Chapter 21: The Real World
I. Reality
A. Death
In graduate school, I had reached the point where I needed to start work on my dissertation. I wrote up a proposal, focusing on the ideas that can be found in chapters 12 through 16 of this book, and handed them in to Dr. Conrad Johnson. He took it, put it in his backpack, and headed home.
That was the last time any of us saw him alive.
He died of the flu. He was not old (49) and in good shape (he rode his bike to work each day). But healthy people still die of the flu. It wasn’t a bad way to die, I guess. He went to bed, certain that he would wake up the next morning, and he did not.
It put a bit of a kink in my plans to get a PhD. Though, I imagine, Dr. Johnson’s plans suffered a more serious setback.
B. Money
I also had money problems at the time. I had been going to school on an assistanceship from the Philosophy Department. But, after six years there, that money was coming to an end. So, I had to start thinking about what I was going to do for income.
This tied in with another concern; making a living. Whenever I told people that I was working on a PhD in moral philosophy, they asked me what I would do with that degree.
The standard answer is, “teach”. This was about the only thing one could do with a degree in philosophy. In fact, the department had warned its graduate school applicants to think twice about pursuing an advanced degree in this field — there were not enough jobs for the candidates that survived graduate school.
As if to emphasize this fact, as I entered my sixth year of college, the department was seeking to fill Dr. Johnson’s position. The advertisement that they placed in the philosophy journal brought literally hundreds of applications. I thought to myself, “What are the chances that my application would be selected out of all of that competition?”
The task seemed a bit hopeless.
One would think that a society that cared about right and wrong would have a place for those truly concerned with the study of ethics. Those who dedicated their lives to understanding the fine points of distinction between right and wrong would have an important role to play in society. However, in reality, people who study ethics are disposable.
Even if I got a job teaching at a university, how much money could I make? I had given up any measurable income up to this point so that I could study. However, I needed to start planning ahead — thinking about retirement and about the things Lesley wanted in her life. She did not want to be supporting me forever.
If I did get my PhD, I worried that this would interfere with my ability to land a real job. I would be considered a poor risk — somebody simply marking time until the right opportunity came along. In fact, I asked the person who hired me for my first full-time job after college if I would have been hired if I had gotten the PhD. She said, “No.”
When I tell this story, the person I am telling it to often answers that I could have gotten the degree and kept it secret.
Get a PhD in ethics, and then lie about it. There is something about that option that strikes me as being a bit… well… inconsistent.
C. Outcome
The aftermath of all of this is that I left graduate school without completing my PhD. My wife and I packed up and headed back west, to the Rocky Mountains. A friend of hers (from Maryland) had moved to Boulder, Colorado. It seemed like a good place to life one’s life. I had grown up in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, and I was wanting to return.
II. Unfinished Business: What Is A Desire?
If I had been able to stay in school, or become a professor, I had a list of questions I still wanted to try to answer. The idea that morality was primarily concerned with the evaluation of desires answered a lot of the questions that I had when I started graduate school. However, it also made me aware of new questions.
I do not know the answer to some of these questions. Ultimately, they may undercut this entire theory. Yet, there is nothing to be gained by pretending that these questions do not exist, or by confidently serving up answers that even I see no reason to feel confident in. These options are available only for the person who does not care whether he leads others into error.
The same professor who introduced me to the idea that a desire is a propositional attitude, Dr. Rey, also introduced me to a problem with this idea. The problem was raised in an article by Daniel Dennett, and it asks the question, “What is a desire?”
I have gone this entire distance trying to argue for the thesis that value claims in general are (objective) claims about the relationships between states of affairs and desires. Moral claims are a specific type of value claim that ultimately evaluates desires according to their relationships to other desires. Yet, this naturally begs the question, “What is a desire, anyway?”
A. What Is a Desire, Anyway?
A desire is supposed to be a dispositional state. That is to say, a desire that P is supposed to be a disposition to make it the case that P is true.
However, Dennett asks us to consider the role of a thermostat. Let us say that the thermostat acts to keep the temperature of the room at least 70 degrees. Does it make sense to say that the thermostat “desires” that the temperature be no less than 70 degrees, and whenever it “believes” that the temperature is less 70 degrees that it acts to make or keep the proposition, “the temperature of the room is at least 70 degrees” true? When (and how) did thermostats acquire desires and beliefs?
It seems obvious that thermostats do not have desires. If we decide to allow that a thermostat does have a desire that the room’s temperature not fall below 70 degrees, and moral value relates desires to all other desires, regardless of whose they are, then the thermostat’s desire would have moral significance. The absurdity of these conclusions suggests that there is a problem in the whole theory somewhere.
It seems to me that the problem is with assigning desires to a thermostat. However, is that just a prejudice, like refusing to see blacks as having moral significance? Should we be expanding our concept of “person” to include inanimate objects, and it is only our obstinate prejudice that continues to identify these things as non-persons?
Ridiculous.
Absurd.
How do you prove it?
I do not know.
B. “I Do Not Know”
I think that these three words, “I don’t know,” are the most underused words in the English language. People should be using them far more often than they do. When a pollster calls to ask a person’s opinion on some matter of national issue, I think that a reasonable response to that poll would put the “I do not know” answer above 90% — except, where it is almost always found in these polls, far below 10%.
If I could have continued living in the academic community, I would have sought an answer to that question — or, perhaps, discovered that there was no answer. Maybe I would have discovered that the answer that made the most sense is that thermostats have rights (though I doubt it).
Why doesn’t this problem justify throwing out the whole theory?
My answer: We have no better theory to put in its place. Evolutionary ethics, common subjectivism, cultural subjectivism, intersubjectivism, intrinsic value theory, divine command theory, act utilitarianism, rule utilitarianism, all have significantly larger problems.
Contractarianism provides a reasonable alternative. However, contractarianism faces the same question.
It may be the case, as some philosophers argue, that the concepts of ‘desire’ and ‘belief’ are so far removed from reality that we may need to discard them entirely, and to substitute new concepts that actually have relevance in the real world. If this happens, all things built on the concepts of desire and belief will have to go with them. Morality may be one of those casualties.
I can’t deny this possibility. Yet, the same principle holds — it makes no sense to abandon an existing theory with its flaws in favor of a better theory until actually have a better theory to use. If we did this, then Newton’s theories would have been immediately tossed out, because there were a few observations it could not handle. We had to wait for Einstein to come along to provide answers to some of those questions. Yet, even his theories had some problems. In both cases, at the time, they were the best theories available, in spite of their flaws and unanswered questions.
Predictions that a better theory will be found some day are well and good. When that “some day” gets here, give me a call. Until that happens, I work with the best that is available at the moment.
III. Promulgating
Anyway, in spite of my unanswered questions, I had another bone to pick with academic philosophy.
My studies brought me to realize that moral philosophers already knew great and important truths about what was right and wrong. The problem was, many of those truths had not left academic halls.
Almost 2500 years ago, Socrates raised the definitive question against divine command theories of ethics — ‘Is X good because God likes X, or does God like X because it is good?’ The first option cannot be the answer because it states that anything that God likes can be good. There is nothing particularly wrong with torturing young children for pleasure; it just happened to be the case that God decided not to like it. Why did God decide not to like it? It was not because it is wrong; because God has to not like something for it to be wrong. God is free to flip the cosmic coin on the issue of torturing children and make it the case that torturing a child is good in fact, simply by changing his mind.
Yet, 2,500 years later, people still profess, “X is good because God likes X,” totally oblivious to the problems that rest behind such a claim. 2500 years of teachers and professional philosophers, and the problems with this type of claim are virtually unknown.
This would not be a problem if we were talking about some obscure piece of knowledge such as the recipe for Damascus steel or how to find one’s way to some ancient pharaoh’s hidden tomb that had been raided long ago.
We are not talking about obscure and unimportant facts. We are talking about telling the difference between right and wrong. Yet, more school time and effort will be spent teaching students the arbitrary rules picked out of a hat (for all practical purposes) for the spelling of certain words than will be spent teaching children how to evaluate different rules for determining right from wrong.
Similarly, David Hume argued over 200 years ago how it subverts all vulgar systems of ethics that defenders cannot explain how they derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’ (without mentioning desires). Yet, we live in a society of citizens ignorant of the problem. People continually attempt to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’ as a matter of course, and nobody seems at all interested in pointing out that it provides absolutely no help in distinguishing between good and evil. The conclusions that they draw from these types of inferences are not supported. Yet, the conclusions that they draw from these types of premises are conclusions about who lives, who dies, who is made more comfortable, and who is made to suffer.
It is as if we do not really care how well or how poorly people engaged in the art of distinguishing good from evil. Why should we care? It’s not as if there are lives at stake. Oh, wait, yes there are lives at stake — for more lives than would be put at risk by students unfamiliar with the rules governing the placement of “i” and “e” after “c”.
These observations supported the conclusion that philosopher/teachers for the past 2,500 years have largely been wasting their time. Without any effort on their part, their greatest discoveries remained well-hidden secrets. Would it be worthwhile for a person who wanted to ensure that he did not waste his life pursuing things that did not matter to take up this course? It seemed doubtful.
A. Fiction
These thoughts brought me, after twelve years of college, to the conclusion that making the world a better place can best be done by getting people to see and understand the progress that moral philosophers had made.
I wanted to make the world a better place. I spent those years studying theories of value so that I could know a ‘better place’ when I saw it. Some of those ideas were my own. However, philosophers have known some of the components of a ‘better place’ for millennia without having any significant influence on actually turning the world into such a place. It was time to pick a new course of action.
I enjoyed writing. Textbooks were dull and would only be shared by a few people, and typically just those people on whom it would have the least influence (because they already knew much of what was in the book). I liked the idea of writing fiction — specifically, science fiction stories that would allow the reader to look at situations in a whole new light. These stories would aim at educating and entertaining at the same time — reaching those people whom it would be best to reach, if only I could write something they wanted to read.
It is relevant to note that I continually worked my ethical views into my stories. My campaign worlds contained gods, and I would constantly raise questions about what it takes for a god to be good or evil, and the moral status of gods. Cultures in the worlds I invented presented the idea that gods and mortals were moral equals; that gods lacked any soft of natural right to rule and mortals lacked a natural duty to obey.
I created cultures whose “family values” were decidedly nonhuman, such as leonid who lived in prides and elves for whom no child ever knew their father. I explored questions about capital punishment and what counts as a “just war”, and created creatures that called into question the idea that “if you evolved a disposition to do C, then you have a right to do C.”
If I could create interesting stories that discussed these issues, then I could perhaps make the world a better place by helping people, who otherwise would not have confronted such ideas, realize certain things that they would not have otherwise realized.
As the final months of graduate school ticked off, I started work on a novel, based in my campaign world, called Thayne Tiempko’s War, that introduced many of these same ethical concepts. The book was extremely easy to write, and I had a draft finished by the time the bags were packed and I was ready to move on after college.
IV. The End of Graduate School
So, that was the end of graduate school. Six years of study without a degree to show for it. However, having a degree is not the same thing as having an education.
It was time to join the real world, which introduced two competing concerns. One concern was making a living — earning money to pay the rent (or mortgage), buy groceries, and the like. The other concern that remained with me was to use my time making the world a better place than it would have otherwise been. It would be great to find a way to do both of these things at the same time, but what would be great too often remains nothing more than a dream.
The dreaded moment had arrived — it was time to enter “The Real World” as they say. It was time to start seeking answers to questions I have never had to answer before, questions quite different from those I concerned myself with in college. Questions such as “Where, exactly, will your next meal be coming from?”