practical Philosophy

Against “moral intuitions”

16 Sunday Aug 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Foundations of Ethics, Morality, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

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One of the biggest problems with analytical ethics, as it’s usually practised, is the reliance on “moral intuitions” as data for ethical judgements. “Intuitions” themselves are not the problem, as long as we think of them as Martha Nussbaum does in The Fragility of Goodness, as “prevalent ordinary beliefs,” the relatively commonsense understandings that make up our starting point, like Gadamer’s Vorurteilen (prejudices). We have to start our enquiry where we are, making sense of the beliefs we already have, rejecting some in the light of others.

But contemporary ethicists often go further than this, giving our unreflective “intuitions” a high status they do not deserve. Continue reading →

Can justice make you happy?

13 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Karma, Morality, Psychology, Shame and Guilt, Virtue

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About ten years ago, after my epiphany in Thailand, I tried to put together a philosophy based on virtue and happiness. The central idea was one I endorsed earlier in discussing karma: that overall, in most cases, the more virtuous you are, the happier you will be. I would still endorse that thesis; I’m just much less likely now to think of happiness as the sole purpose of life.

So after the Thailand trip, I started trying to compile a list of the virtues. This was before the long and comprehensive lists found in André Comte-Sponville’s book and the research of Peterson and Seligman, so there were some virtues I missed just because I didn’t think of them. But another virtue was a deliberate omission: justice.

Love and honesty, I thought, did all the work that we might think justice needs to do; justice is superfluous. (Walter Kaufmann made a similar claim in The Faith of a Heretic.) Being honest makes it easier to trust and be trusted by the people around us; giving love allows us to be loved. So the two each make us happy, and together they produce most of what is conventionally thought of as morality: love makes us concerned for the consequences of our actions on others, honesty prevents us from doing deceptive things. Justice seems unnecessary, and especially, it doesn’t make us happy. So it’s dispensable.

I think I had this view about because of an ambiguity in most discussions of justice.
Comte-Sponville’s often edifying book exemplifies the problem. While he says justice is the most important virtue, he doesn’t give us reason to believe that it is a virtue – at least, not a personal virtue in any way comparable to the other virtues in the book (gratitude, gentleness, compassion). Most of Comte-Sponville’s discussion of justice draws on John Rawls, and Rawls is clear from the outset of his book that he sees justice as a virtue of social institutions, not of people. Comte-Sponville could have dropped his justice chapter entirely, and the account of personal virtue presented by the book would not have been diminished; what that chapter addresses .

Eventually, though, my views changed. I came to realize that justice is a virtue after one difficult incident. Continue reading →

Chastened intellectualism and practice

06 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by in African Thought, Christianity, Confucianism, Greek and Roman Tradition, Human Nature, Humility, Metaphilosophy, Practice, Unconscious Mind

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My previous post discusses the problem that academic philosophy doesn’t do a whole lot to make us better people; its main defence is that it isn’t supposed to. But then what is?

Aaron Stalnaker addresses this point in his book Overcoming Our Evil. It compares Augustine and Xunzi, two thinkers from faraway contexts who share a commonly pessimistic assessment of human nature. I had some serious methodological concerns about Stalnaker’s work in the sixth chapter of my dissertation – basically that the work isn’t as relevant to constructive ethical reflection as it claims to be – but I’ve softened a bit on those concerns since writing the dissertation. While I still don’t think that Stalnaker’s work itself makes the constructive contributions it claims to make, I do think that its categories are helpful for others who do want to make such contributions.

Specifically: what Augustine and Xunzi have in common, according to Stalnaker, is “chastened intellectualism.” While they agree that we can know a great deal of the truth about how we should live, they also agree that knowing the truth is not enough to make us act accordingly – contradicting at least some readings of Plato. Some sort of further practice is required. Pierre Hadot points out that in Roman times such practices were viewed as integral to philosophy. (Jonathan Schofer, on my dissertation committee, kept insisting that I pay greater attention to Śāntideva’s accounts of practices, and now I’m seeing why.)

I’m very sympathetic to such an account, from my personal experience. It was one thing to realize that my own attitudes and behaviours were the big problem in my life. It has been quite another to actually change those attitudes and behaviours.

But then seekers like me face a problem. Augustine and Xunzi recommend practices that are embedded within a particular tradition – Christianity and Confucianism respectively – each of which I find highly problematic. There’s a lot I disagree with in Buddhism as well; I don’t think any tradition has managed to fully grasp truth (though I also certainly don’t claim to have done so myself!) Some traditions of practice (like Goenka’s) claim to be non-sectarian techniques, but nevertheless incorporate a great deal of their tradition’s own teachings. (At the same time, Goenka’s technique didn’t do a lot for me, with one major exception.)

What then are we seekers to do? Should we swallow the practices of an existing tradition whole even while disagreeing with it, as a part of developing a necessary humility? Or should we pick and choose to make our own practice, retaining intellectual integrity but giving ourselves less chance to learn from what’s out there?

Ethicists aren’t especially ethical

04 Tuesday Aug 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Social Science, Virtue

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I’ve been waiting for these survey results, by philosophy professors Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust, to come out. (Schwitzgebel is a fellow blogger whom I referred to last time.) I was among the 200 philosophers they surveyed at the 2007 APA conference, identifying myself as an ethicist. The answers I gave appear to match the answers most other people gave: ethicists are not usually better people than non-ethicists. That is (respondents said when they elaborated their opinions), ethicists are not typically more conscientious, fair, generous, honest, kind, selfless or thoughtful than other philosophers, or than non-academics.

Schwitzgebel and Rust surveyed philosophers as the people who presumably knew ethicists the best. Obviously there are problems with the extremely non-random sample in the survey methodology (whoever wanted a cookie or candy at the conference filled out the survey). Still it’s useful because the result is, on the one hand, pretty obvious to anyone who hangs around philosophy departments (I had no doubt the results would turn out as they did), and on the other hand, somewhat troubling. If studying ethics doesn’t make us more ethical, in some sense, then is it worth doing?

The question is unfair to some extent. Many ethicists focus on the application of ethics to very specific contexts, where it’s not obvious what the right thing to do is. Others focus on the nature of ethical claims: how can we really say something is good or right, in the first place? Answering either of these questions isn’t really supposed to make us more virtuous people, any more than studying sociology or physics is.

And yet there’s still a problem here. What if we do want to be better people? Academic ethics, at least in some cases, should teach us what it is to be a good person. But that doesn’t make us good people, any more than we become good soccer players just by knowing what a good soccer player does. It might help, but really we need something else. What is that something else? I’ll try to say more in my next post.

Do we know whether we’re happy?

02 Sunday Aug 2009

Posted by in Economics, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Pleasure, Psychology

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Rosalind Hursthouse has an entry on virtue ethics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where she tries to explain why “happiness” is not an adequate translation of the Greek word eudaimonia (human flourishing, blessedness, good life). The trouble with “happiness,” she says, is that in contemporary English

it connotes something which is subjectively determined. It is for me, not for you, to pronounce on whether I am happy, or on whether my life, as a whole, has been a happy one, for, barring, perhaps, advanced cases of self-deception and the suppression of unconscious misery, if I think I am happy then I am — it is not something I can be wrong about.

I think Hursthouse is severely understating matters here. Continue reading →

Stumbling on happiness

30 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in Family, Flourishing, Happiness, Psychology

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Rare is the philosopher who doesn’t give happiness a significant place in the good life. Even Kant, often caricatured as making no room for happiness, still says both that it is a duty to secure one’s own happiness in this world, and that one needs to hope for happiness in the afterlife. Happiness, then, is a topic of key philosophical importance, whether by “happiness” we mean the pleasant mental state aimed at by Bentham or the broader conception of human flourishing in Aristotle’s eudaimonia; and most accounts of the latter include some element of the former.

We would do well, then, to pay attention to the burgeoning field of psychologists’ empirical research on happiness. The field faces a number of methodological problems, but comes to interesting insights in spite of these. One deservedly popular book in the field is Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, a well written and engaging summary of current research. Gilbert does a good job of summarizing many psychologists’ counterintuitive findings about happiness.

The problem is that some of Gilbert’s conclusions contradict not only common sense – which isn’t a problem, because contradicting common sense is the point – but each other. He concludes at the end that we are not as different from other people as we think we are, and that therefore in order to be happy we should ask other people what makes them happy. Yet elsewhere in the book he acknowledges that people don’t themselves know what makes them happy. The most obvious example is children: ask anyone who has children and they will tell you their children are their key source of joy, yet every study on the subject concludes we get less happy when children are born, and happier again when they leave. Which is to say that according to Gilbert’s own data, other people’s self-report is not the best place to find out what will make you happy.

The Buddhist critique of hope

26 Sunday Jul 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, External Goods, Happiness, Hope

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In her class on Buddhist ethics, Janet Gyatso once described Buddhism as a “critique of hope.” The statement has two flaws. First, of course, it’s an overgeneralization, like any statement about Buddhism as such; more importantly, it misses the hope for liberation, awakening, nirvana. Nevertheless, it strikes me as being basically true in many respects. This is perhaps another way of putting the critique of external goods: most Buddhist thinkers tell us to avoid hoping that the external conditions of our lives will get better, focusing instead on improving ourselves and making ourselves better able to deal with those conditions. On old BBSes I remember a message tagline saying “I feel so much better ever since I’ve given up hope.” In a certain sense, Buddhists urge us to be hopeless.

The problem is that in English this is not at all what “hopelessness” means. This kind of hopelessness is an arguably positive state; but normally “hopelessness” simply means despair, a terribly negative state. The reason, it seems to me, is that the word “hope” means two things at once: first, the strong desire that things be different than they are, and second, the expectation that they will become so, or at least have a chance of becoming so. Despair – hopelessness in the normal sense – is the first of these without the second. But the Buddhist critique is that it’s the first one that causes our problems, whether or not we have the second. Let go of the first, and the second doesn’t matter anymore.

It’s a self-help commonplace that we will never be happy as long as we tell ourselves “I’ll be happy when…” But that “I’ll be happy when” requires hope. If we give up the hope that we might have the things we want, it pushes us into contentment with the life we already have.

My story: finding Buddhism

23 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Happiness, Modernized Buddhism

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My previous post examined the problems that led me to move away from utilitarianism, including its Rawlsian variant. Happily, I also found solutions.

Wat ThammamongkhonWhile working at the UN in Bangkok, I spent a lot of time at Thai Buddhist temples, because I thought they were the most beautiful places I’d ever seen – such incredible feasts of colour. I didn’t just go to the biggest and glitziest, the main tourist attractions; as an urban geographer I wanted to explore the city, and I kept heading to temples way off the beaten track. This attracted a lot of curiosity from monks who rarely saw foreigners, so I had a lot of conversations with monks – people who, having started with very little, chose to have even less. I got fascinated by Buddhism – both from my encounters with monks, and from the idea of a nontheistic religion. So I kept heading back to the used bookstores on Khao San Road, devouring whatever I could find about Buddhism – finding the likes of Walpola Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught.

But Buddhism hadn’t yet made a difference in my life, while I was working in Bangkok. That would come later, as I travelled through Laos and upcountry Thailand, keeping philosophical journals as I went.

In my journals, I came to reflect on the fact of my own dissatisfaction. In my times at McGill I had felt very unhappy because I lacked a good job and a girlfriend. In Bangkok I had a girlfriend, but the relationship made me even more unhappy. I also had a well paying job opportunity that many would envy, but in an environment so charged with politicking that I couldn’t wait to get out. Finally, of course, the job did end, and I had the chance I’d been waiting for, to travel for fun upcountry. But I was lonely, travelling all by myself; what I wanted was some people to talk to. Then I met some Thai people at a guesthouse who wanted to talk, but they didn’t speak much English so the conversation was limited. So I wanted to find some fellow foreigners to talk to in English – and I did, but I didn’t like them very much.

I took some stock of this situation in my journals. These events sounded to me like some sort of Buddhist parable; I just wished I could figure out what the point was. But eventually I did. I thought especially of the Second Noble Truth from the Pali suttas, that suffering comes from craving. Maybe, I thought, the problem isn’t with me not getting the things I want. Maybe the problem is with me. At age 21, especially for someone who’d grown up frequently being treated as if he was the smartest person on the planet, that’s the kind of realization that can change your world. It did change mine.

And yet, all the Western philosophy that I’d learned before didn’t just go away. I’d learned important, powerful, beautiful things that seemed true – and often seemed opposite to the Buddhism I’d found myself in. Is there a way to reconcile the two? One way or another, that question has been central to my life ever since.

My story: a break with utilitarianism

21 Tuesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Politics, Social Science, Work

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I’ve noticed that the “About me” page on this blog has so far got more views than any other. So I hope it won’t be overly narcissistic of me to wax autobiographical for a moment, and expand (in this post and the next) on the story that I tell there, of how I came to the kind of philosophy I have now.

Philosophy intrigued me a lot in high school. My first real exposure to it was in grade 9, in 1990, in a mini-course at Queen’s University offered to precocious high-school students in my home town; I came to really enjoy it in a philosophy course that my high school offered in grade 12. What appealed to me most at the time was ethics, in a conventional sense (as opposed to the expanded sense that matters to me now): explanations of why we should do what we should do. But what those courses taught me above all was that I was a committed utilitarian; everything came down to acting for the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Mill’s Utilitarianism was the first philosophical book I ever read in the original. It’s no coincidence that I was also a dedicated political activist at the time, participating in every left-wing cause I could get my hands on.

I started having philosophical qualms about utilitarianism soon afterwards, as I began my undergrad years studying sociology and urban geography at McGill; I couldn’t find a satisfying philosophical justification for it. I hadn’t read John Rawls at the time, but if I had, I probably would have become a worshipful devotee of his. (As I noted last time, while Rawls isn’t a utilitarian as such, and devotes much of his energy to attacking utilitarianism, the resulting worldview looks very much like utilitarianism’s: a life spent in political action to uplift the most deprived people.)

But while I saw problems with a utilitarian worldview, there wasn’t much to replace it, and during those years I remained more or less a utilitarian by default. Things really changed after graduation, when I went to work for the United Nations in Bangkok, trying to edit works that would help coordinate efforts for people with disabilities in Asia and the Pacific: a supremely utilitarian or Rawlsian job, aiming to help out millions of people in the direst of physical conditions.

And I found there was that I was terribly unhappy. Small things, like paper jams on printers, drove me to desperation. I wasn’t all that much more unhappy than I’d been in the previous years, but I was noticing it more. My unhappiness posed a significant problem for a utilitarian worldview, a problem that standard critiques of utilitarianism usually don’t get at. Namely: in the name of the greatest happiness, I was trying to help ensure that all these poor and deprived people could have the kinds of opportunities I’d had in my own privileged upbringing. But what good is it do to that, if someone with all these opportunities and privilege can still end up miserable?

Rawls the utilitarian

19 Sunday Jul 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Economics, Happiness, Morality, Politics

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John Rawls is widely recognized as one of the most important critics of utilitarianism. In some respects he is; utilitarianism per se became much less popular in analytic philosophical circles after the publication of Rawls’s work. Yet in another respect, Rawls’s work is fundamentally a continuation of the utilitarian project – softening John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism in something very much like the way that Mill had softened Bentham’s. Continue reading →