You know what I am sick of hearing and reading about? How facts, logic, and reasoning don’t matter to people.
Likewise, if there’s one stereotype about our profession that I cannot abide by, it is that what we do as philosophers and philosophy teachers has no practical value. Or that our heads are forever in the clouds. Or that our investigations are pointless (these views are different but related).
And if there’s one response to that stereotype that both frustrates (and saddens) me, it is that we specialize in and teach many skills that are valuable in the workplace. That response concedes that to have value is to have value in the workplace. So I will set that question-beggingly narrow response aside, though I want to note that we certainly teach skills that are both in decline and indispensable to most careers: careful listening, critical reading, creative problem solving, and of course, clear writing and speaking. Our students know their way around an argument.
Of course, the old-school way of teaching informal logic/critical thinking with an emphasis on recognizing fallacies and punishing those who use them is bullshit, and it plays to another stereotype of our profession that remains sadly true: that no one does the thrust and parry better, or, for that matter, more gleefully.
The study of philosophy teaches not just the fine and useful nuts and bolts of the skills listed, but puts learners on a path to phronêsis, Aristotle’s and other ancients’ notion of practical wisdom about cultivating the virtues that make living a good life possible.
How?
First, that knowledge of how an argument works that I mentioned earlier—and sensitivity more generally to the logic of rival positions—can sharpen up decision-making in any domain. Should you support your town’s plan to reduce the deer population? (What presuppositions underpin the goal to reduce it? What are the alternatives to the one proposed? Did they factor in the deer’s pain in the proposed plan? Why or why not? Did they consider the likely longer-term consequences for other species and vegetation in the area?) What kind of cancer screening should you seek or agree to? (What would you do with the results? What do long-term studies show about the treatment’s effects on mortality rates? What are the risks of the tests themselves? Did the studies include women or people of color?) No amount of empirical data from the experts will reveal the logical strengths or weaknesses of rival positions.
Second, nor will empirical data from the experts—just the facts, ma’am—settle the question of what values we should prioritize in our decision-making. Do human interests always outweigh those of non-human animals? If so, why? How do the goods of the non-animal environment figure into our thinking? Are values instrumental or intrinsic? What are your ethical lines in the sand, and why? Philosophy helps you think through and clarify your own values in part by putting you into direct contact with thrilling minds like Hume’s. Who cannot be sparked to reflection by his: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” (Sect. III., A Treatise of Human Nature.)
Third, when the practice of philosophy is done well, one can discover and develop agency. When someone is drawn into the activity of philosophical conversation, she comes to see herself as a new voice participating in the long tradition of examining the most complex questions about what there is, what we value in life, how we know (and deceive) ourselves, and the range and limits of our knowledge of the world. Along that path, one may acquire a new sense of selfhood, transformed and metaphysical. Nowhere has this been more clear than in my prison philosophy book group. In a meeting just before the pandemic lockdown, one of the men declared joyfully of Symposium, 199d, [“Is Love such a thing as to be a love of something or nothing?”]: “I’d have known blindfolded that Plato was in the house; now it’s gonna get good!” To be sure, this man was into Plato’s account of love that follows, but a large part of his pleasure came from an appreciation of his own appreciation and his newfound critical voice.
And finally, figuring out who you are and want to be is, for many of us, a lifetime project, but for some, the first giant leap happens at just the moment we end our formal required schooling in high school, and, for the lucky few, start college. The study of philosophy at these crucial junctures can be indispensable to opening eyes to fundamental questions about so many things we have been taught are, or have absorbed as, givens.
Sure, philosophers promote critical detachment from the thick of our practices and assessment of them from some distance. Perhaps that’s from where the head-in-the-clouds stereotype comes (I admit that sometimes when I flip into that mode, I feel like I’m undergoing an Avatar-ish transformation). Still, it’s not a God’s eye view, and that shift in perspective often illuminates corners of a subject or a problem we would not have been able to see otherwise.
What do we really know about the world? What have you mindlessly accepted? Who are you? What’s important to you? What is the good life? Indeed, how should you live?
Take, for an applied, public example, the panel discussion my college set up after the SCOTUS Dobbs decision (and ahead of a visit by Mary Ziegler, professor of law at the University of California, Davis, to talk about Dobbs). The panel was comprised of a Government professor who talked about the legislative history of some high-profile abortion cases, a Women’s and Gender Studies professor who talked about the twisted path evangelical Christians took to get to their current extreme stance, and me, a Philosophy professor.
Here is how I proceeded:
On Tuesday, September 20th, 2022, Senator Lindsay Graham declared that “Abortion is not a states’ right issue.”
Indeed! And I am going to give two independent but intertwined arguments in favor of keeping the state (capital or small “s”) out altogether of this categorically personal health decision. What is at stake with Roe and Dobbs?
First and foremost: Dobbs settles the question of who decides whether someone should have to continue a pregnancy or have an abortion in just the wrong way. The fundamental thing at stake in the prospect of a reversal of Roe v. Wade is that that medical decision will no longer be in the hands of the person experiencing it, and their doctor; rather, that decision would be in the hands of the state. The bodily autonomy of the pregnant person is uniquely directly on the line. No one in the United States is compelled by law to donate a drop of blood, for example, even to save the life of their child. (Cf. Judith Jarvis Thompson’s “In Defense of Abortion.”) The view that the government—state or federal—should have the power to compel a pregnant person to continue an unwanted pregnancy is completely out of step with the rest of the law regulating healthcare decision-making, and it has to be based, likewise, on the view that someone else’s interests are directly at stake in this decision, in other words, that fetus’s interests take precedence over the healthcare decision-making of the pregnant person. The debate about the moral status of the fetus is a fundamentally metaphysical one with answers that vary historically and culturally, and religiously, not to mention from person to person. No amount of empirical, objective data will settle the question of the moral status of the fetus, about which reasonable people disagree profoundly. We certainly look at certain facts and decide whether or how much they matter, which is, again, not a mere examination of them. A law that prohibits abortion robs people of the right to act according to their beliefs about the normative question of the status of the fetus and our bodily responsibilities to it, if any. Allowing the state to force pregnant people to stay pregnant and give birth overrides that deep moral disagreement, and instead legislates one moral position on all citizens.
Second—and yes, this should be obvious—letting states be the arbiters of this healthcare decision criminalizes healthcare; indeed, it criminalizes pregnancy. State legislation dictating that abortion is illegal without exception, or illegal past a certain point in the pregnancy, or legal only to save the life of the pregnant person—ties the hands of healthcare providers who rightly fear that treating life-threatening complications will land them in jail. And the gray areas about the degree of danger the patient is in, gestational age, and which conditions are not compatible with the life of the pregnant person or the fetus are, while exceptions, not rare exceptions.
What’s right and wrong about the decades-long abortion rights activism slogan “We are PRO-CHOICE America”—even after Roe legalized abortion? What about the substantial impediments to being able to make meaningful choices to have kids and raise them in healthy conditions? Or not to have kids? Who has the money and transportation and time off from work to exercise the right to get an abortion? SisterSong, the Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, was formed in 1997 by sixteen organizations of women of color to address many of the inequities I mentioned above, and in time the leading abortion rights organizations joined in as partners in defending reproductive justice.
But since the legal right to have an abortion is a necessary, if woefully insufficient, component of reproductive justice, and we are now back at square one, having just lost that right, we must again pose NARAL’s ancient question: Who Decides?
The Current Events Series of Public Philosophy of the APA Blog aims to share philosophical insights about current topics of today. If you would like to contribute to this series, email rbgibson@utmb.edu or sabrinamisirhiralall@apaonline.org.
Katheryn Doran
Katheryn Doran teaches courses on American philosophy, environmental ethics, and philosophy and film at Hamilton College. She co-edited Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the Basic Skills and has published papers on skepticism, and philosophy and film. She served on the APA Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy 2013-16, and was the guest editor of the APA Newsletter on teaching philosophy in non-traditional settings. Doran has run a philosophy book group in prison from 2007-2020 and looks forward to resuming that work.
https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/our-faculty/directory/faculty-detail/katheryn-doran
