The direction of philosophy should not be in telling people what to do but in explaning what people already do.
Scientists achieved great things by focusing on explaning. They explained why nucleuses stay together, why objects fall, how trees grow. With each explanation followed an application, an invention or something similar.
Philosophy is not doing the same. The focus here is on the invention. We wish to invent the lightbulb before understanding electricity. Ethics are attempts to tell humans what to do before we understand what they are already doing. Is it not amazing that we have as the main objective of some ethics “happiness” when happiness isn’t even fully understood? It’s like trying to make a match when you don’t know how fire works. You don’t know what materials you need, what you’re going to do with them; you’re just stumbling around in the dark.
The direction of philosophy should be changed from professing religions to understanding religions. We should stop trying to make society work better and start trying to understand how it currently works.
The person who tries to make a lightbulb fails. The person who tries to explain and understand electricity will eventually make a lightbulb.
Explaining works in science because of the nature of matter; if I drop an apple, it doesn’t have the choice but to fall. Were apples to be more like people in a society, some apples would fall faster than others, some would not fall at all and still some would rise up instead of falling.
Ethics is all about people, and because of this, there are no general laws governing it. Apples don’t ask the question “Should I fall?”. If they did, and some decided against falling, we would have no such thing as the notion of gravity. Free will undermines a scientific approach.
An example I myself have come to like is as follows. We all know that if an object is on the surface of a planet, it is quite unlikely to suddenly jump up and start orbiting the planet, let alone land on the planet’s moon. Yet in the last fifty years, both of these events have happened quite frequently. A sufficient amount of free will can even bend the laws of gravity.
Therefore, if even the laws of physics have trouble with humanity, how would it ever be possible to think that there would be a way to go from “why” to “what” with humanity. That is because, in every single case, the “why” is different. Most of the time, even the person himself in not conscious of all the reasons for his actions. The “why” is far too complex, and thus its study is, if not comletely, then very nearly impossible. As such, it is the only possible way to go straight to the invention, that is, what a person should do.
I liked your post, I found the 3rd paragraph to be particularly interesting.
I feel it to be sort of a stretch in terms of the OP, I’m not really sure what all that has to do with the direction of philosophy - but I liked it nonetheless.
As for me, I feel the direction of philosophy will take a major turn towards the idealist forest to venture deep within the introspective woods. Transdimentional science, metaprogramming, etc.
Isn’t that the job of sociology or anthropology or psychology already? Don’t those disciplines try to describe human behavior (while offering their own theories as to why people “already do” of course)?
Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is that we, like Descartes did, need to start from the beginning. We don’t understand how humans decide things, we don’t understand what the word “good” means or where the sensation “happy” came from, and yet we’re perpetually telling people what to decide on and what they need to do to become happier. All founders of new ethical systems claim that theirs is better than the one currently used, but we don’t even know what the one currently used is! Get my drift?
It simply complicates things, that’s all. Not even that much. I take it by free will you mean the ability to decide right? Though humans are able to decide to do whatever they want, they do so on certain criteria. Here they are. (Brought this up before, hope it works better this time )
If the perceived benefit is greater than the perceived detriment than the person will decide to do the action.
(Make sure to include effort in the detriment part!)
I think we have a pretty good understanding of the good and happiness. Not being able to whip out a rigorous definition does not imply your moral intuition is skewed. Even less so for happiness–you can’t tell when you’re happy?
Well, people have tried to define/understand happiness or good for millenia, and they’ve had some success. And I think the supreme bettle is right, that we don’t necessarily need rigorous definitons for those terms. Some might even argue that an objective definition of those words is impossible.
I still don’t see how your view of philosophy is any different from the usual (and usually successful) social sciences. Mathematics has provided us with decision theory and game theory, two rigorous models that can be applied to human behavior. Sociologists and anthropologists may study how standards of happiness and good evolved and change. And we can get a very clear idea of how people “decide things” from psychology, and with the advent of non-invasive brain scans, I think in the next century we’ll know how humans cognate with the same level of understanding as we know how a computer clicks through programs. The tasks you assign to philosophy are being worked on, and with greater accuracy in neuroscience and genetics, we should even be able to reduce them to a material substrate. Those questions are old business.
You say we need to do what Descartes did, start from the beginning. I think we already have. And I also think some of the things you think philosophy can do might very well be impossible.
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