Are We All Philosophers Now?

Philosophers must be a busy bunch this year; there are so many different things to think about. It isn’t that there is anything completely new to think about, but there are so many very concrete and escalating situations to tackle that deal with perennial issues in the area of moral philosophy, otherwise known as ethics.

I suspect the word “philosophy” probably conjures a very boring university lecture being given by an old white man in most people’s imagination. This is both true and false. (Aha! A paradox!)

It’s true because, yes, that lecture does happen. It is false because that is not the sum total of philosophy. You can see philosophy happening on most television shows that deal with human nature and decision making: any medical drama, any legal drama and any reasonably intelligent police procedural. At some point, a human has to make a decision that is difficult because it isn’t quite clear what the “right” thing to do is. We label this “entertainment” instead of “philosophy” when we watch imaginary characters struggle with these decisions on-screen.

There are myriad questions posed about loyalty (to whom, under what circumstances, despite which consequences?), making a choice that may have potentially devastating effects without complete certainty (will the surgery be successful or kill the patient?) or making a trade-off between two important but difficult-to-compare aspects (appearance or physical ability versus risks to health).

I don’t know if philosophers get hired to consult on these shows to help create interesting situations or describe the work the characters might engage in to find solutions. Probably not: the problems themselves abound quite naturally (they have for some time now) and I suspect that writers are sufficiently clever students of human behavior to find solutions that are satisfying to audiences.

And I’m equally sure that philosophers are not being hired in large enough numbers at influential technology companies or government, where they might skillfully describe potential dangers and other second-order effects of implementing a given technology or policy on an arbitrarily large scale. Or to simply serve as a counselor who can provide illustrative and relevant thought-experiments that help us see the potential problems differently and with a bit more depth; with a bit more humanity. Or even to merely provoke a healthy seriousness in considering the issues at hand.

The truth is that we all have to make difficult decisions sometimes. We have to take up the work of choosing between two or more things that create tension in our values and how we understand the world. 

But, of course, everyone thinks they are an above average driver.