Thoughts from
San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture

 
Stupid Philosophers
By Tom Smith

Philosophers can get away with making arguments that would be laughed out of other disciplines. Causing controversy is the latest missive from Ted Honderich. (thanks to NRO for the pointer.) I read a book of his called if I remember correctly "Violence for Equality" back in the 1970's. I remember thinking at the time it was pretty lame. The argument goes roughly, it's OK to kill people in a good cause, and equality is a good cause.

The review of the new book, After the Terror, in the CHE is pretty stupid, I'm afraid. It just assumes the usual cant about the causes of third world poverty (globalization, blah, blah), and goes from there. The reviewer timidly suggests, maybe there are moral dangers in approving terrorism. You think?

(To digress a bit, I also just don't see what's so bad about a lot of third world poverty. I hung out for a while in the Amazon last summer, and frankly I would much rather be a Peruvian Indian fishing that big river for a living than some Manhattan investment banker drone or Wall Street law firm associate. You fish for a living, you're in great shape, nobody seems to be working very hard. So you have lice and die younger. I'd rather do that than pull 80 hours a week in a glass box.)

Honderich's new book is said to be written in an offhand, chatty style. How odd. That's how his 1970's book was written, too. Other terms might include sloppy, full of unsupported assertions, presumptuous, and so on. Oh, yes, and windy.

How's this for slimy: to try to defuse controversy over his apparent approval of terrorism, Honderich offered to give 5000 pounds to OxFam, which, get this, refused the donation on ethical grounds, saying it held that all humans had a right to life and it was wrong to kill some of them to try to achieve political ends through the terror thereby created, and it wouldn't take money from somebody who supported terrorism. Oh, how very philosophically confused of OxFam, or maybe they're just Kantians (or Christians). Still, good on OxFam! But 5000 pounds is a lot for a philosopher to offer, no? No. Honderich hails, how shocking!--from a very wealthy family. Would it just be too incomprehensible for Ted to leave off advocating killing people for say, one year, and spend that year maybe working with AIDS victims in Africa? I could him in touch with lots of groups that would welcome the help. But I guess advocating roasting people alive (those that couldn't get to the windows in time to put themselves out of their misery) in buildings in New York from your, let me guess, fashionable west end of London address, is a finer thing, in some philosophical sense. And there are better restaurants nearby as well.

My impression from the outside is that there is very much a hierarchy in philosophy, with the smartest people going into quite technical areas such as epistemology and metaphysics, in which there have been some bona fide geniuses in recent decades (such as Saul Kripke, I would say) down to very applied ethics and political theory, where stuff gets said and written that strikes me as downright embarrassing. I would put Honderich in very much the latter category. I have certainly sat in philosophy workshops where not well-known but at least tenured philosophy professors made generalizations about, say, contract law that were so wildly wrong that any half-intelligent business person who had occasionally to read a contract would be chagrined--not to mention any first year law student. Yet at the top of the philosophy profession are people who probably compete with Nobel prize winning physicists for sheer brain power. Go figure.
posted by thomas at 10/23/2003 09:27:00 AM