Category: books

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I’m not sold on longtermism myself, but its proponents sure have my sympathy for the eagerness with which its opponents mine their arguments for repugnant conclusions. The basic idea, that we ought to do more for the benefit of future lives than we are doing now, is often seen as either ridiculous or dangerous.

Usually, this takes the form of thought-experiments in which longtermists are supposed to accept major harm to humanity now in the hope of some huge potential benefit later. Physicist and YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder, after boasting that she couldn’t be bothered to read William MacAskill’s book What We Owe the Future (“because if the future thinks I owe it, I’ll wait until it sends an invoice”), goes on to interpret a paper by MacAskill and his colleague Hilary Greaves in this way: “a few million deaths are acceptable, so long as we don’t go extinct.” Phil Torres takes aim at an updated version of the same paper, in which Greaves and MacAskill argue that possible futures with huge numbers of people, even if they are unlikely, represent an expected value that outweighs that of the near future. He reads it as implying that MacAskill and Greaves might well press a button that lets 1 million people die now, to increase the chance that 100 trillion people will be born later.

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“The constant direct mode of address was a chore. No one will enjoy having this read to them.” Quoting from a referee report on the Nicomachean Ethics misses the point of James Warren’s hilarious rejection letter, but I looked it up because I remember thinking that the fictional critic was onto something, and not just about Aristotle. “I had the impression at times that some kind of conversational or dialectical background was being assumed but this is not at all marked in the text.” Indeed! Why hide the fun part?

I owe several very happy moments to well-executed philosophical dialogues: Imre Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations, Larry Laudan’s Science and Relativism, and Aristotle’s former supervisor come to mind. I will be ever so grateful to anybody who can point me to similarly exciting conversations. The dialogue form draws and holds the attention: it can let worldviews clash in the abstract, but it can simultaneously delve into matters of detail without becoming boring – these details having been established, after all, to flow not just from the idiosyncratic preoccupations of one contingent mind, but from larger intellectual interests common to at least two separate perspectives.

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“I am by nature too dull to comprehend the subtleties of the ancients; I cannot rely on my memory to retain for long what I have learned; and my style betrays its own lack of polish.” Among the benefits that reading the twelfth-century philosopher John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon has brought me were the pleasure of finding a witty and humane voice to introduce me to the new and faraway world of 12^th-century learning (of which voice I intend to give plenty of examples below), and the fact that he helped me quit Twitter (again, more to follow). Apart from those, however, a major one was certainly the consolation of seeing an unquestionably capable thinker express his intellectual limitations in terms that seem genuine, going further than what perfunctory modesty would have required.

There have surely been thinkers who were more emphatic about their natural flaws, but there is a fine line between the comforting and the disturbing. When the 20^th-century Dutch philosopher Leo Polak dreaded his approaching inaugural address, he wrote in his diary: “I came to nothing […] I have been of no value, for my family or for other people, or even simply done my duty. My pathological lack of memory my only excuse, but it is also partly laziness and sloppiness (no card system) and having whiled away my time, having flattered myself with undeserved success.” That, too, resonates, but not in the uplifting way that John’s confessions do.

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Three times have we started doing philosophy, and three times has the enterprise come to a somewhat embarrassing end, being supplanted by other activities while failing anyway to deliver whatever goods it had promised. Each of those three times corresponds to a part of Stephen Gaukroger’s recent book The Failures of Philosophy, which I will be discussing here. In each of these three times, philosophy’s program was different: in Antiquity, it tied itself to the pursuit of the good life; after its revival in the European middle ages it obtained a status as the guardian of a fundamental science in the form of metaphysics; and when this metaphysical project disintegrated, it reinvented itself as the author of a meta-scientific theory of everything, eventually latching on to science in a last attempt at relevance.

Indeed, this means that the last serious attempt to revive philosophy faded out many decades ago. Unlike David Hume, who figures in this book as one of only a few thinkers in the Western canon who saw and confronted directly the problems inherent in the ambitions of philosophy, Gaukroger does not regard himself as writing in a “philosophic age”. Nobody now looks at philosophers as having something interesting to contribute, the way we look at scientists (although Gaukroger has a thing or two to say about them, too). For all intents and purposes, we live in a post-philosophical era, though ending his book on a Picardy third, Gaukroger does not completely reject the idea that there are things to be salvaged.

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Here’s an interesting game. You receive 20 dollars, and you and three others can anonymously contribute any portion of this amount to a public pool. The amount of money in this pool is then multiplied by 1.5 and divided equally among all players. Repeat 10 times, then go home with your money. What will happen? How much would you contribute in round one, if you knew nothing about your fellow players?

This ‘Public Goods Game’ is one example of the many sophisticated social-psychological experiments that Joseph Henrich brings into play in his recent book The WEIRDest people in the world. It is also a good example of how he puts those experiments to use. One lesson from this game is that people are more cooperative than models of economically rational behavior would suggest (are more homo reciprocans than homo economicus (211)). Another is that average first-round contributions vary significantly between populations. ‘WEIRD’ stands for ‘Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic’, and also serves to emphasize that WEIRD populations are weird in the sense of unusual: they are psychological outliers in a lot of ways.

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