by Rachel Robison-Greene
Public philosophy isn’t new. The image that many people conjure up when they picture a quintessential philosopher—the image of Socrates—is the image of a public philosopher. Socrates didn’t write articles. He didn’t publish in peer reviewed journals. He had conversations with members of his community about subjects that matter. The practice of public philosophy is thriving today in a surprising number of forms. Different approaches give rise to meta-level questions about the nature of philosophy in general and the nature of public philosophy in particular. I’ll provide a non-exhaustive discussion of some of these approaches and then I’ll discuss perks and pitfalls of one approach in particular.
One of the most common forms that public philosophy takes is work written for a broad audience rather than an academic one. Public philosophers of this type write articles for media outlets and blogs as well as books intended for consumption by non-specialists. This work relays information or offers arguments. One advantage of such an approach is that experts can (ideally) summarize a critical mass of information succinctly, making it possible for the community to get at the heart of a philosophical issue quickly. 1,000 Word Philosophy, for instance, presents enduring philosophical questions along with summaries of some of the most compelling answers on offer in easily digestible articles.
Another form that public philosophy can take is facilitating active engagement with the history of philosophy. Public philosophers of this type might host open talks and panel discussions with experts. They might put together community reading groups. In Italy, a group of public philosophers has put together a philosophy museum that is open to the public. This form of public philosophy emphasizes the enterprise as a great conversation taking place across the duration of human history.
The third type of public philosophy and the type that I’ll discuss at length here is the approach that brings communities together to facilitate important conversations. This occurs in many settings: street corners, libraries, coffee houses, pizza parlors, and this approach acknowledges the philosophical spirit in everyone: the ability to give and respond to reasons, the capacity to develop and react with apt emotions in particular circumstances, the potential to weigh evidence and evaluate the trustworthiness of sources, and so on. Community members are actively participating in crafting and critiquing arguments. My husband, Dr. Richard Greene and I have put on many such events. We call them “Ethics Slams.” We’ve discussed issues such as climate change, gun control reform, and cancel culture. We begin by presenting a list of philosophical goals and commitments and then proceed to moderate open mic public conversations.
Though these conversations are often rich and meaningful, I must confess to a certain level of looming pessimism. I suspect that most of the gloom surrounds the likelihood of achieving the goal we set out to achieve, which is to come to a better understanding of truths by crafting and evaluating the strongest arguments we can related to the topics under discussion. The philosophical motivation is, in part, the motivation that John Stuart Mill offers in On Liberty. He says,
…the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion still more than those who hold it.
If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception, and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error….We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
Mill argues that the freedom to articulate viewpoints freely provides human beings with a better chance at arriving at truths and at recognizing not just that bad arguments are bad, but also at understanding why they’re bad. People are rarely placed in spaces in which they can engage in this activity with people from a wide range of backgrounds, so our hope is that Ethics Slams will provide them with healthy spaces to engage in the kind of exchange of ideas that Mill describes. The optimistic part of me believes that people value their innate philosophical nature; a nature which is on display when they participate in this kind of argument analysis. I hope this will make a difference when it comes to how we engage with one another and how we think about policy formation. Philosophical discourse shouldn’t take place in a vacuum.
And yet, as I’ve said, I’m pessimistic. My pessimism arises from at least four main features of these discussions. The first is that our current epistemic climate is unfortunate, to put it mildly. It is hard to form true beliefs or to craft arguments with well-justified premises in a climate of belief formation, particularly online, in which profit is treated as more important than truth. When participants come from a wide range of backgrounds and political orientations, they bring with them confirmation bias, conspiracy theories, a tendency to demonize those they view as outside of their in-group, and a body of beliefs that has been heavily influenced by carefully crafted online misinformation designed to be seductive precisely to members of their given demographic.
My second concern is one that is discussed at length by Plato: some participants seem to engage the discussion with genuine curiosity and epistemic humility. Others seem interested only in persuasion. That is, they are engaging in rhetoric rather than philosophy. At first glance, rhetoric and philosophy seem quite similar, but their goals are often antithetical to one another. In Plato’s Gorgias, the titular character is a sophist, or what we might today call a “rhetorician.” He takes himself to have mastered the skill of “making the weaker argument the stronger.” He says, “For the rhetorician can speak against all men and upon any subject. In short, he can persuade the multitude better than any other man of anything which he pleases.” Rhetoric could but need not be used in the interest of truth. It could instead be used in the furtherance of what Harry Frankfurt, in his noteworthy work of public philosophy “On Bullshit” aptly describes as “bullshit.” In other words, if a philosopher and a sophist walk into an Ethics Slam, the participants might walk out more misguided than they were before, depending on the skills of the sophist and the position that sophist happens to take on the issue at hand.
I’ve often wondered what, if any, difference exists between an event like an Ethics Slam and a Town Hall. I think there is a meaningful difference because the goals and expectations are clearly articulated from the start and the aims we’ve identified are explicitly and intentionally philosophical. In doing so, we hope to encounter philosophy rather than sophistry at our events.
Then again, that approach isn’t as straightforward as it may seem either. Ensuring that discourse remains philosophical requires a stipulative definition of what it is to be philosophical. Some discussions that we’ve had have become predictably emotional because they involved not abstract philosophical concepts, but concrete social issues that impact some populations more than others. For example, we’ve hosted Ethics Slams about the ethics of public protest, the MeToo Movement, and recent laws that ban certain diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Voices were raised and tears were shed. Sometimes people are inclined to disregard what others say if those others become emotional because they view reason as at odds with emotion. Accepting this definition often leads to testimonial epistemic injustice. We might do well to include emotions, and moral emotions in particular, in our understanding of what it is to think philosophically. There are challenges for that position as well, however. What are we to do with retributive moral emotions such as shame, blame, guilt, and anger? What role, if any, should such emotions play in philosophical public discourse?
The third problem I want to identify is the self-selecting audience problem. The general idea is that we never manage to actually have good faith conversations with the people who might benefit from them the most. I’ve framed this concern as a dilemma argument in what follows:
Either the parties participating in the discussion are committed to good faith discourse or they are not.
If they are committed to good faith discourse, they aren’t the people we need to reach, and the discourse isn’t useful.
If they are not committed to good faith discourse, they won’t be willing to participate in the discourse and the discourse isn’t useful.
Either way, the discourse isn’t particularly useful.
Finally, I’m concerned with a related problem that I’ll call the causal efficacy problem. We’ve had strong attendance at these events. We’ve often had well over a hundred people. In this climate, that’s a lot of people in a room committed to philosophical discourse and treating one another with respect. That said, we could have ten, a hundred, or even a thousand times that many people present and it would be unlikely to have any practical impact on social policy. In a country that sometimes seems difficult to describe as anything other than an oligarchy, the people with the money and the power decide what policies will be implemented. Philosophical analysis plays little to no role in that.
In gloomier moods, I ask myself, “Is any of this worth it?” Engaging in public philosophy requires a lot of time and effort and doing it at all occasionally results in abuse and backlash.
But I’m not always pessimistic. Despite my doubts, some of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had both as a teacher and as a person have been doing public philosophy. Some professional philosophers respond to public philosophy with disdain. This strikes me as transparently gatekeeping. A discipline that is the heart and soul of the humanities shouldn’t put its liberating, humanizing power on a shelf only the rich and privileged kids can reach. We should liberate philosophy from the ivory tower. It hasn’t lived there for very long in the first place.
I’ve seen the humanizing effects of philosophy firsthand. In one striking instance, we were working with a group of incarcerated students on a set of moral arguments related to contemporary issues. One student in particular had shared the details of her difficult childhood with us. She had moved around so much that she rarely attended school and did not graduate. Reading was challenging for her. She learned a lot from her circumstances and offered unique and compelling arguments I never would have considered without her contributions. When we mentioned this, she told us that this was the first time anyone had ever seemed to really care what she thought about anything. Offering reasons is an important part of what it is to be human. Listening carefully to each other’s reasons is both validating and humanizing.
The commitment to reasoning with one another helps us to form community and to recognize that we are not voiceless. Even if our voices don’t change public policy, we can find comfort in our philosophical community. That community can be part of what makes our lives meaningful, even when things are grim. We can model good behavior for one another and serve as strong examples for young people.
In the Republic Glaucon challenges Socrates on the question of why we ought to be virtuous. He argues that people really only behave virtuously because they are concerned about the consequences. If there were no consequences, people would be self-serving. Socrates argues that virtue is worth pursuing for its own sake. It’s intrinsically valuable. Similarly, living philosophically, taking ourselves and each another seriously as the source of reasons and as beholden to them is valuable for its own sake, even if our reasoning doesn’t have much impact on world affairs.
I’ll end with a supporting quote from Mill’s On Liberty about what makes us wise,
In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that has been said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious.
Because he has felt that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.
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