Philosophers disagree on nearly anything. What is the basis of moral values? There is massive division on this issue, with some saying that morality doesn’t exist or is purely subjective, while others say right and wrong are defined by how well an action fulfills our preferences or desires. If you were a professional philosopher, how can you be sure that your views on morality are correct? The view you have is probably held by no more than twenty percent of others in your field of study. All of these other people are just as smart, educated, and thoughtful about the issue as you are, and yet they believe you are wrong. Every moral view cannot be correct, since all of them logically exclude all the other ones, and since no viewpoint has anything like a majority, it follows that most philosophers have false beliefs about morality. The same could be said about nearly every other philosophical topic. This seems to indicate that philosophers ought not to trust even their own philosophical beliefs and leanings, because the odds are that any particular viewpoint is false.
All of this is beautifully drawn out and argued by Jason Brennan in his new paper “Scepticism about Philosophy.” It reminded me a lot of John Loftus’ Outsider Test for Faith; he points out that no religious believer ought to trust their religious feelings too strongly, because all religious believers, whether Christian, Hindu, Muslim or of some other faith, have exactly the same strong feelings about their beliefs, and since they can’t all be right, most of them must be wrong, which means yours are probably wrong and therefore you should distrust them.
I gave my thoughts on this in a previous post called “Philosophy is Pointless“:
“Philosophy is needed for practical choices. Even though philosophical positions are frequently false, even the false positions can generate the right conclusion more often than not. Since a good practical decision only calls for the right conclusion to be reached (not for the underlying reasoning behind that conclusion to be correct), that means that we can place a good deal of trust in philosophy, even though it’ll be wrong most of the time. This situation isn’t really what we’d like, but it is very encouraging considering that we were just escaped the grips of philosophical nihilism.”
Something else relevant to this is the need for a new method of doing philosophy. I think that philosophers ought to be all working together to abolish all philosophy journals and start publishing everything on a single website. I’ll call this hypothetical website WikiPhilosopy. WikiPhilosophy ought to be subdivided into sections of WikiEthics, WikiEpistemology, and so on. The way it would work is that anyone could email an argument into the website and have it peer reviewed and published. After it was published, we could set up a way in which anyone could email an objection to the premises or conclusion of that argument and that criticism would be peer-reviewed and a link to it would be placed on that argument’s page. I suspect that this would have the effect of allowing for dramatic amounts of progress in philosophy. Of course, the whole thing might sound chaotic to some, and maybe it would be. But think about it: if some lone philosopher publishes a correct and conclusive criticism of virtue ethics, and the paper or book isn’t widely read or known about, and if no one else happens to think of that same objection, then the philosophical community has been robbed of a way of finding the truth that it would have had if this criticism was available to all. Adovocates of virtue ethics would be able to keep up with updates to the wiki, and once this criticism was published they would know about it.
