Will philosophy change?

He isn’t alone in thinking that. After decades of abstract, technical philosophy dominating in the west, some in the discipline have been pushing for a revival of hands-on, ethical thinking. This could be a good thing—if it is done right.

I spoke to Singer, who is the Ira W DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and who turned 70 this month, over the phone. His arguments were detailed and precise—much as you would expect from a man who is one of the world’s most widely-read thinkers. He is particularly known for his essay Famine, Affluence and Morality, published in 1971—the year he began his academic career at Oxford's University College. This established him as a key proponent of effective altruism—a movement which aims to alleviate suffering through, for example, encouraging charitable giving. He has lost none of his conviction on this topic; indeed, this year Famine, Affluence and Morality was republished with a new introduction by him. In it, he explains why effective altruism was such a departure from the philosophy that preceded it. He reiterated these ideas during our conversation last month.

“When I was an undergraduate back in the 60s, English language philosophy was very much about analysis of the meanings of moral terms… the business of philosophers was seen as explaining the meanings of concepts,” Singer explained to me.

“There was a period when philosophy was in a phase of linguistic analysis and ordinary language philosophy... [20th century philosopher] AJ Ayer would probably be the leading example of a philosopher who argued that the proper role of philosophy is morally neutral…. But fortunately around the time… that I went to Oxford, which had been in the stronghold of this kind of language philosophy, things had started to change a little.” (AJ Ayer was a proponent of logical positivism. He later renounced this position. In his words, the main problem with it was that “nearly all of it was false.”)

That Singer cares deeply about this cause is unsurprising; he has dedicated decades, and dozens of books, to trying to get us to improve the way we act.

The question that Singer answered is one that all philosophers must confront if they’re serious about what they do: “What is philosophy for?” Should it be predominantly aimed at alleviating suffering or at abstract technical questions—or is that distinction meaningless? (Often it is not the philosopher who first asks themselves this but rather a friend or relative who is sceptical about the worth of the discipline. “What is philosophy for?” translates as “No offence, but I think you’re wasting your time studying it” if it comes from a grandparent.)

The notion that philosophy should guide our moral decisions was once relatively uncontroversial. Aristotle, for example, thought that philosophy ought to be concerned with practical questions about how to live a good life. He did not think this was the only purpose of philosophy, as Singer seems to. He dedicated huge amounts of his time to questions in the field of metaphysics (Literally translated as “After the physics,” pointing out the order in which the curriculum should be studied in). He answered questions concerning causation, form and matter.

But Aristotle’s ethical philosophy is vast—and absolutely speaks to how we ought to live our everyday lives. Indeed, the section on Aristotle’s ethics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy reads: “Aristotle conceives of ethical theory as a field distinct from the theoretical sciences. Its methodology must match its subject matter… we study ethics in order to improve our lives.” (He was not alone in arguing that philosophy comes in two halves; in Finland, practical and theoretical philosophy are entirely separate degrees at almost all universities.)

Aristotle’s two ethical Treatises, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics, have roughly the same subject matter: they examine the conditions under which it is right to heap praise on someone or blame them for something, the nature of friendship and the traits that people need to develop in order to live good lives. So philosophy clearly has a history of addressing direct ethical questions. Without yet examining the question of whether practical philosophy is a good thing, we can safely say that lots of it has been written over the years.

There have been times, though, when it has experienced a decline in popularity. And never has it been less popular than it was in the mid 20^th century, when technical, fiddly analytic philosophy began to dominate.

I asked Julian Baggini, founder of The Philosophers' Magazine, about this era of the discipline. He explained: “there was a professional insecurity among philosophers, a wariness of being thought of as wooly-minded gurus explaining the meaning of life. This led many to distance themselves too much from the ethical aspects of philosophy.”

In the late 19^th century the “linguistic analysis” that Singer referred to in our conversation took off. Gottlob Frege, a German logician widely held to be the father of analytic philosophy, began to write on the philosophy of language, and in 1892 published On Sense and Reference: a landmark work which examined the meanings behind our words. It is worth noting that not all analytic philosophy is abstract; far from it. But analytic philosophy did emphasise mathematical logic and technical analyses to an extent that had not been the case previously.

A couple of decades later, Bertrand Russell began asking the same questions as Frege. One of these was: “What is the meaning of a proper name?” Russell himself thought that names are actually a group of descriptions that we associate with a thing. When we say Prospect Magazine we are actually saying, for example, “That excellent current affairs magazine that was founded in 1995.” This was later disproved by an American called Saul Kripke, who showed that names and groups of descriptions work in radically different ways in modal claims (that is, sentences that make a proposition that involves possibility. “The tallest girl in the class might not have been the tallest” is an example of a modal claim.)

It is worth pointing out that philosophers back then were not just wannabe mathematicians and wannabe scientists. Indeed, When Ludwig Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge he wrote something for Russell. Handing it over at the end of the first term, he said “Will you please tell me if I am a complete idiot or not? If I am an idiot, I will become an aeronaut. If I am not, I will become a philosopher.” Russell duly read it, and replied “No, you must not become an aeronaut!”

By this point, things were about as far from the practical, normative philosophy that Singer was after as it is possible to get. But this sort of philosophy came to utterly dominate in western universities, and has continued to dominate in recent years, as my own recent undergraduate degree confirms.

I spent three years studying philosophy at undergraduate level, and we asked (and had a go at answering—for contrary to popular opinion much of philosophy does aim at definite answers) questions such as: “In order for a belief to be justified, must it be the case that were it false, I wouldn’t believe it?” And “Is it possible for causal loops to exist?” In fact, even my ethics class was called meta-ethics, and addressed questions concerning morality as a concept, rather than specific moral questions.

But might future undergraduates have rather a different experience? Does Singer’s continued popularity mean anything for the course of philosophy, or is it just an anomaly?

Effective altruists are certainly making a lot of noise at the moment. Last year Oxford-based effective altrusit William MacAskill released a book, Doing Good Better, which was widely read (and reviewed in Prospect). Australian philosopher Tony Ord has founded Giving What We Can, a society aimed at eliminating poverty in the developing world. The co-founder of Facebook, Dustin Moskovitz, identifies as an effective altruist. In 2009 Singer wrote a book titled The Life You Can Save and has since founded an organisation which aims to alleviate poverty and which goes by the same name.

In fact, only last week the ABC television channel in Australia hosted a programme called “Why effective altruism could change the world.”

Closer to home, just look at the work of Alain de Botton—arguably the best known living British philosopher. He has dedicated the past ten years to rebranding philosophy: to making it less stuffy and more applicable to everyday life. He has published books in recent years that are called things like How Proust can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy. Indeed, a few years ago he founded a scheme called The School of Life, which offers “Good ideas for everyday life.” The school has been expanding: initially just in London, there are now campuses in Paris and Amsterdam, and will be in the US within a year.

Referring to the prevalence of more abstruse types of philosophy, Baggini told me “Over the last few decades, there has been a reaction against this. Even some serious, respected academic philosophers have been willing to discuss the meaning of life.”

There are certainly no signs of a huge counter-revolution taking place, in which analytic philosophy is thrown off the agenda completely. But when one looks at the philosophy that has been popular, in both the public and academic domains, over recent years, there are hints that philosophy is perhaps undergoing a slight change of mood.

For Baggini, even if practical philosophy is making a come-back, more must be done. “I think this is welcome. But I also think this kind of philosophy needs to engage more with neighbouring disciplines such as psychology, political science, economics, sociology and anthropology. Philosophy used to include all those things. Now that they have branched off on their own.” But it is in another part of Baggini’s reply to me that I think we hit the nub of the issue.

“In ancient Greek philosophy, it was almost taken for granted that living in truth and living well went hand-in-hand. Part of the motivation to study the less obviously ethical aspects of philosophy comes from how it relates to problems of living. For instance, to know how to live, you need to know what you know (epistemology), our own natures and the nature of the universe (metaphysics). You also need to think about what "living well" means, which means thinking about meta-ethics: the nature of ethics itself, not just its content.”

It may be that abstruse, technical philosophy matters for its own sake. But even if philosophy is primarily about helping us to act more morally, there is a place for the abstract stuff.

When he argued that philosophy should be morally neutral, AJ Ayer was wrong. The discipline is about the rigorous application of reason and following arguments wherever they may lead, and many moral questions are big enough—and complicated enough—to warrant in-depth philosophical scrutiny. But while AJ Ayer underestimated the importance of philosophy that has an immediate baring on the way we act, I worry that Singer is overestimating it. In our conversation he seemed to call not just for the inclusion of applied ethics in the discipline, but for extreme caution when it comes to anything else.

But much abstruse, logical philosophy is as vital to our moral thinking as more direct ethical enquiry: it teaches us to spot contradictions, for example, which may help us to sort through our moral beliefs. Even seemingly neutral linguistic analysis might help us to sharpen our critical skills in this way. A change in philosophy is welcome—so long as it involves embracing the importance of applied philosophy, not forgetting the importance of the rest of the field.