Utopias, Dolphins and Computers

Problems in Philosophical Plumbing

Mary Midgley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134784660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Why do the big philosophical questions so often strike us as far-fetched and little to with everyday life? Mary Midgley shows that it need not be that way; she shows that there is a need for philosophy in the real world. Her popularity as one of our foremost philosophers is based on a no-nonsense, down-to-earth approach to fundamental human problems, philosphical or otherwise. In Utopias, Dolphins and Computers she makes her case for philosophy as a difficult but necessary tool for solving some of the most pressing issues facing contemporary society.
How should we treat animals? Why are we so confused about the value of education? What is at stake in feminism? Why should we sustain our environment? Why do we think intelligent computers will save us? Mary Midgley argues that philosophy not only can, but should be used in thinking about these questions.
Utopias, Dolphins and Computers will make fascinating reading for philosophers, educationalists, feminists, environmentalists and indeed anyone interested in the questions of philosophy, ethics and life.

1

PHILOSOPHICAL PLUMBING

WATER AND THOUGHT

Is PHILOSOPHY like plumbing? I have made this comparison a number of times, wanting to stress that philosophizing is not just grand and elegant and difficult, it is also needed. It isn’t optional. The idea caused mild surprise, and has sometimes been thought rather undignified. The question of dignity is a very interesting one, to which we will come back at the end of this chapter. But first, I would like to work the comparison out a bit more fully.

Plumbing and philosophy are both activities that arise because elaborate cultures like ours have, beneath their surface, a fairly complex system which is usually unnoticed, but which sometimes goes wrong. In both cases, this can have serious consequences. Each system supplies vital needs for those who live above it. Each is hard to repair when it does go wrong, because neither of them was ever consciously planned as a whole. There have been many ambitious attempts to reshape both of them. But, for both, existing complications are usually too widespread to allow a completely new start.

Neither system ever had a single designer who knew exactly what needs it would have to meet. Instead, both have grown imperceptibly over the centuries in the sort of way that organisms grow, and are constantly being altered piecemeal to suit changing demands as the ways of life above them have branched out. Both are therefore now very intricate. When trouble arises, specialized skill is needed if there is to be any hope of locating it and putting it right.

Here, however, we run into the first striking difference between the two cases. About plumbing, everybody accepts this need for trained specialists. About philosophy, many people—especially British people—not only doubt the need, they are often sceptical about whether the underlying system even exists at all. It is much more deeply hidden. When the concepts we are living by work badly, they don’t usually drip audibly through the ceiling or swamp the kitchen floor. They just quietly distort and obstruct our thinking.

We often don’t consciously notice this obscure malfunction, any more than we consciously notice the discomfort of an unvarying bad smell or of a cold that creeps on gradually. We may indeed complain that life is going badly—that our actions and relationships are not turning out as we intend. But it can be very hard to see why this is happening, or what to do about it. We find it much easier to look for the source of trouble outside ourselves than within. Notoriously, it is hard to see faults in our own motivation, in the structure of our feelings. But it is in some ways even harder—even less natural—to turn our attention to what might be wrong in the structure of our thought. Attention naturally flows outwards to faults in the world around us. Bending thought round to look critically at itself is quite hard. That is why, in any culture, philosophy is a relatively late development.

When things do go badly, however, we have to do this. We must then somehow readjust our underlying concepts; we must shift the set of assumptions that we were brought up with. We must restate those existing assumptions—which are normally muddled and inarticulate—so as to find the source of trouble. And this new statement must somehow be put in a usable form, a form which makes the necessary changes look possible.

QUARRELS BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY?

That need to readjust our concepts is the need that philosophy exists to satisfy. It is not just a need felt by highly educated people. It is a need that can spoil the lives even of people with little interest in thinking, and its pressure can be vaguely felt by anyone who tries to think at all. As that pressure becomes fiercer, people who are determined to think particularly hard do sometimes manage to devise a remedy for this obscure discomfort, and this is how philosophy first got started. Time and again in the past, when conceptual schemes have begun to work badly, someone has contrived to suggest a change that shifts the blockage, allowing thought to flow where it is needed.

Once this has happened, the bystanders tend to heave deep sighs and say, ‘Aha—of course, I knew that all along. Why didn’t I happen to say it before?’ (Sometimes indeed they think that they have done so…) These new suggestions usually come in part from sages who are not full-time philosophers, notably from poetry and other arts. Shelley was right to say that poets are among the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. They can show us the new vision. But to work the new ideas out fully is still a different kind of work. Whoever does it, it is always philosophical business. It needs, not just a new vision, but also the thorough, disciplined articulation of its details and consequences.

Much of this work is boring, and it can sometimes prove astonishingly long and difficult, but it is indispensable. Any powerful new idea calls for a great deal of change, and the more useful that idea is going to be, the more need there is to work out these changes fully. For doing this, it really is very helpful to be acquainted with other visions and other sets of changes, to have some background training in the way that past conceptual developments have worked. Of course there have been some self-educated philosophers who didn’t have the advantage of this background—Tom Paine was one—but the work is much harder for them.

Great philosophers, then, need a combination of gifts that is rare. They must be lawyers as well as poets. They must have both the new vision that points the way we are to go and the logical doggedness that sorts out just what is, and what is not, involved in going there. It is this difficult balancing act that has gained them a respect which is different from the respect due to either kind of work on its own. It accounts for the peculiar prestige which philosophy still has, even among people who are extremely vague about what it is or why they might need it.

Keeping these two functions together is hard. Where philosophy is salaried and professionalized, the lawyer-like skills are almost bound to predominate because you can examine people to test their logical competence and industry, but you can’t test their creativity. These skills are then no longer being used to clarify any specially important new vision. Philosophy becomes scholastic, a specialized concern for skilled plumbers doing fine plumbing, and sometimes doing it on their own in laboratories. This happened in the late Middle Ages; it seems to have happened in China, and it has happened to Anglo-American philosophy during much of this century.

THE VISION THING

This self-contained, scholastic philosophy remains an impressive feat, something which may be well worth doing for its own sake. It is quite right that there should be deeply specialized thought, like some mathematics (for example) that most of us cannot penetrate at all. But if philosophers treat this esoteric area as their central business, they leave a most dangerous gap in the intellectual scene. This work cannot, of course, stop the other aspect, the visionary aspect of philosophy, from being needed, nor that need from being supplied. The hungry sheep who don’t get that creative vision look up and are not fed. They tend to wander round looking for new visions until they find some elsewhere. Thus, a good deal of visionary philosophizing has been imported lately from Europe and from the East, from the social sciences, from evangelists, from literary criticism and from science fiction, as well as from past philosophers. But it doesn’t necessarily bring with it the disciplined, detailed thinking that is needed to apply it to life.

The living water flows in, but it is not channelled to where it is needed. It seeps around, often forming floods, and it finally settles in pools where chance dictates, because the local philosophic practitioners won’t attend to it. In fact, the presence of these alien streams often merely exasperates them. They suspect that the public has no business to ask for visions at all, and that unlicensed merchants have certainly no business to supply them.

So we get a new version of the old ‘quarrel between philosophy and poetry’ that Plato worried about in the Republic, a demarcation dispute embittered by modern professional territorialism and academic specialization. Philosophers are tempted to imitate other academic specialists by defensively narrowing their subject. They follow the specialized scientists, who claim that nothing counts as ‘science’ except the negative results of control-experiments performed inside laboratories, and the specialized historians, who insist that only value-free, non-interpreted bits of information can count as history. Ignoring the philosophic howlers that are so obvious in these claims, these philosophers in their turn also rule that only technical, purely formal work, published in learned journals and directed at their colleagues, can count as ‘philosophy’.

Do they still do this? Much less so, I think, than they did a little time back. In the last few decades, many people have indeed noticed the absurdity of over-specialization, the emptiness of the heavily defended academic fortress. But unfortunately, these absurdities are built into hiring-and-firing and promotion procedures that will take a long time to change, even when the need for change is widely understood. Meanwhile, it needs to be loudly and often said that this contracting of territories, this defensive demarcation-disputing among professionals, is not just misguided. It is pernicious and thoroughly unprofessional.

Learning is not a private playground for the learned. It is something that belongs to, and affects, all of us. Because we are a culture that values knowledge and understanding so highly, the part of every study that can be widely understood—the general, interpretative part, the ideology—always does seep out in the end and concern us all. The conceptual schemes used in every study are not private ponds; they are streams that are fed from our everyday thinking, are altered by the learned, and eventually flow back into it, influencing our lives.

This is not true only of philosophy. In history, for instance, ideas about the nature of social causation, about the importance or unimportance of individual acts or of economic and social factors, are constantly changing. Historians can’t actually be neutral about these things, because they have to pick out what they think worth investigating. Selection always shows bias, and must have its eventual influence. All that specialist scholars gain by refusing to attend to this bit of philosophy is ignorance about their own thinking, ignorance of their own commitment and of the responsibility it carries. The same thing is true of science. One has only to think of the part that concepts like ‘relativity’ or ‘evolution’ have played in our everyday thought during the twentieth century to see this.

But of course, philosophy is the key case, because it is the study whose peculiar business it is to concentrate on the gaps between all the others, and to understand the relations between them. Conceptual schemes as such are philosophy’s concern, and these schemes do constantly go wrong. Conceptual confusion is deadly, and a great deal of it afflicts our everyday life. It needs to be seen to, and if the professional philosophers don’t look at it, there is no one else whose role it is to do so.

THE SELF-HELP OPTION

Ought we each to be able to do this on our own, on a do-it-yourself basis? This attractive idea probably lies at the heart of British anti-intellectualism. We do sometimes manage this private philosophizing, and there is, of course, a great deal to be said for trying. But it is extremely hard to get started. Indeed, as I mentioned, often we find it hard to imagine that anything definite is wrong with our concepts at all.

This is the crucial paradox. Why are we not more aware of our conceptual needs? The difficulty is that (as I have mentioned), once this kind of work is done, conceptual issues drop out of sight and are forgotten. That is why people have the idea that philosophy has never solved any problems. Systems of ideas which are working smoothly become more or less invisible. (This, of course, is what provoked my original comparison with plumbing, another service for which we are seldom as grateful as we might be). Until they explode, we assume that the ideas we are using are the only ideas that have ever been possible. We think either that everybody uses these ideas or that, if there are people who don’t, they are simply unenlightened, ‘primitive’, misinformed, misguided, wicked or extremely stupid.

EXAMPLE: THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

It is time to mention some examples. But it is tricky finding the right ones. This disregard of our conceptual schemes is so strong, so natural, that in order to pick on an instance of what I am talking about, we need to choose a notion that is already making too much trouble to be disregarded. I considered discussing the Machine Model here, but it is now wallowing in too many kinds of difficulty to deal with at this point. Instead, let us open a related manhole and look at the idea of the Social Contract.

That was the conceptual tool used by prophets of the Enlightenment to explain political obligation from below rather than from above. Instead of saying that kings must be obeyed because they were appointed by God, philosophers suggested that the only reason for obeying any kind of government was that it represented the will of the people governed and served their interests. At last, unsatisfactory kings were expendable. Civic duty sprang only from tacit agreement among rational citizens, each concerned for their own interest—an agreement regularly tested through voting.

After fierce disputes and much bloodshed, this startling idea was quite widely accepted. Once it had become so, questions about it largely ceased to be noticed and vanished under the floorboards of many Western institutions. On the whole, we in the West now take contract thinking for granted, and we are not alone in doing that. The authority of contract is, for instance, treated as obvious by the many oppressed and misgoverned peoples all over the world who are now demanding something called ‘democracy’. Yet difficulties about that concept do still arise, and indeed they are on the increase. Lately, distinct patches of dry rot have arisen around it, and there have been some very odd smells.

For instance—if we rely heavily on the notion of contract—we have to ask, what about the interests of non-voting parties? What, for a start, about the claims of children, of the inarticulate and the insane, and of people as yet unborn? What about something that, till recently, our moralists hardly mentioned at all, namely the non-human, non-speaking world—the needs of animals and plants, of the ocean and the Antarctic and the rainforests? There is a whole great range of questions here which we now see to be vital, but which we find strangely hard to deal with, simply because our culture has been so obsessed with models centring on contract. Again, even within the set of possible contractors, we might ask who is entitled to a voice on what? What happens to the interests of people in one democratic country who suffer by the democratically agreed acts of another? What, too, about minorities within a country, minorities who must live by decisions they did not vote for? (A question which Mill worried about profoundly in his Essay on Liberty.) And so on.

Plainly, social-contract thinking is no sort of adequate guide for constructing the whole social and political system. It really is a vital means of protection against certain sorts of oppression, an essential defence against tyranny. But it must not be taken for granted and forgotten as a safe basis for all sorts of institutions. It needs always to be seen as something partial and provisional, an image that may cause trouble and have to be altered. It is a tool to be used, not a final decree of fate or an idol to be worshipped. It is, in fact, just one useful analogy among many. It must always be balanced against others which bring out other aspects of the complex truth.

This provisional quality is, in fact, a regular feature of conceptual schemes. None of them is isolated; none of them is safe from the possibility of clashing with others. If they are successful, they always tend to expand and eventually to be used on unsuitable material. (One can see this happening all the time with intellectual fashions). The cluster of ideas that centres on the image of contract has been very expansive, generating powerful ideas of rights, autonomy, interests, competition, rationality as self-interest, and so forth. It has strongly influenced our whole idea of what an individual is—again, something that we take for granted and rarely think to alter when we run into trouble.

THE DESTRUCTIVE SIDE OF INDIVIDUALISM

Contract thinking makes individuals look much more separate than most cultures have taken them to be—more separate, surely, than they actually are. It says that there is really no such thing as society, that the state is only a logical construction out of its members. By contrast with older organic metaphors such as ‘we are members one of another’, contract-talk portrays people as essentially distinct beings—billiard-balls on the table—each free to make just what contracts it chooses and to abstain from all others.

This individualism is, of course, particularly revolutionary if it is applied to personal relations, and it has been meant to be applied there. The defence of individuals against outside interference has been personal as well as political, seen as a deliberate emancipation from all non-chosen obligations, notably from allegiance to parents and from permanent marriage. Because these institutions really had been used for tyrannous purposes, they too caused alarm. Systematic contract thinking makes it possible to rule that personal relationships, like political ones, can only arise out of freely negotiated contracts, and that what is freely negotiated can at any time be freely annulled.

This conceptual move certainly did make possible much greater social freedom, and thus a great deal of self-fulfilment. Yet it has some extremely odd consequences. Unfortunately, personal relations, such as friendship, do normally have to be relied on to last, because they involve some real joining-together of the parties. Friends share their lives; they are no longer totally separate entities. They are not pieces of Lego that have just been fitted together for convenience.

LEGO IS NOT LIKE LIFE

People are different from Lego. If you have been my friend for years, that friendship has changed both of us. We now rely deeply on each other; we have exchanged some functions, we contain elements of each other’s lives. We are quite properly mutually dependent, not because of some shameful weakness, but just in proportion to what we have put into this friendship and what we have made of it. Of course any friendship can end if it has to, but that ending will be a misfortune. It will wound us. An organic model, which says that we are members one of another, describes this situation far better than a Lego model. And what is true of friendship is of course still more true of those personal relationships which are of most importance in forming our lives, namely, our relations to our parents and to our children. We didn’t choose either parents or children; we never made a contract with either. Yet we certainly are deeply bound to both.

Is this binding a tragic infringement of our freedom? Some twentieth-century theorists, such as the Exist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• 1 Philosophical Plumbing
• 2 Practical Utopianism
• 3 Homunculus Trouble
• 4 Myths of Intellectual Isolation
• 5 The Use and Uselessness of Learning
• 6 Sex and Personal Identity
• 7 Freedom, Feminism and War
• 8 The End of Anthropocentrism?
• 9 Is a Dolphin a Person?
• 10 Sustainability and Moral Pluralism
• 11 Visions: Secular, Sacred and Scientific
• 12 Artificial Intelligence and Creativity
• Notes
• Index