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

hand. To illustrate her view on abortion, for example, the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson (born 1929) asks her readers to imagine that they wake up one day to find themselves attached to a famous violinist. Similarly, while arguing that people have a moral duty to aid the starving, the philosopher Peter Singer contends that if you think that a person should be blamed for failing to save a child from drowning in a shallow pond you have committed yourself to thinking that you should give almost all of your income to famine relief.84

When faced with such examples normal people (that is, non-philosophers) are often incredulous. How on earth can such bizarre examples be relevant in any way to the moral issues that the philosophers who use them are discussing? But it’s not only the ordinary man on the street who is bemused by the way that philosophers argue about such real-world moral issues as famine, abortion, cloning and the like. People in charge of guiding public policy on such issues are also often completely bemused by (or, worse, contemptuous of) the way that philosophers discuss them. For example, Leon Kass, the Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics in the United States, has written that the contemporary philosophical discussion of cloning, stem cell research, and markets in human body parts “has grave weaknesses . . . [for] it ignores real moral agents and concrete moral situations . . . [preferring] . . . its own far-out, cleverly contrived dilemmas. . . .”85 Or, in other words, Kass thinks that the argumentative methods that philosophers use are as relevant to everyday life as a man with a stoat through his head.

Complaints about Complaints and Thinking about Thinking

So, should philosophy be considered just a strange and bizarre hobby, like camel spotting, collecting birdwatchers’ eggs, or teaching Scotsmen to play tennis? Not at all! In fact, philosophers’ argumentative strategies can be very useful in both clarifying the issues that they address and finding solutions to them. Since this is so, perhaps philosophers should follow the lead of John Cleese in the Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch “Complaints” (Episode 16, “Show 5”) and complain about people (such as Kass) who make rash complaints about philosophy without making sure that those complaints are justified. But before they do this, philosophers have to show why these complaints are rash and unjustified. And (happily enough!) John Cleese’s complaint in this sketch about people who make complaints shows just how philosophers should show this.

When Monty Python’s Flying Circus was first broadcast many people wrote in to complain about it. Far from being upset by this, the Python team was amused by the fact that many of the people who complained about them had clearly missed the point of the sketches they were complaining about. To make fun of such people they started making up complaints of their own to incorporate into their sketches. For example, after a sketch in which a psychiatrist dressed as a milkman made a pat diagnosis of a doctor’s depression as being the result of a severe personality disorder, Terry Jones, playing a psychiatrist called Dr. Cream, complained about “the way in which these shows are continually portraying psychiatrists who make pat diagnoses of patients’ problems without first obtaining their full medical history” (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 16, “Show 5”). The sketch then cut back to the milkman-psychiatrist with the doctor in time to hear the milkman say “Mind you, that’s just a pat diagnosis made without first obtaining your full medical history.” Given this cut, it turns out that the joke’s on Dr. Cream because his complaint fails to be justified once the milkman-psychiatrist issues his caveat to his patient. Moreover, as well as this cut back to the milkman making Dr. Cream the butt of the joke, it also makes fun of certain members of the Python audience, for it highlights how silly it is for the Pythons to be expected to have the characters in their sketches adhere to the professional standards of their occupations. Nobody would believe that a person dressed as a milkman from “Jersey Cream Psychiatrists” who diagnoses people while delivering their morning dairy products is an accurate representation of a real psychiatrist, and so to complain as though someone would believe this is just daft.

Not content with this, though, the Pythons also recognized that people might complain about the inclusion of such complaints into their sketches. To respond to this they had another character in the sketch “Complaints” (the “BALPA Man”) complain about “shows that have too many complaints in them as they get very tedious for the average viewer.” And, of course, including the BALPA Man’s complaint about shows with too many complaints in them itself added to the number of complaints in the show . . . and so Michael Palin then complained about people who hold things up by complaining about people complaining. Such a series of complaints about complaints about complaints could, of course, go on indefinitely, but fortunately a sixteen-ton weight fell on Michael after he’d made his complaint about people who complain about the inclusion of complaints about the Pythons’ sketches, and the chain was broken.

So, what does all this have to do with the price of butter? Nothing! But it does have a lot to do with the common complaint that philosophers’ examples aren’t relevant to the moral issues that they are supposed to illuminate. In “Complaints,” the Pythons anticipate complaints about their sketches, and incorporate these complaints into their sketches—and then anticipate complaints about their incorporation of these complaints into their sketches, and so on. We find the Pythons thinking about what their audience are thinking, and including their audiences’ thoughts about their sketches into their sketches humorous. And it is the Pythons’ innovative abstraction from writing comic sketches to thinking about why sketches are comic in order to make them funnier that is the key to explaining the