Monty Python and Philosophy, Gary Hardcastle [portable ebook reader TXT] 📗

explaining this, I am going to focus on my own area of expertise within philosophy, which is moral philosophy. But I think the claim is true in other areas of philosophy, and even beyond philosophy.

The Philosophical Argument and Reflective Equilibrium

What constitutes a philosophical argument? How does somebody go about constructing one? What, in other words, would the client be getting if he got what he wanted, at least if he got it from a philosopher? Assuming that most readers have a limited exposure to professional philosophy, I want to describe how philosophers go about making arguments, focusing on a particular method popularized by the American philosopher John Rawls (1926-2002), known as reflective equilibrium.25

Philosophy is the systematic study of questions, the answers to which cannot be determined simply by gathering observational data about the world and making hypotheses about those data. “What is on the telly?” is not a philosophical question, because ultimately it has to be addressed through observation. “What is the nature of knowledge?,” by contrast, is philosophical. Without experiences we could not address it, but its answer does not rest on observation. Philosophical questions may well have determinate answers. There is a truth about them. But theoretical, rather than empirical, reason is the means to arriving at the truth. My own particular interest is in moral philosophy, the field within philosophy that asks questions about how we should live our lives, and what constitutes goodness. It addresses large general questions such as “What makes a flourishing human life?”; “Does the moral value of actions lie in their consequences or in the motives behind them?” and “Are states of affairs or the characters of persons the ultimate bearers of value?” and also much more specific questions such as “Is abortion morally wrong?” and “Is it ever right to lie?”

These questions simply cannot be answered by gathering empirical, or scientific, evidence. So how do we try to work out the answers to them? Philosophy rejects appeals to authority. Good philosophers never offer anything like “As the great thinker Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson argues . . .” as support for their claims (although they might preface an explanation of what is wrong with Arthur’s views with a comment on his greatness). So they can’t resort to The Holy Bible, the Ten Commandments, or the sayings of Spike Milligan, profound as they are. Such appeals replace the question “What is moral?” with “Why are Spike Milligan’s, or The Holy Bible’s, sayings morally authoritative?” But we can’t answer that question without establishing what is moral in the first place. So we might as well have started with that question.

Since neither authority nor empirical evidence is decisive, how do we do it? As suggested above, the method that most contemporary philosophers use is what Rawls called reflective equilibrium. This method invites us to approach questions about morality, and philosophical questions generally, in the following way. Taking up a topic like justice, or punishment, or lying, we first list our considered judgments about specific particular cases, and look at whether these all fit together consistently. Where we find that they don’t fit together we reject those judgments in which we have least confidence (for example, those in which we have reason to suspect there is an element of self-interest pressing us to that particular judgment). We also list the general principles, or rules, we judge suitable to cover cases, and look to see if those principles fit together as well, again rejecting the principles in which we have least confidence. Then we look at the particular judgments and the principles in the light of one another—do they fit together? Do some of the principles look less plausible in the light of the weight of considered judgments, or vice versa?

Of course, all that this method gives us is, at best, a set of judgments that fit together; what philosophers call a consistent set of judgments. But if we engage in the process collectively, in conversation with others who are rational like us, we can have increasing confidence in the truth of the outcomes. Other people can bring out considerations we had not noticed; they can alert us to weaknesses in our own judgments; they can force us to think harder and better. If we converge on conclusions about particular cases with people with whom we otherwise disagree a great deal, we should have even more confidence in our judgment. We can’t ever be certain that we have arrived at a final, true view of justice, or punishment, or lying. But this method at least gives us a way of making some progress.

What exactly do I mean by “judgments about particular cases” and “principles”? An autobiographical comment which, I’m afraid, does not reflect particularly well on me, will help. In the late 1970s I held a view that, I think, was quite common among British teenagers with my political outlook, which was that there was no reason to grant free speech to racists, or anyone with anti-social views, and that it was entirely fine for the government to censor offensive films. So, the principle I held was something like this: “Governments should have the power to censor expression when it meets some objective criteria for being anti-social.” One morning I turned on the radio and heard Jimmy Young (a DJ) announce that he was soon going to be talking to a Church of England vicar who was trying to have a new film, “Rimbaud,” banned from his local cinema. My reaction was outrage—“How dare this busy-bodying minister try to shut down a film about the great homosexual French poet Arthur Rimbaud?” (Here we have a judgment about an individual case: it is wrong to censor this film). When the discussion began, however, it turned out that the vicar objected not to the film’s portrayal of homosexuality, but to its excessive violence. The film was, in fact, entirely devoid of reference to homosexuality or poetry, and had I heard the vicar