So my latest "Values Analysis" class (sophomore level ethics class) seems, on the whole anyway, to be a particularly jaded bunch. Although it is typical in an ethics class to find that a fair number of people think that psychological egoism is true, in this class the number might be as high as 50% (maybe higher).
Clearly, psychological egoism is a very demanding theory, as it is far more demanding than mere pessimism about human altruism. I can believe in altruism but be a pessimist about how often it actually emerges in the world. But the psychological egoist thinks that altruism (again, where it is seen as separate from self-interest) is impossible, not just unlikely or rare.
I'm curious what factors I should attribute the increase in belief in this thesis to. If I were teaching at a different school, one with a lot of poor students, or students who had lived through inner-city ghetto conditions growing up, I could understand it. Seen from that grim perspective on life, the world sure looks like the kind of place in which altruism is a fiction. But my students do not come from these backgrounds at all. Quite the opposite.
So I'm left wondering what it is. One possibility: if you believe in psychological egoism, it does provide you with a "free pass" to oneself in all future situations where you don't help another person in a situation where you don't perceive a way to benefit personally. A psychological egoist might reason that there's no reason to feel bad about such a situation -- it's not rational, after all, to feel guilty about something you couldn't do (be motivated to perform altruistic acts) in the first place. This leaves me wondering if belief in psychological egoism may be more prevalent in the top and bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Those at the top believe in it because it allows them to guiltlessly keep what they have; those at the bottom believe it because their experiences lead them to this conclusion.
That's one possibility, though it's a grim one that I'd hope isn't the real reason. Anyone have any other suggestions? My explanation requires a bit of cynicism, and hopefully that's just the New Yorker in me speaking. :)
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Monday, September 10, 2007
The Office
Folks might enjoying checking out this piece I wrote for Inside Higher Ed. My office really is my favorite perk!
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Collecting Conclusions
Over time, I have noticed one thing: students (well, people in general, obviously) like to "collect" conclusions like some people like to collect stamps or coins. What I mean is this: when you go through an argument for X in class, you can tell that some people who were disposed towards X in the first place now feel as if X, which they had already in the past "collected," was now authenticated because an argument exists for it. The argument could be awful, but that's fine with them, because all they were looking to do in the first place was collect X (or legitimate it) and put it in their "belief sack" and continue on their way.
This is fairly typical behavior, and there's nothing shocking or unusual about it. But in philosophy I always think that what we're trying to do is get people past that. Just because it's natural to do it doesn't mean we ought to embrace the practice. As I tell my students: if you like X, great. But you really shouldn't like X if there isn't a good argument for it. And if someone presents you with a really good argument against X, it should bother you, because now your belief in X should be shaken to some degree. You shouldn't just dismiss the argument without even trying to analyze it critically because you've already previously collected X and no one is going to take it from you. In other words, part of philosophy is about training people to appreciate the importance of attending to arguments for and against one's position. We don't just collect conclusions (which sounds more like the business of subjectivism) -- we assess arguments. The conclusions we end up with are the ones that stand up best over time.
Which brings me to my point: I don't think many philosophy students are all that different about the desire to collect conclusions than anyone else. I see this all the time, but noticed it specifically the other day in Modern Philosophy. After presenting Descartes' ontological proof in Meditation 5, my students were left without a clue as to how to critique the argument. But yet they (many of them, anyway) seemed entirely unmoved by the conclusion -- that God necessarily exists. I don't mean that I expected them to leave the room religious, but rather that I know many of them are not religious, or are at least skeptical that a proof can establish a deity. So I do expect them to be bothered by the argument and really try to figure out what's wrong with it. Instead, it seems to me that they had already "collected" the conclusion that God doesn't exist, or at least that no argument could establish it, and no one was going to rob them of that. But if this is true, then the only thing that makes a philosophy student different from everyone else is this: philosophy students collect stranger conclusions. But they'd still be belief collectors, just like just about everyone else.
Does everyone else experience this as well in their philosophy classes? Note please that I'm not trying to be overly critical of my students here. We all do this to some degree. But when someone points out to me that I've shrugged off an argument because it doesn't mesh with a "collected" conclusion I prize, I'm embarrassed about it. I'm not sure I sense that embarrassment in all of my philosophy students (some, but not all).
Any stories of your own? How do we get them to stop "collecting conclusions" without a sense of shame about it?
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Political philosophy readings
Over at PEA Soup, Matt Zwolinski has a post requesting suggestions for readings in political philosophy. The response has been good, with both some classics and some 'non-standard' items as well. Check it out!
Friday, September 7, 2007
Building a Successful Philosophy Club
Recently I've been working with a few of the philosophy (and religion) students here to try to come up with some good solid ideas for (a) running an effective philosophy and religion club and (b) getting students to run it autonomously, with help from faculty in the form of advice (and the all important funding).
I'm pretty new to this sort of thing. What, in your opinion, makes a departmental club successful? Clearly you (a) want the club to make inroads into the larger student community, so that you can build enrollment for your classes, (b) you want it it to forge better (and more collegial) professional relationships betwen students as co-members of the same disciplinary community, and (c) you want it to be fun.
Any suggestsions out there? Are there any "best practices" you'd like to suggest? Or any "avoid that!" suggestions? Perhaps a club should aim for more than what I've outlined?
I'm all ears on this one!
I'm pretty new to this sort of thing. What, in your opinion, makes a departmental club successful? Clearly you (a) want the club to make inroads into the larger student community, so that you can build enrollment for your classes, (b) you want it it to forge better (and more collegial) professional relationships betwen students as co-members of the same disciplinary community, and (c) you want it to be fun.
Any suggestsions out there? Are there any "best practices" you'd like to suggest? Or any "avoid that!" suggestions? Perhaps a club should aim for more than what I've outlined?
I'm all ears on this one!
A tension in writing pedagogy?
I'd like to discuss what I've experienced as a tension in how we help students learn to write in philosophy and to get some insight as to how the tension might be resolved.
First, the tension: Good philosophical writing is much more orderly than many students are accustomed to. At its best, it proceeds in a logical way, makes its assumptions explicit, lays out its reasoning carefully and directly, etc. I imagine that all of us have observed students struggling with this objective, producing written work that, whatever the merits of the ideas on offer, lacks structure, focus, or flow.
The natural remedy for this is to be direct with students about the orderliness that's expected. I have handouts I provide to students and I make available examples of written work that exemplifies the orderly style they should strive for. However, I've found that this has an unexpected negative consequence: Rather than their awareness of the need for order liberating them, many students find it either constraining or mechanical. The writing they produce becomes very by-the-numbers, with unoriginal theses and arguments drawn directly from texts or class discussion. The result is formulaic, sterile, risk-averse writing the crafting of which (I suspect) does little to help students master philosophical ideas.
This tension is important for two reasons: Yes, we want to encourage orderly writing. But writing also serves two other aims.
First, even though philosophical writing is less "creative" than many students realize, it can be a way for students to articulate and defend their own philosophical views. Students often take this to heart more strongly than I would like, treating each writing assignment as an opportunity to state, now and for all time, their true view on some philosophical matter. I like to remind them there's no sincerity requirement on their written work. (I don't even think there's a sincerity requirement for professional philosophers, but that's another story.) Nevertheless, helping students find a philosophical voice is a legitimate pedagogical goal, and I've found that this goal is sometimes at odds with the goal of producing orderly writing.
Second, the pedagogical value of writing isn't exhausted by the production of written work. The process of writing -- shaping a thesis, putting together arguments, digesting texts, identifying objections -- makes no less a contribution to student learning than does actually producing prose. That said, I've found that the need to produce orderly prose often results in students not really using the writing process as a way to interrogate philosophical ideas. They revert to plugging ideas into a written structure so as to generate clean prose, which means they neglect the much dirtier process of wrestling with philosophical problems and claims.
The tension, then, is between order and engagement with content, between the goal of crafting well-structured prose and the goal of learning about philosophical problems by writing about them. I don't think this tension is irresolvable, since some students react positively to the need for order, as it frees them to think less about the writing task proper and more about the intellectual tasks that accompany writing. Still, I believe there's a genuine tension here, one I've observed often in my career.
Can these two goals be harmonized? One idea I've fiddled with is to use more free writing with students. The idea here would be to give students a block of class time (10 minutes, say) to write whatever comes to mind in connection with some claim, topic, text, etc. The hope would be that this would let students do a bit of intellectual exploration (I wouldn't collect them, so there'd be little performance pressure) that they could then use as a springboard for more formal writing tasks later on. Perhaps they would, upon reading their free writing, come to appreciate that orderliness makes one's ideas more perspicuous and that our (my) insistence on orderly writing is not a whimsical authoritarian demand. Has anyone tried any free writing techniques? Do you have any thoughts about how to address the tension I've identified?
First, the tension: Good philosophical writing is much more orderly than many students are accustomed to. At its best, it proceeds in a logical way, makes its assumptions explicit, lays out its reasoning carefully and directly, etc. I imagine that all of us have observed students struggling with this objective, producing written work that, whatever the merits of the ideas on offer, lacks structure, focus, or flow.
The natural remedy for this is to be direct with students about the orderliness that's expected. I have handouts I provide to students and I make available examples of written work that exemplifies the orderly style they should strive for. However, I've found that this has an unexpected negative consequence: Rather than their awareness of the need for order liberating them, many students find it either constraining or mechanical. The writing they produce becomes very by-the-numbers, with unoriginal theses and arguments drawn directly from texts or class discussion. The result is formulaic, sterile, risk-averse writing the crafting of which (I suspect) does little to help students master philosophical ideas.
This tension is important for two reasons: Yes, we want to encourage orderly writing. But writing also serves two other aims.
First, even though philosophical writing is less "creative" than many students realize, it can be a way for students to articulate and defend their own philosophical views. Students often take this to heart more strongly than I would like, treating each writing assignment as an opportunity to state, now and for all time, their true view on some philosophical matter. I like to remind them there's no sincerity requirement on their written work. (I don't even think there's a sincerity requirement for professional philosophers, but that's another story.) Nevertheless, helping students find a philosophical voice is a legitimate pedagogical goal, and I've found that this goal is sometimes at odds with the goal of producing orderly writing.
Second, the pedagogical value of writing isn't exhausted by the production of written work. The process of writing -- shaping a thesis, putting together arguments, digesting texts, identifying objections -- makes no less a contribution to student learning than does actually producing prose. That said, I've found that the need to produce orderly prose often results in students not really using the writing process as a way to interrogate philosophical ideas. They revert to plugging ideas into a written structure so as to generate clean prose, which means they neglect the much dirtier process of wrestling with philosophical problems and claims.
The tension, then, is between order and engagement with content, between the goal of crafting well-structured prose and the goal of learning about philosophical problems by writing about them. I don't think this tension is irresolvable, since some students react positively to the need for order, as it frees them to think less about the writing task proper and more about the intellectual tasks that accompany writing. Still, I believe there's a genuine tension here, one I've observed often in my career.
Can these two goals be harmonized? One idea I've fiddled with is to use more free writing with students. The idea here would be to give students a block of class time (10 minutes, say) to write whatever comes to mind in connection with some claim, topic, text, etc. The hope would be that this would let students do a bit of intellectual exploration (I wouldn't collect them, so there'd be little performance pressure) that they could then use as a springboard for more formal writing tasks later on. Perhaps they would, upon reading their free writing, come to appreciate that orderliness makes one's ideas more perspicuous and that our (my) insistence on orderly writing is not a whimsical authoritarian demand. Has anyone tried any free writing techniques? Do you have any thoughts about how to address the tension I've identified?
Monday, September 3, 2007
The Labor of Teaching Philosophy
On labor day, I thought I would quickly raise the issue of whether teaching philosophy &/or being a professional, academic philosopher is (morally) justified labor.
At least two contemporary philosophers have argued that sometimes -- if not often -- it is not. Peter Unger in Living High and Letting Die argues -- too simply put -- that younger, less established philosophers should quit teaching and go to law school to become corporate lawyers to make a ton of money to donate to organizations that help desperately poor people. And Saul Smilansky, in 10 MORAL PARADOXES and "The Paradox of Beneficial Retirement", argues -- again too simply put -- that many philosophy teachers should retire because they would be replaced by better philosophy teachers (he argues this about any profession where there are many, many qualified people for the positions).
A first question I have is whether there are other arguments for views that are morally critical of the profession of teaching philosophy and, perhaps especially, doing philosophical research (or certain kinds of research, perhaps on certain topics...). Perhaps philosophers who develop these arguments never get them out on paper since they found them so convincing that they quit the field (!!), but I'm sure there must be more arguments than these two above (which, of course, need much more explanation than what I gave).
Second, and more importantly, are any of these arguments any good?
I have some thoughts on these questions, but I have to get back to work so I can't answer them now.
At least two contemporary philosophers have argued that sometimes -- if not often -- it is not. Peter Unger in Living High and Letting Die argues -- too simply put -- that younger, less established philosophers should quit teaching and go to law school to become corporate lawyers to make a ton of money to donate to organizations that help desperately poor people. And Saul Smilansky, in 10 MORAL PARADOXES and "The Paradox of Beneficial Retirement", argues -- again too simply put -- that many philosophy teachers should retire because they would be replaced by better philosophy teachers (he argues this about any profession where there are many, many qualified people for the positions).
A first question I have is whether there are other arguments for views that are morally critical of the profession of teaching philosophy and, perhaps especially, doing philosophical research (or certain kinds of research, perhaps on certain topics...). Perhaps philosophers who develop these arguments never get them out on paper since they found them so convincing that they quit the field (!!), but I'm sure there must be more arguments than these two above (which, of course, need much more explanation than what I gave).
Second, and more importantly, are any of these arguments any good?
I have some thoughts on these questions, but I have to get back to work so I can't answer them now.
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