There are philosophical arguments. So what?
A reply to Bentham's Bullfrog
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A few months ago, Matthew Adelstein—of the very failed Substack Bentham’s Newsletter—wrote a piece criticizing people for not taking philosophical arguments seriously, lamenting their irrationality. As Matthew explains:
I suspect one reason so many people think that ethics is subjective is that they think that it’s beyond rational thought in this important sense. While arguments and analysis can help elucidate politics, math, and other domains that there are truths about, people think that ethics is beyond persuasion. It involves both sides simply declaring their views, and that’s the end of it.
He then goes on to explain why that is irrational and wrongheaded. There are good and bad reasons for believing something, and arguments help us adjudicate those reasons in deciding what to believe. And ignoring such reasons is, at a minimum, epistemically irrational—it is antithetical to arriving at the truth. It would be similar to consulting one’s fever dream or chicken entrails to decide how best to invest or to make other decisions in one’s life. And yet people routinely ignore reasons when forming their opinions on any number of philosophical and ethical issues.
I suspect part of what explains this is that examining reasons is hard, and it is easier to simply pick a belief that is held by others. And given the opportunity cost of thinking through a difficult philosophical issue, most people would rather spend their time doing something else. Not to mention, the cost to them of being wrong about this or that ethical or philosophical issue—as far as they can tell, anyway—is negligible. How bad would it be for you personally to hold false views about how consciousness arises or relates to the brain? It isn’t obvious that there would be, other than having false beliefs. Having false beliefs about incoming traffic on the freeway, on the other hand, would obviously be costly to an individual (at least in some cases).
However, I suspect in some cases, there is something else going on: philosophy is hard to do, easy to screw up. And worse still, philosophical arguments can be hard to dissect and disarm for the layperson, and they can be misleading and wrongheaded. Add to that the fact that professional philosophers are incredibly good at defending views that are false because they are good at generating plausible sounding reasons. I should know: I’ve been a professional philosopher for over a decade. This is not to say, of course, that philosophers are being dishonest or manipulative in such cases. For the most part, philosophers engage in good faith discussions. The problem is that the best philosophers are often very good at defending bad arguments, and that philosophy is the sort of inquiry where it is easy to mess up. Consider a passage from Dan Moller (applying this point to moral risk and abortion):
[The] main reason for supposing there is a non-negligible possibility of error isn’t the sheer existence of anti-abortion arguments. It is rather that the subject matter involved is the sort of thing it is all too easy for people like us to be mistaken about; abstruse moral reasoning involving far-out cases and complex principles is something we find very difficult and are disposed to get wrong reasonably often.
The same could be said of many philosophical arguments. They are too easy to get wrong and professional philosophers are good at (unwittingly) defending bad arguments such that the average layperson wouldn’t, and perhaps couldn’t in some cases, be able to tell. And unless you think I exaggerate: in my early days of graduate school, I had a professor who could outargue anybody, even many professional philosophers, and even when he was wrong. Often when we argued I would feel that he was wrong but would have too much difficulty pointing out exactly where. Just as often, I would be somewhat skeptical of the argument he was making, often pointing out that he was too good at arguing compared to me, so how would I know if he was wrong? How could I show it? It would be incredibly hard. There is thus a sense in which it is rational for layperson to ignore philosophical arguments—they are often complex and hinge on matters that are easy to get wrong. However, they still should be more responsive to reasons. But that is a post for another time.
I 100% agree with what you said -- which is why we need a reform of philosophy journals.
It's great to explore new ideas but, like you said, philosophers are great at making them seem plausible. Since most ideas are wrong if we want philosophy to be a net epistemic benefit it should spend more time knocking down ideas and showing where arguments are flawed than introducing new ideas.
This is exactly the opposite of how journals work now days. They mostly won't accept direct point by point rebutalls and while you can write an article like "I define Xism to be ... as has been seen in papers like cite. It's wrong" still has the problem that it requires you to produce an argument that X must be false not merely show that the author has a fallacious argument for X or relies on implausible assumptions.
This is why I think each philosophy journal ought to commit to publishing a rebuttal for each paper it accepts -- say the best response that meets minimum standards within a year.
I agree with the main points made in the article. I'm a bit puzzled at the emphasis on Matthew Adelstein's blog. I also post critiques of his blog. Was the comment on it being very failed a joke or a serious remark? In any case, I do think you could have leveraged more from Matthew's own work in making your point. Matthew seems wildly overconfident in what philosophy can accomplish and how readily and reliably it can do so. Philosophical arguments should be taken with with many grains of salt, as there are multiple failure points in a long inferential chain.
Regarding the comment Matthew made that got things started:
"I suspect one reason so many people think that ethics is subjective is that they think that it’s beyond rational thought in this important sense. While arguments and analysis can help elucidate politics, math, and other domains that there are truths about, people think that ethics is beyond persuasion. It involves both sides simply declaring their views, and that’s the end of it."
This may be true, and it's the sort of thing that's testable and that one could learn about via conversation with people who are subjectivists or antirealists. Unfortunately Matthew seems to me to be a bit impatient and dismissive with how antirealists like me think and why we think what we do, going so far as to suggest that some of us are conceptually impoverished and should defer to people like him, who allegedly have functioning intuitive faculties.