Topics Philosophers

Question I have a question regarding folk philosophy and academic philosophy. How far are the folks away from the academics in terms of agreement in certain issues? I read an interview of Philippa Foot and she said something along the lines of "moral relativism is common in first year students." When I read the philpapers survey, a whole bunch of you are moral realists. How far are us folk off? How far away are we from you academics in all types of issues? If you can direct me to some reading that any folk can easily access, I would be very thankful. Perhaps anecdotes would be nice, but I have a feeling you folks don't hold anecdotes much weight!

Accepted:
February 9, 2011

Comments

One often finds philosophers appealing to the intuitions of the 'folk', or, as an earlier strand of Anglo-American philosophy put it, the views of 'the man on the Clapham omnibus'. Such appeals play a variety of roles in philosophizing--they can be used as the basis for a position that is more clearly to be articulated, or a position against which to argue--but it's not always altogether clear to me what basis there is for such appeals. Why, I am tempted to wonder, should the 'intuitions' of the folk about philosophical issues be any more relevant to philosophers than folk intuitions about the nature of the physical world should be of interest to physics? Such methodological issues were prominent in the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, when great philosophical emphasis was placed on what is said when as a guide to clarifying philosophical issues. (The greatest practitioner of ordinary language philosophy, or what this practitioner himself called 'linguistic phenomenology', was, to my mind, J. L. Austin, whose collected papers I highly recommend in conjunction with this question.) Recently, a movement known as 'experimental philosophy'--'xphi' for short--has begun to engage these issues in earnest again. In "An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto," Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols respond to the dismissal of appeals to folk intuitions in philosophy on the basis of the putative parallel with physics as follows: "In some areas of philosophy, the disputes float free of commonsense intuitions....But in many other areas of philosophy, it's much harder to maintain that the disputes are so disconnected from commonsense intuitions. Indeed, for many standard philosophical problems--for example, problems concerning free will, personal identity, knowledge, and morality--if it weren't for commonsense intuitions, there wouldn't be a felt philosophical problem." Experimental philosophers propose to engage commonsense intuitions empirically, through surveys, in order to assess just what relation there is between the positions of philosophers and those of the 'folk'. This interesting approach raises fascinating philosophical issues: for a judicious, elegantly overview of xphi, I highly recommend K, Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics; for a 'state of the art' collection of essays on xphi, you should check out Experimental Philosophy, edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols. Both of these books--but especially that of Appiah--are highly accessible to any 'folk'.

While I myself don't know whether the relation between moral realism and moral relativism has yet been taken up in xphi--perhaps another panelist can speak to this--I should note, that there is a deep question about just what one means by 'moral relativism' and 'moral realism' that needs to be clarified before one can even begin to assess the claim that whereas the 'folk' are moral relativists, philosophers are moral realists. (This isn't to imply that I think that I disagree with Foot's remark, simply to note that in order to evaluate the remark--even in accordance with the overarching methodology of xphi--some philosophical work is necessary.) For 'moral realism' can signify different things: a commitment to the objectivity of moral truths; a commitment to there being universal moral truths; a commitment to the view that the truths of morality are universals, like Platonic forms, to which human beings have access. While one could be committed to all these positions, one need not be: in order, then, to determine in what respect 'a bunch of philosophers are moral realists', one needs to be clear about just what is meant by 'moral realism'. (A very good topic for philosophical investigation!)