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| A standard hierarchy of needs. Where does philosophy fit in? |
It seems like this may involve belaboring what is obvious (to some), but I can't say I've seen the case presented quite like this before.
Pictured above is a rendition of Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs (hereafter "the hierarchy"). I've indicated in a number of places that "Better Living" can be understood in these terms. I've indicated in my book (see 'About Me') that a (hopefully careful and thorough) inductive grounding of the concept "good" - along with "right" the most important concept in the field of metaethics - points toward good being synonymous with (the fulfillment of) a need. An overly reductionist and biologistic rendering of "need" or "good" based on some concept of a telos understood in terms of natural functions seems to wind up explaining many of the needs at or toward the bottom or middle of the Maslow-hierarchy but not so much those at and towards the top; while the explanation of our origins is usually rendered in terms of the concept of 'inclusive fitness' - we're genetic preservation and replication machines (crudely, "the four Fs") - it turns out that the distinctively human cognitive makeup comes with ends/goals/purposes like morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem-solving, aesthetic appreciation, etc. Questions that arise: How does human appreciation of music arise within an evolutionary context? How do we treat of (genuine) needs toward the top of the hierarchy that don't seem to have played nearly the role for prehistoric humans that they do for us moderns?
Additionally, thinkers like David L. Norton have noted the deep if not exact similarity between the hierarchy and the ancient concept of eudaimonia (rough synonyms are flourishing, well-being, happiness, living well, a complete life). The terms "eudaimonia" and "self-actualization" appear to be synonymous here. (Noted ethicist Alan Gewirth takes the idea a step further with his concept of self-fulfillment.) (One really should do some mental integration and follow these links where they lead; the wikipedia entry for "self-fulfillment" prominently references Gewirth, for instance.) Now, it may turn out that one partly fulfills needs at different levels of the hierarchy, but the ideal of perfection is a complete (teleios) fulfillment of needs.
I plan to have more to say in a future posting or book or more about the concept of ethical perfectionism as a complete fulfillment of the aspirations of common sense morality (inasmuch as we would say that there are inchoate or implicit aspirations in common sense morality). Moral theories that involve revisions to common sense morality are dubbed revisionary (aha, Huemer now appears!); "revisionary" seems to be a charge leveled more toward utilitarianism than to competing theories since it involves such a revision or departure from how humans historically have thought about the good and the right-and-wrong. (See, e.g.: trolley problems.) That usually has been a charge against utilitarianism because of the apparently or genuinely counter-intuitive (roughly, counter-common-sense-morality) prescriptions, motivations, etc., that people would have to adopt to fit the demands of the theory. I don't think ethical perfectionism - the most perfect version we can formulate, that is; I nominate an Aristotelian or intellectual perfectionism (as do Hurka, the Dougs, and others) - succumbs to this problem.
(Hopefully an intellectual perfectionism avoids problems of circularity, viz.: when we fill in the concept of intellectual perfection, does it lead to adoption of, say, utilitarianism (and then when we fill in the best version of utilitarianism or consequentialism more broadly speaking, in order to (e.g.) account for Mill's highly plausible distinction between higher and lower pleasures or goods, do we end up with intellectual perfectionism)? Well, in line with what intellectual perfection involves, in a sense yes, at least in part, via the procedures of dialectic. (Blog tag for dialectic.) Utilitarianism's appeal comes from having grains of truth, even if it ends up being a one-sided theory that excludes the grains of truth in other theories, e.g., Kantian-style deontology associated with (e.g.) rights-talk that is ethically foundational enough not to be reducible to utilitarian guidelines. Or so I and numerous ethical theorists claim.)
Somehow all of the preceding is deeply relevant to the promised proof to which I now come, about the need for philosophy. (I'm trying not to leave loose ends, you see.)
Two of the needs listed at the top of the hierarchy - morality and problem-solving - are centrally specific concerns to philosophy, and uniquely to the discipline of philosophy. Problem-solving comes under the head of "epistemology" or theory of knowledge, and it's that issue which I seek to address here.
What is the main problem that epistemology is trying to solve? Well, it's a rather obvious problem: while there isn't really any serious dispute about the general reliability of the deliverance of sense-perception, which humans all share in common (and with the other animals), humans come to many varied systems of belief. (The Greek term for belief is endoxa. Consider the relation to terms you already know such as "orthodox" or "paradox.") Sometimes these systems of belief are wildly at variance with one another. It's hard to see how (e.g.) socialism and capitalism are in any serious way reconcilable with one another. And yet different humans, with access to the same sensory evidence, end up thinking very different things about these isms.
Since advocates of capitalism and of socialism can't both be right, we run into the very serious (indeed, life-and-death, if you look at the the 20th century) possibility of doxastic error. And if one is in serious doxastic error, it's hard to reconcile this condition with being (completely) eudaimonic. To put the issue into greater relief: what about the irreconcilability of theism and naturalism? How does that affect how one ought to fashion one's life? To live a good life do we need to prepare for an afterlife? Do we need to attend church on Sundays? Do we need to adhere strictly to what's in Scriptures? Which set of Scriptures - the Koran, the Bible, the Upanishads?
What's the proper ethical treatment of animals? Are current industrial farming practices abominable? (There is something approaching a philosophical consensus, if ever there was any, that indeed it is. I can think of a lot of arguments in the literature that it is, but I can't think of a single argument in the literature that it isn't. This has hardly affected social or government policy in the main, however. This in itself is a philosophical problem.) Are meat-eating practices of any kind wrong? (The jury appears to be out on that one.)
Is healthcare a basic and universal human right? (Note that quality healthcare is pricey, beyond the reach of many of the world's inhabitants.) If so, how does that square with the right to liberty? Doesn't the latter preclude being forced into service to provide for others' healthcare? Isn't taxation of earnings on par with forced labor? Isn't sending one's earnings to third-world relief funds akin to getting one's work clothing wet to save a baby from drowning in a shallow pond on one's way to work? (You've never encountered that situation? Is that relevant to the comparison? What about trolley problems?) If you should donate some of your earnings to third-world relief, just how much of your earnings? What are proper procedures, if any, for quarantining individuals who are infected with a highly contagious virus? These are life and death questions, and there's no broad agreement on them.
So isn't it really important, if we want to get things right about such questions, and we find that - based on the fact of disagreement alone - that not everyone is getting it right despite their sincerely-held beliefs (endoxa), that we would want to be really rigorous about our belief-formation processes? Shouldn't we want to learn, rigorously, about the rules of formal logic? (Should(n't) I present this whole proof of the need for philosophy in numbered-premise-and-conclusion format? But what is the fun in that? Have you ever seen me do such a thing in this blog?) Shouldn't we all want to learn about bending over backwards to avoid committing informal fallacies, which are widespread if not rampant in at least some areas of discourse? Shouldn't we all heed to the best of our abilities Mill's advice (there's Mill again...) about knowing the opinions of adversaries in their most plausible and persuasive form? Wouldn't you prefer that your adversaries know your opinions as you actually hold them before they criticize them?
(Apparently tons of haters of Ayn Rand "know" from afar that Rand admirers such as myself are empathy-lacking assholes, and that all we have to talk about is politics and not things like aesthetics or philosophic method. I was not aware that all that time pondering the implications of the issue of (e.g.) Rand as a dialectical thinker, or (which comes roughly to the same thing) the thinking that went into my Journal of Ayn Rand Studies article, was the equivalent of staring into blank space, my life is so empty and lacking in experiential-background context! The things the haters know about me that I don't, it's just effing great, I tell ya. So, is Ayn Rand a philosopher, much less a good or serious one? As long as we're going to issue forth with endoxa or opinions about that, we should want to be pretty careful and thorough about getting it right, because who or what counts as a (good or serious) philosopher is really quite important to all this. And isn't issuing forth opinions lazily and recklessly about others' opinions almost the very definition of being an empathy-lacking asshole as opposed to a noble soul? Not to name names, but is the opinion of a Rand-bashing Nietzsche scholar who runs the most popular philosophy blog worth anything in this context? What does popularity or even "credentials" count for when it comes to truth and honesty, BTW? Who runs a philosophy blog as good, overall, as this one? Are any of the others talking explicitly, specifically, and with aspirations to systematicity about the topic of better living through philosophy? About philosophy for children? Like, sometimes? Ever? Is that 'Aristotle' on twitter running a sprawling enough research program like the original Aristotle to have the lay of the philosophy-blog land? I know about that 'Aristotle' figure, does he know about me? Why is 'Aristotle' on a known intellectual cesspool like twitter rather than running a philosophy blog, publishing books, etc.? How did I find out about that 'Aristotle' if I spend little time on twitter, anyway? What does a perfectionistic research program involve? Why isn't twitter-'Aristotle' talking incessantly about better living through philosophy for children? What does twitter-'Aristotle' have to say about a culturally-influential-and-polarizing figure like Ayn Rand and/or her associate and leading Aristotle scholar Allan Gotthelf? If somehow hypothetically revived to the present day, would Aristotle specialize in Aristotle studies? Could someone in the present day only specialize given the growth of specialized knowledge required for expertise in any field nowadays? Would specialization explain why next to zero politicians today, who specialize in the art of persuasion, are anything close to experts in philosophy? Etc. As far as I know, only one philosopher is asking questions at this overall level of perceptiveness nowadays. And only I can anticipate what my next blog post will be, and it should be pretty darn good. [Edit: and here you go.] BTW, I need to perfect my research program more, by homing in on state-of-the-art journals/articles in my own 'areas of specialization' [ethics, political philosophy]. I have good reasons for doing so, given the nature of the integration and transmission of knowledge/research....)
Have I made my point yet?
But just to state the conclusion succinctly: You need philosophy because at least some of your opinions are probably wrong, and better living for a human involves advanced cognition about morality and problem-solving.
To tie up any loose ends: Aristotle is known as the fountainhead of dialectic. Dialectic has been described in the Oxford Handbook of Aristotle as his philosophical method. The fruits of that method are well known for their explanatory power. (He had wrong things to say about women and slavery. His theories in physics have been superseded - after only about 1800 years or so of other thinkers doing natural philosophy, that is. He has to be assessed on his overall merits. His ethics are as canonical as ever, even in the demanding confines of analytic philosophy.) T.H. Irwin has a whole book - the largest single-author book on Aristotle's philosophy that I know of - titled Aristotle's First Principles (1988) in which he investigates Aristotle's application of the method of dialectic (what Irwin terms 'strong dialectic'). Aristotle recognized the major issue raised above, the problem of opposing opinion or endoxa despite uniformity in human sensory experience. Surely everyone has hit upon some grain(s) of truth or other in their opinion-formation processes, but clearly (given the fact of disagreement) they need to perfect those processes to the best of their abilities. One way of doing so is engaging in dialectic, the art of context-keeping in the most fundamental explanatory sense, but the art, more popularly understood, of seeking reconciliation among opposing ideas. (That is the art of context-keeping applied, in the sense that we seek to establish the cognitive contexts within opposing belief-formation processes occur, so as to better understand how opposing opinions were arrived at, and therefore how to apply needed fixes.) So dialectic and intellectual perfection(ism), which may well come to the same thing, are fundamental to philosophical activity. Now, Aristotle didn't say that (strong) dialectic was merely about treating the contexts opposing opinions, since he was also a realist in the sense that an independent reality (the one we commonly access through sense-experience) is the ultimate arbiter of truth and falsity. This explains the grain(s) of truth in opposing opinions even though, for all we know, opposing opinions taken on the whole are false. Point being, it's not opinions all the way down.
(A note about Irwin: he's a good man, and thurrah. I may have mentioned before that his massive, 3-volume The Development of Ethics (2007) contains the largest bibliography that I know of - approximately 1600 references, even more than the 1300 or so of Sciabarra's Total Freedom (2000). (While I haven't read it, I am aware that Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) also has a massive bibliography, around 1100 references IIRC. Any deep tie-in between the themes covered in these three books? How much and against what odds should one bet that there is?) Irwin is the main source of my awareness of discussions about an ethical theory being revisionary. For point of reference, the 5 thinkers to whom Irwin devotes more than 100 pages of coverage each are Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Kant and Sidgwick (the revisionary utilitarian guy). Now, while if you took only these 5 thinkers and 'dialecticized' them, you'd probably come up with an intellectual and ethical framework that, practiced by all humans, would lead to a really decent and enlightened society, despite differences about "the foundations." Aristotle and Aquinas in particular are perfectionists - intellectual perfectionists to be exact - and the clear sense from Irwin's exhaustively comprehensive treatment of the history of ethics is that their 'Aristotelian naturalism' offers the strongest resources overall for ethical theory. In fact, Irwin's coverage of Aquinas is the most extensive of any other figure in his Development, at over 200 pages. I'm close to finishing the final, third volume of the series. The last 300 densely-packed pages cover the 20th century from Moore onward. Up until that point, Irwin's coverage was quite lucid, easy (enough) to follow. But then 20th century ethics comes around, and it becomes almost excruciatingly technical and focused on the difficult subject matter of metaethics. The likes of Ayn Rand had no time for this stuff, as she was focused on the life-and-death importance of ethics whereas the relevance for ethical practice of any number of the proliferating 20th-century isms (expressivism, cognitivism, emotivism, error theory, internalism, subjectivism, realism, quasi-realism, etc. etc.) is not exactly clear. The frustration of non-academics/specialists about this situation is expressed in such articles as this one. Still, you have a (the?) leading Aristotle scholar in W. D. Ross heavily involved in these discussions, so they're still in some way very important. The question is, can their importance be conveyed to a lay-audience? Or is the subject matter inherently too difficult? I remember a claim to the effect that Heidegger's subject matter is inherently too difficult for lay-translation, although Irwin's chapter on Existentialist ethics, which is pretty much all about Heidegger, is easily the clearest of his 20th-century chapters so far, so I doubt such a claim in Heidegger's case. Also, while Irwin's prose when it comes to 20th-century meteathics is difficult, the treatment of the metaethical subject matter in fellow Oxford scholar Derek Parfit's On What Matters (2011), volume 2, is actually quite accessible, breezy almost. What's missing in On What Matters is coverage of the Aristotelian naturalist tradition so favorably treated by Irwin. Is a (dialectical) synthesis of Irwin and Parfit possible, or does specialization preclude that, dammit? [Edit: On the topic of good and thurrah men, Mortimer Adler's compilation, Great Treasury of Western Thought, is some 1770 pages, 1430 of which are the main textual extracts, in double columns, in tiny print. I'm about halfway through it, and based on the pace of reading so far (roughly 12-14 pages an hour) I expect it will take over 100 hours, probably around 120 hours, to get all the way through. Likewise, Irwin's Development is some 2800 large-size pages, with small print, and at my pace of reading of about 22-25 pages an hour, the time to completion would be over 100 hours as well. Both good and thurrah men are Aristotelian researchers - and so is Sciabarra - so is there something more than a coinkydink there? What other works from a single author/editor take over 100 hours to get through? I want to know, dammit. I don't remember Copleston's History, with its relatively short pages, taking nearly as long.])
[Addendum: the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary definition of "self-actualize" is "to reach one's full potential." So now we have another conceptual tie-in, between goods, needs, and potentialities, yes? (Actuality or energeia being synonymous with entelechy.... ain't making connections fun?)]
