Philosophy is a mess

The point of this post is to show how a discussion that would seem to be restricted to the world of ethics quickly becomes entangled with very different parts of philosophy. (And I'll be paraphrasing Harman throughout). And I take the argument to show that a good philosopher can't study only (say) ethics or only (say) math. The nature of philosophy is such that you need to know your way away around a bunch of different areas.

Is ethics objective--is there a matter of fact that is independent of any one of us, with our biases, whether an action is wrong? Or maybe ethics is (at least) subjective? As I've argued before, this question matters largely because we want to know if we can disagree and agree with what other people think about ethics.

A plausible first attempt at answering this question could sound like this: ethics isn't objective, because the way we justify ethics isn't up to the standards of the rest of our objective knowledge. Take, for example, our knowledge that zebras exist. We know that zebras existing is an objective truth because we can observe zebras with our senses (our eyes see 'em at the zoo or in pictures). But ethics--feh! how do you observe an ethical truth? Now, it's true that some people form ethical beliefs after observing (seeing) something. For example, someone can decide that it's wrong to burn cats after observing a cat burning. But that's not a pure observation, like seeing a zebra. Nope. Rather, what you see and observe is a cat burning, but what you decide is that it's bad, after you observe a cat on fire. But you haven't SEEN bad. There was no "badness" that you saw at the cat burning. What would "badness" look like anyway?!

But, as Hanson points out, this idea runs into trouble. Because you're not just making a claim about ethics here; you're also making a claim about the way we observe zebras.

Is it true that when you see a zebra you've made something like a pure observation, that has nothing to do with how you think? Some people (most people, actually) argue that this is not the case. After all, you know what a zebra is before you look into the world and observe one. You have some kind of theory and understanding about the world in order for you to be able to conceptualize what a zebra is, and that has to come before having an observation of it. To realize this, imagine that I ask you whether bliggles exist. I say that they do, because I've observed them directly. You've never observed them directly, but that's because you have no idea what they are. Would it be right to say that you've observed bliggles when you have no idea what they are? (It turns out the bliggles are what I call the combination you get when you duct-tape a parrot to an elephant, a strange object indeed. I'm not just renaming some normal object.)

The point is: in order to make your ethical argument, you also have to make a completely different argument about the way we observe things in general, and how that counts as justification for our empirical beliefs.

And if things weren't complicated enough, we also have this weird thing called "math." Do we observe all mathematical truths the same way we observe empirical truths? Yes? Then with which of our senses? Our eyes? Sure, we can see that 2 stones and 2 more stones make 4 stones, but have you ever seen 2 million stones be added to 2 million stones, and counted to make sure that we have 4 million stones? No, you haven't. So should we doubt that 2 mil+ 2 mil=4 mil? Well, that makes no sense. So maybe we don't observe mathematical truths. Well, maybe we can be sure about things without observational evidence. But then what about ethics? Maybe ethics gets off the hook, and you can be objective without having observational evidence? Or maybe math gets on the hook, and it isn't objective, just like ethics isn't objective.

So now we have three problems entangled: how do we justify our belief in empirical truths, how do we justify our belief in ethical truths, and how do we justify our belief in mathematical truths? Dissolving this tangle isn't really possible; a good philosopher would need answer to all three of these questions.

So maybe philosophy needs to be done as a whole. This is more the way that philosophy was done in the past than the way that it is sometimes done now. And I think the philosophy that tends to get remembered now, the good stuff, doesn't restrict itself to just one domain. After all, if all of philosophy is really tangled up like this, a good idea in one domain is probably going to be a good important idea in the other domains too.