Peter Andes is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Alberta. He specializes in moral and political philosophy. His PhD research is on the ethical issues involved in procreation.
What excites you about philosophy?
Just when I think I’ve made up my mind on some issue, I’ll encounter some forcefully made argument that totally throws my view into doubt. This is the thrilling, albeit unsettling and frustrating, part about philosophy in my view, and what I think first attracted me to it. I always wanted to have the right view on things, I never wanted to be lost in error and do the wrong thing, and hearing different sides of an issue was a way to try to make up my mind in order to come to the correct view, however we understand “correct” here (something else philosophers debate!).
As time has gone on, I think I’ve become a little less prone to thinking that the stances that seem obvious at first glance are necessarily the ones that we should hold, given that further reflection and hearing from other sides on an issue can lead us to find the initial position far less obvious. When looking for a way to understand what we are doing in philosophical debate, these days I think of the way John Stuart Mill and Charles Sanders Pierce thought about philosophical deliberation and debate, that in subjecting a position to different arguments we are trying to find that position that best survives the gauntlet of objection. That position may in the end fall and be replaced by another one at some further time, but this still seems the best way of testing positions and seeing which views might be the most defensible.
At the same time, however, I think I have also learned that sometimes some positions we hold seem so fundamental to our ideas about ourselves and to our very survival that even if there are strong arguments against them it may be prudent to wait to jettison them just yet. It is sometimes prudent to wait out a barrage of argument if the conviction in question is just so fundamental and so important for the way we live our lives. It is in such instances that we can think that the arguments we are hearing may be well constructed, but our deeply held intuition is just not worth giving up for some well-constructed arguments that may turn out to be flawed. Sometimes we just have to say, here I stand, and this is what I think and what makes the most sense to me, even if I can’t absolutely prove it to my opponent, and that’s that.
But when do we hold on to an intuition and when do we follow the argument against it? That’s the tricky part to decide! It is navigating these sorts of tensions, which is itself never straightforward and is often quite tricky, that draws me to philosophy in trying to determine the best way that we might think and act in the world, avoiding error as much as we can without sacrificing our everyday intuitions, our humanity, and what gives human life meaning as much as we can.
What are you most proud of in your professional life?
I am most proud of having an article I had been working on for a long time published in Utilitas, entitled “Sidgwick’s Dualism of Practical Reason, Evolutionary Debunking, and Moral Psychology”. There I take up the argument in favor of Henry Sidgwick’s rational intuitionism and utilitarianism offered by Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer in their book The Point of View of the Universe.
I was deeply interested in this book and its arguments for a long time, and whether or not there was a way that rational reflection alone could lead to the discover of a single moral principle that we all ought rationally to follow. In the article, I consider the argument Lazari-Radek and Singer offer, an evolutionary debunking explanation for the appeal of egoism. Lazari-Radek and Singer argue that we only find egoism appealing when we do because we are evolved to be self-interested, but we find utilitarianism appealing when we do on the grounds of rational reflection alone, which means that we should dismiss egoism and go with utilitarianism.
In the end, I argue against their conclusion, pointing out that we can possibly offer an evolutionary explanation for the appeal of rational benevolence too, which would mean it too would be debunked, and, even if we cannot, that on their own view it seems like once we have evolved the capacity for reason then we can arrive at conclusions based on reason that are not subject to evolutionary debunking arguments. If that is so, then we might just as well be using our capacity to reason to arrive at egoism, in which case egoism would be insulated from evolutionary debunking arguments, and so it seems like Sidgwick’s dualism, his conclusion that it seems like rational reflection supports both egoism and utilitarianism, seems unresolved.
Working on these issues has led me to think that it is difficult to argue that rational reflection alone points to one moral view, but I still think that classic arguments against egoism, such as that if you really want to look out for yourself you will find your life more meaningful and personally satisfying if you look out for others and forget about this egoism business, have some merit. As for utilitarianism, I find it interesting that thinkers like Francis Hutcheson and John Stuart Mill and Sidgwick argued that we should not always calculate the best consequences for our actions but rather most of the time rely on common sense notions of rights, “secondary principles”, and the intuitions of common sense morality, for this will actually be best for the general welfare in the long run. This seems to suggest to my mind that when utilitarians like Singer try to get us to depart from the common sense moral judgments that feel right to us, even if these judgments can seem a disorganized jumble at times, they may actually be misguided, since it is perhaps by following these common sense moral judgments that have developed over time that things actually may go better overall. (I don’t think we should push the large man off the bridge to stop the trolley in the famous bridge trolley case, for example, and whether we can back this up with an elaborate rational justification at the moment or not, perhaps we want people in our society sticking with their common sense intuitions like that doing harm is worse than allowing harm because without them our society would be worse overall. In the situation itself, I could certainly never push the large man! And that is probably a very good thing.) All this seems to me to leave us with little motivation for departing from our common sense moral judgments for either egoism or utilitarianism. However, as is always the case, there is still much room for debate on these matters.
What are you working on right now?
I am currently working on my PhD research on the ethics of procreation. Seana Shiffrin, David Benatar, and Rivka Weinberg have all investigated why it might be morally problematic to bring a child into existence when this will expose the child to suffering. Stuart Rachels has argued, based on Peter Singer’s work, that we ought to donate the money that would go into raising a child in affluent nations (usually estimated at around $250,000) to reliable aid agencies instead of having children. I am developing responses to their views, arguing that it is morally permissible to have children so long as the goods in the child’s life outweigh the harms, and provided that parents fulfill their obligation to offer their children a supportive parent-child relationship that can help them cope with life’s tragedies. On the global poverty front, I argue that, even if we accept that our obligations to the global poor are as demanding as Singer and Rachels suggest, we still might offset raising our child through donations and/or raise our children to do more good than otherwise would have been done if they had not been born. With these strategies, I hope to argue that it is morally permissible to have children, provided this is done responsibly.
What’s your personal philosophy?
I think life can often feel too messy or elusive to be summarized neatly in a single philosophical view, as much as this would be appealing to those of us with a philosophical disposition, but I have certainly been influenced in my thinking by a number of distinct philosophies and philosophers, including the pragmatism of William James, the moral sentimentalism of Francis Hutcheson, the virtue theory of Aristotle, and the approach of reflective equilibrium of John Rawls, just to name a few. Even as I would reject logical positivism, I find Otto Neurath’s “boat” analogy, that we are at sea on a ship where we can only change out a few planks (beliefs) at a time without sinking, to be a helpful way to think about many philosophical problems, just as in my mind Rawls’s reflective equilibrium is a kind of analogous process for ethics, where we start from where it seems we must begin, from our existing intuitions and candidate principles, and see where, if anywhere, we can go from there.
What would your childhood self say if someone told you that you would grow up to be a philosopher?
I can vaguely recall a conversation from my childhood with a few fellow schoolchildren. I think we were talking about different things one could major in or pursue in college, and we got to talking about what would happen if we chose a philosophy major. We all laughed and thought the idea of people just sitting around and thinking very deeply about great abstractions like “life” and “existence” was very funny. So it is funny that I came to study philosophy! I imagine my childhood self would be somewhat confused if he were to learn at that moment just what his future was.
I find that many people I meet just aren’t acquainted with the sorts of things philosophers argue about, which can be pretty down to earth and applied in the moral and political areas I work in. Many people still have the image of philosophy I had when I was a child. But then not everyone can learn about everything, I certainly don’t know much about a lot of disciplines and I am always trying to learn more, and so I don’t know that I could really expect other people to be much acquainted with the sort of moral and political theory and intellectual history that seems so pressing to me, especially when there are so many different things in life to think about that I have barely scratched the surface on.
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Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
