Philosophical Progress

Since philosophy folks are always feeling defensive about philosophical progress, lemme say something concerning that. I remember in the introduction to "Realism with a human face" that there was a quote from Putnam. It went along the lines of: "There are almost never answers to philosophical questions, but there are better and worse ways to think about the questions." This is one way that philosophical progress occurs: there are some deep questions that might ultimately be unresolvable, but there are better and worse ways of struggling with these issues.

For example, you might wonder whether God exists. And so you might start looking into believing in things that you can't see or directly observe, that kind of inference, etc. And then you can have a whole long debate about that. But along might come some philosophers and say "You're thinking about belief in God all wrong, because what it means to believe in God isn't what you guys have been assuming it means, and so your debate has been misdirected." In this sorta-inspired-by-maybe-real-philosophy scenario, there has been philosophical progress through a clarification of what is worth debating.

To ethics: I get the feeling that the philosophical community has been moving, for a while now, towards a broadening of debates about ethics that have lasted a couple hundred years. I don't have the kind of knowledge to really defend this, but one gets the sense that at a certain point folks realized that what ethics distinctive and queer--it's normative properties--could be found in lots of other things. It's routine to point out that this is true about epistemology and what justifies are beliefs and makes some better than the others. But it's also been recognized in philosophy of perception too.

So the sense I get is that progress has been made on problems of ethics, insofar as we've recognized that the queerness of ethics is really just it's membership in a larger domain, that of the normative. And now there's focus on the normative, and people tending to deal with the normative all at once. This seems to me a better way of thinking about ethics, as part of the normative realm, and an example of philosophical progress and an insight that the rest of the world is going to owe philosophers who spend years sludging through, trying to figure out what's going on. We'll end up with a much better understanding of what it means to be moral, and we'll have a better understanding of what obligates us, and this will lead to different ways of thinking about how we treat each other.