Albany-Moscow Video-Conference

Jon, I took a 3 term course in college. I flunked the last term after A’s on all of the tests and A’s in previous two terms. Why. When the prof asked at the last session of classes what we had learned. I stood up and said, “The important thing that I learned was that no philosopher had ever drawn a correct conclusion based upon measurable evidence.”

I have never seen anything that convinced me that any philosophy was not just mental masturbation.

what, precisely, do ‘we’ now know about applied ethics that ‘we’ did not know in 1959?

it’s hard to argue that the 1977 Geneva Protocols weren’t a big jump forward in applied ethics, also the victory in the culture wars with respect to sexual orientation, also the codification of universal human rights. One can debate (and god knows I have) the extent to which people who called themselves professional philosophers were a part of these debates, but there has certainly been progress.

I’d be interested in what areas we thought there had been regress over the last fifty years. It must happen from time to time – logically, there must have been some period of regress in Kant interpretation if we were to have progress since 1959. Macroeconomics took a big regress with rational expectations. Any other examples?

Seneca is the philosopher whom I read and trsst the more. Marcus Aurelius is good too.

I’m most interested in how the videoconference aspect worked. How many on each side and how easy was it for varying numbers of people to be involved?

As a graduate student who attended the video-conference, I can say I found it tremendously rewarding.

To respond to John @ #8: There were perhaps 20 people on both sides, perhaps a bit fewer. Each side had an interpreter, who would translate their presenter’s talk into he other side’s language. Their camera work was a little fancier than ours. They had a couple of cameras, apparently manned by real human beings. So, they would turn the cameras and focus on the speakers and those asking questions, and things like this. I think I would have found it useful for their translator to be on-screen when giving the translation, but they tended to keep the camera on the presenters (who spoke in Russian, of course). The translator was sitting off to the side and out of view.

We relied on a single, immobile camera, mounted above the television screen which displayed the feed from Moscow, that captured about half the room. The other screen was out of our camera’s view, and displayed our camera’s feed. Our presenters and translator chose places to sit that were in our camera’s range. When anyone who was not in view wanted to ask a question, they would simply walk over and sit in the camera’s view.

I hope this answers your question, and all in all, I thought that the technology worked quite well.

‘Ethics at the middle of the last century was a pretty abstract pursuit, separated from any concrete consequences.’

The obvious counter-example to this claim is Richard Hare, who published on a wide range of applied topics from the mid-50s. Once we’ve started noticing counter-examples, we could also mention Berlin, Hayek, Oakeshott, and Hart. The term ‘applied ethics’ is pretty recent, but philosophers having an interest in practical moral dilemmas is not. The picture of twentieth-century ethics as a desert of abstraction until Rawls heroically returns to the normative is a disciplinary origin-myth.

Salient at 4: if you’ve got access to an academic library, then instead of a summative work, I’d recommend browsing through Ruth Chadwick & Doris Schroeder eds, Applied Ethics: Critical Concepts (6 vols, Routledge 2001). Otherwise, Hugh LaFollette ed., Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (Blackwell 1997) and Hugh LaFollette ed., The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics (Oxford University Press 2003) are both pretty good, and will give a sense of what’s going on in the field. The single work of applied ethics you should read, though, is Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (2nd edn, Cambridge University Press 1993).

The usual story told (at least in the US) is that professional philosophers began to get seriously interested in applied ethics in large part because of the social unrest of the 60s – the Vietnam war, civil rights movement, etc. Norman Daniels somewhere tells the story of how he got into this (he’d been politically active, but his dissertation was on non-Euclidean geometry or some such very “non-applied ethics” thing, but he was asked to teach applied ethics at his first job (I think it was Tufts), and because of his political activity and interest, he soon switched his academic work. Many of the professional philosophers of that generation have similar stories to tell.

Peter Singer is another example – from more or less the same generation – of a prominent professional philosopher who focuses on applied ethics.

Folks who are now well known in medical ethics who are of that generation often started out in another area of professional philosophy- Dan Wikler, (who did a dissertation on philosophy of language), Don Marquis (dissertation in the philosophy of science), etc.

Perhaps Harry has a similar story himself (didn’t you go to graduate school thinking you were going to do phil language?), though he is obviously not in their cohort.

Nowadays it is common for the professional philosophers who do applied ethics to have written dissertations on applied ethics – and this is a sign of how far the field has come, professionally. It didn’t use to be this way.

Of course all this interest and activity by professional philosophers doesn’t tell us whether or to what extent progress has been made in applied ethics, though I think a case could be made that it has at least made some.

David-

I thought it was clear from the context of the earlier comments that we were talking about whether we know anything about applied ethics that we didn’t know before. So when I claimed that a case could be made that some progress had been made by professional philosophers, I just meant in understanding the issues surrounding applied ethics. With that in mind we can reply to your four points:

You wrote : “The discussion is limited to “professional philosophers.” This limits the field to those who write papers for a living within the world of academia.”

Yes, well, I’m happy to ask whether people outside of professional philosopher have made progress in what we know about applied ethics issues, but I was only claiming that a case could be made that professional philosophers have made some progress in this regard. This is consistent with the claim that others (non-professionals) have made even more such progress. Again, I thought the context of the comment thread made this focus clear.

(2) You wrote “In order to measure “progress,” we look to institutional events or protocols that would embody some “new discovery” by the academic world in the ethical sphere. (I’d love to see how something like this would be perceived by the layman. I don’t see anyone in the abortion debate looking for “more research” on the subject.)”

Why should whether the layman looks for “more research” on this matter? Surely in very emotional, polarized debates like abortion people often don’t want to look carefully and rationally at the arguments. What follows from this about whether such arguments might in fact exist int he professional journals, and that those arguments might actually improve our understanding of the issues, even if ignored by the layperson. By ‘progress’ I just mean that we know more stuff about the issues – even if its in the fairly minimal sense that we know more about why certain traditional arguments for certain positions in applied ethics are flawed – that is still progress in our knowledge.

(3) You wrote “The individuals who realize such institutional change are, almost by definition, not academics. So any ethical progress that is made will usually not be ascribed to the professional philosophy world.”

Again, I would’ve thought it was clear from the first several comments in this thread that we were not talking about practical realizations or changes in actual policies, etc. but rather in understanding the issues. You’re talking about whether ethical progress has been made in the practical sense (and on this point, see below).

(4) You wrote ‘Here’s where we should look for real progress in applied ethics: have philosophers themselves acted more and more ethically over the past 50 years? I only 1 or 2. They seem like decent folks. Do philosophers beat their wives less than architects? Are they more just in their everyday social interaction with strangers than grocers? Did they “learn” these ethics by reading philosophy?”

Again, I wasn’t claiming that we’re more ethical as a result of studying applied ethics – or even that people are made more ethical by studying ethics (I’m not a professional applied ethicist, so I’ve got no personal stake in this, either).

The point was just to respond to skeptics (e.g., see the first commentator) that studying applied ethics increases our knowledge. Its a separate question whether people act on it.

Finally, though, since you raised the _distinct_ issue of whether professional applied ethicists have made a _practical_ difference, I’d point to Peter Singer and the animal rights movement and his impact on improved conditions for animals as such an example.

Finally, notice that I said that a case could be made that at least SOME progress in our knowledge (not necessarily our behavior) had been made – “some” is consistent with “not very much”.

David –

1) The discussion isn’t limited to professional philosophers: first, at least in the UK, lots of philosophers have chaired or been on government advisory committees (Mary Warnock, Bernard Williams, David Archard – it’s also worth noting the indirect influence, for instance, of H L A Hart on the Wolfenden Report). Second, plenty of us write books for the interested layman (Peter Singer has already been mentioned – his How Are We to Live? is excellent). Third, most of us teach students, who then go out into the world and to jobs in charities, government, and business. They’re changed, by doing philosophy, into more thoughtful, rational people.

2) ‘I don’t see anyone in the abortion debate looking for “more research” on the subject’. I do. At least some debates on abortion – as pointed out by Jon Mandle above – are far more detailed, carefully argued, and precise than 50 years ago. Research in applied ethics doesn’t show that any one answer to this problem is obviously right, but it does show how to discuss the problem more rationally. Do you think this is a bad thing?

3) This just seems to be a reason why people wouldn’t notice the contribution made by ethicists.

4) ‘Here’s where we should look for real progress in applied ethics: have philosophers themselves acted more and more ethically over the past 50 years?’ Why do you think that progress in applied ethics would consist in making people more moral? More moral according to whom? The situation is: humans are faced with practical dilemmas. Our choices are to deliberate as well as we can about them, or to deliberate badly. Applied ethicists make the bet that the techniques of philosophy – reading, talking, writing; considering hypotheticals, sharpening our concepts, making arguments – are part of good deliberation. Some of us – me, for instance – also think that deliberating well is part of the good life, and therefore worth pursuing for its own sake as well as for its consequences. That’s one reason why I think I’m doing some good by helping my students to develop deliberative skill.

Summing up: we have different standards for success in applied ethics. At minimum, yours aren’t obvious. I should note that I think a lot of actual applied ethics, right now, isn’t much good – just not for the reasons you suggest.

I wonder, did this conference include the third option: not “philosophy has made progress” or “philosophy has not made progress” but the view that it isn’t really the job of philosophy to make progress, that this may be a misunderstanding of the task of philosophy?

I do think that the recognition of errors, giving reason to abandon dead-ends, is part of the task of philosophy, and it can be measured as a kind of indirect progress. But perhaps it is more properly the task of the sciences to progress in the positive sense, to create more knowledge, and improvements upon old knowledge. I tend to think of philosophy as the reins on the horse of the sciences. It questions primary value assumptions (the goals and values of the ride) and seeks to ensure we’re headed in the desired direction, and it constantly reevaluates previous claims to success (rechecks the map as it were, in case the horse gets to enthusiastic, leaping ahead of what it knows).