Why majoring in Philosophy might make you a better citizen than you might have thought

My department just held its second annual ceremony celebrating our graduating majors and, again, the chair was kind enough to ask me to make some remarks (you can find last year’s remarks here). Again I followed two of our majors, whose talks were excellent.

I’m posting the comments here, again, partly because it was fun, and partly as a resource for others. Last time I invited people to use whatever they want without attribution and, again, feel free though in this case the two personal examples make that a little more difficult.

I have omitted four jokes that went down particularly well, three of which don’t look quite right in writing, the other of which was spontaneous. But the video of the speech is up on facebook and shouldn’t be hard to find (it’s public) so you can watch/listen there, and critique my delivery. Maybe someone else can figure out how to embed it here (I can’t).

A tranche of about 10 students graduated this year, all of whom took a class with me in their first semester as freshmen, and who have taken (or attended without taking) classes with me on and off throughout. I saw 9 of them (plus a boyfriend) the night before the event, and realised that not only are none of them Philosophy majors, but none of them are even graduating from my college (Letters and Science). But two of them (and a mum) kindly attended the Philosophy reception, non-awkwardly. The comment about liking, admiring, and respecting at the end — well, that’s how I feel about lots of our majors too, but it was formulated with those others in mind.

Here are the comments:

First I want to congratulate the students who are graduating, and thank the parents, friends, and supporters who are here to celebrate with you. And to thank especially whoever has been paying tuition the past few years. We’re all sad that we don’t get to teach the students any more, but somebody at least is glad that the paying is over.

Last year I reassured the parents about how well prepared philosophy graduates are for the labor market. That was an exercise in futility – if you are here, you either know that they are well-prepared for the labour market, or you don’t care or, perhaps, you are just really pissed off with them, and going through this whole weekend with gritted teeth; and nothing much I say will convince you otherwise.

So this year I thought I’d explore how well-prepared they are to be leaders in our democracy. Now, in saying that, I don’t want you to think they have a high chance of being elected. Probably not, in fact. But they are well-trained and well-prepared to contribute to changing the way the culture of our democracy works.

I realized this earlier in the spring, when students in my large lecture class – all non-majors, majority Business majors – reacted to something I explained to them as if I was teaching them magic.

We have a method in moral and political philosophy that we call reflective equilibrium. It gets us closer to the truth about difficult moral and political questions – like whether abortion is permissible, the extent to which educational inequality is legitimate, whether we should have the death penalty; even what is valuable in life. These issues matter, and people disagree about them. How do we get closer to the truth about them?

Here’s how it works.

We all carry around with us general principles: “Abortion is wrong except in cases of rape.”; “The government should guarantee freedom of expression”; more controversially: “The government would be justified in prohibiting cricket matches if doing so significantly reduced the threat of terror attacks”. From your laughs I can tell you think I am making this last one up. But it’s a very real issue in some countries though not, regrettably, in America. (And I should add, for any legislators listening, that it is the paucity of cricket I regret, not the paucity of terror attacks).

We also carry around judgments, and dispositions to judge, about particular cases: “saving that child by grabbing him by the arm so he didn’t walk in front of the bus was good, but hardly heroic”; “I support censorship of that violent movie”.

But sometimes we discover that some of our judgements, and some of our principles, conflict. I’ll give you a personal example, even though it doesn’t show me in a particularly good light. When I was 17 I heard a radio disc jockey – one of my favorites – saying that he was about to interview a vicar who who was calling for a movie about the great French homosexual, atheist, and anarchist French poet Arthur Rimbaud to be censored. I was appalled – basically it triggered the anti—censorship principle I carried around in my head.

The vicar, it turned out, was talking about an entirely different film – the Rambo in question was an American soldier played by Sylvester Stallone, an actor who, some of you may have noticed, actually plays homosexual French poets quite rarely. I knew that I’d have been open to censoring that film. I was forced to confront a conflict between an anti-censorship principle and a judgement that it was ok to censor a particular movie.

When beliefs conflict in this way, we know, for sure, that one of them is false. A, and something that implies Not-A, cannot both be true. So we have to decide which of our conflicting moral beliefs to hold on to, and which to reject. Consistency is easy; truth is hard, but truth is what we want to aim for. Even in this world in which so many people seem not to care about it.

So which do we reject? Here are three kinds of belief that you might target.

Some of our beliefs were formed under unreliable conditions. My example here isn’t a moral one: but my dad used to tell me of every famous person in history that they were English. For example Christopher Columbus, Benjamin Franklin, Catherine the Great, and Richard Nixon. After all they all have English names, so what other nationality would they be? Catherine the Great has THREE English names. But, now, as an adult, I have to second-guess myself from time to time, because I know that some of my beliefs about who is English might be a bit, let’s say, dodgy. In that case he knew the beliefs he was instilling in me were false – but something my students often discover is that some of their moral beliefs are similarly foundationless – they just believe, without having reasons, what their parents told them, or what their community instilled in them.

Some of our beliefs are self-serving. For example, I am sure that Prince Charles – you know Prince Charles, he’s that unemployed bloke who can’t get a job till his 91-year-old mum retires – believes that constitutional monarchy is an excellent form of government. But – well, he would think that, wouldn’t he?

And in some cases we know that other, entirely reasonable, morally decent, people disagree with us about our values. You might be pro-choice or pro-life about abortion. You might support or oppose charter schools which aim to serve low income kids in urban areas. You might support or oppose increasing redistributive taxation. Whatever your stance, you know for sure that there are morally decent, and reasonable, people who disagree with you.

If you don’t know that, by the way, you should get out more.

These kinds of moral and political beliefs – those you received from your dad, or your family, or your community; those that are self-serving; those about which reasonable and morally decent people disagree – these we should call into question, scrutinize, look for reasons to amend or revise.

Here’s where the magic my students found so exciting comes in. We can’t do this scrutiny alone in an armchair. Each of us knows that we have, at best, a partial grasp on the moral or political truth. (When I say ‘each of us’, by the way, I mean something like ‘each of us who is not a narcissistic sociopath’. Which, I hope, covers most of the people in the room). And we know that other people – who have different backgrounds, who have been raised in different communities, who have different day-to-day experiences – also have a partial grasp on the moral or political truth. So we seek them out. We enter reasoning dialogue with them.

In ideal reflective equilibrium you converse reasonably with the people who are as unlike you in background and outlook as is compatible with actually understanding each other. You try to identify common ground, and reasons for disagreement. You seek out other people’s insights for enlightenment.

Here’s a simpler way of putting it. A slogan if you like. DO NOT LOOK AT FACEBOOK. [1]

That’s what democracy needs. It’s also what our society needs. It’s also, incidentally, what our labor market needs, though I think we’ve established that you either don’t care about that or won’t believe it whatever I say. People who are sufficiently self-confident that they can think beyond slogans, and beyond winning an argument, who think with, learn from, and teach, others. The training we provide prepares our graduates to do that. I infer there’s a space for people with those abilities. If you’ve been paying attention to public discourse the past year or two, you probably agree.

I want to end with two, separate, thoughts.

Like my colleagues I know I’m lucky to teach at UW-Madison. It’s not because of the Lake, or the money, or the enthusiasm with which the legislators frequently express their appreciation – though we do all value all those things. It’s because we like, respect, and admire our students. An eminent professor at a well-known university on the East Coast once alerted me to two distinctions. First, between students who need to learn that they matter just as much as everyone else, and the students who need to learn that everyone else matters just as much as they do. Then, between students who are smarter than they think they are, and students who think they are smarter than they are. The joy of teaching here is that so many of our students are smarter than they think they are, and need to learn that they matter just as much as everyone else.

Finally, I want to send you away with a saying. (If you’re a philosopher it’s always good to have a saying. You know, when you’re on a plane and someone asks what you do, if you are foolish enough to say you’re a philosopher they’ll ask “Oooh, do you have any sayings?”) Some of you know that I study charter schools in my spare time. One famous charter school franchise has a saying: Work Hard, Be Nice. Being nice is great, don’t get me wrong, but doing good is better. Working hard matters, but only if it produces good, and you shouldn’t work too hard for your own good. We’re confident that you can go out into the world and really contribute; and we want you to enjoy yourselves as you do it. We hope we haven’t taught you just to work hard and be nice, but to Do Good and Be Well.

Congratulations, and thank you, to you all.

[1] Yes, I’m aware of the irony of having told you that if you want to watch it you should go to facebook….