by Will Wilkinson on November 12, 2004
John Tomasi is right (see “Should Political Liberals be Compassionate Conservatives?: Philosophical Foundations of the Faith-Based Initiative” Social Philosophy & Policy 21/1, January 2004″) and Rawlsian political liberalism requires that if the state is going to provide certain services, then the state should also provide funds to non-secular providers of those services, otherwise, they get crowded out, and the comprehensive worldview common in the adminstrative state is, in effect, illiberally imposed.
So if the state pays for mental health services, they should also pay for alternative treatments, such as Scientology training (Scientology is rabidly anti-psychiatry), and Christian “treatments” for homosexuality. The state must not discriminate against those who do not believe in the secular mental health profession’s definition of our spiritual and behavioral woes, or those who don’t believe in Ritalin, Prozac and grief counseling as the cure for their spiritual ills.
Right?
by Will Wilkinson on November 12, 2004
In a monumental post on Stephen Toulmin, Michael Blowhard writes:
The impression I’ve gotten from a few timid looks into up-to-date philosophy is that it’s a matter of filling in the few remaining (and really tiny) squares — an activity for specialists and tenured-prof-wannabes only. Between you and me, and off-the-record only, my philosophy-prof friends giggle at the idea that anything major remains to be done in modern Western philosophy.
So what are philosophers good for? I think this requires a good long answer that I’m not going to take the time to assay, but it’s a question that deserves some reflection. Michael seems to be under the impression that the dialectic of the traditional problems of philosophy–free-will; realism vs. anti-realism; mind/body; etc.–is worn out. I agree, but that’s because I think there are right answers to this questions, or at least ways of framing them that dissolve the question (that shows the fly the way out of the fly bottle, I should say). And I think that the correct answer to many of these questions has practical import. If we get it right, it changes how we live, or at least stops us from worrying about something we shouldn’t have been worried about.
My naturalistic bent leads to me see the role of philosophy as that of clarifying traditional questions to the point that they can be approached with the tools of scientific method. When that occurs, a lot of the philosophy drops out. But science remains a kind of applied philosophy that requires the right kind of conceptual and inferential framework for asking the right questions, and for interpreting the results of experimentation. Philosophy of physics is an interesting field, for instance, because physics turns out to be so weird, and requires philosophical counsel.
And science tells us things that settles old philosophical disputes, and that helps reframe old scientific questions. Human beings are not, we now know, a blank slate. And the sciences of human nature help us reconceive old questions. The kinds of social order that are possible depends on what human beings are like, and we are learning a lot about what human beings are like. Philosophers, if they are doing there job, ought to be applying the results of the best relevant science and showing how that changes the way we think about old questions.
Anybody have any good ideas about areas where philosophers are making a really important contribution to knowledge, other than just filling in a few really tiny squares?
