The Influence of Philosophy

on Life
Is philosophy relevant to
the problems of real life?
• Yes, and in several
ways.
Philosophy disambiguates questions,
and disambiguation is useful when
one is facing real life choices.

Philosophy analyses complex ideas,

and getting clear about complex ideas
is often a necessary prelude to making
informed and rational decisions.
Philosophy concerns itself with considering
possible explanations of a variety of
abstract things - like sound and unsound
reasoning, justice and injustice, meaning
and value.
By coming to a better understanding of
abstract notions such as these one can
increase one's understanding of life and
the possibilities in life.
• Philosophy also raises old questions which
have been forgotten and new ones which
have not been raised before. The
relevance, or irrelevance, to life of
forgotten questions, and of new questions,
cannot be decided in advance of looking at
those questions.
Wide and Narrow Views of Philosophy
In some eras of history philosophers have taken a
wide view of their subject, in others a narrow
view. During the first half of the twentieth century
philosophers on the whole took a rather narrow
view of their subject. As it happens the theories
of Viennese positivism, and the methods of
linguistic analysis, or 'Oxford philosophy' so-
called, both seem to have encouraged a narrow
view. Perhaps this came about partly as a result
of the rise of science in the nineteenth century,
which might have produced unacknowledged
feelings of intellectual intimidation in the secret
hearts of some professional philosophers.
Dissatisfaction with narrow views of
philosophy is bound to occur from
time to time. In 1959 considerable
dissatisfaction with the narrow
view was expressed in a
negative, destructive but rather
amusing book by Ernest Gellner
called Words and Things.
• Gellner claimed that professional
philosophers in Oxford and elsewhere no
longer perceived their subject as having any
bearing either on the big questions of meta­
physics or on real-life decisions about
morals and politics. According to Gellner
these academics, these so-called
philosophers, were wasting all their efforts
on endlessly analysing essentially
uninteresting 'ordinary language'
propositions.
Applied Philosophy
At the time it seemed that Gellner's strictures fell
on deaf ears. More recently, however, analytic
philosophers have been turning back to the
traditional 'big' questions of metaphysics, and not
a few have been thinking and writing about 'real-
life' problems.
• In the 1970s the Australian Peter Singer
published a defense of the rights of non-
human animals, in a work entitled Animal
Liberation. This is perhaps the first
philosophy book in the history of the
universe to contain photographs of
abattoirs, not to mention a batch of
(meatless) recipes; it converted a number
of readers to (temporary) vegetarianism.
Other philosophers writing on applied philosophy include G.
E. M. Anscombe (on contraception), Sisela Bok (on lying
and secrecy in public and private life), Stephen Clark (on
animal rights), Philippa Foot (on euthanasia), Judith
Jarvis Thompson (on abortion), Mary Midgeley (on
animals, on wickedness, on feminism, and on the theory
of evo­lution), Roger Scruton (on conservative politics and
on sexuality), Amartya Sen (on philosophy and
economics) and Bernard Williams (on obscenity). New
philosophy journals have been founded, devoted to
discussion of real-life problems; for example, the
American journal Philosophy and Public Affairs. In the
1980s the British Society for Applied Philosophy was set
up, together with its associated publication, The Journal
of Applied Philosophy.
Philosophy in Public Life
Much twentieth-century thinking was still influenced
by Hume, and not a few contemporary
philosophers consciously or unconsciously
accept Hume's scepticism about causation (see
chapter 18). When faced with social issues these
philosophers are liable to sit on their hands,
claim­ing that no one knows whether racist or
sexist propaganda (say) causes any bad effects:
for (they silently assume) no one really knows
whether anything really causes anything.
More importantly, it has too often been the case
that the bodies set up by government to
investigate moral issues are faced with impos­
sible tasks and impossible questions. For
instance, they might be invited to calculate the
consequences of redrawing bits of legislation
which embody ancient ethical principles. Or they
might be expected to think up arguments in
favour of breaking profoundly important taboos.
Philosophers are not necessarily much good at
estimating practical con­sequences (for example,
the practical consequences of unbanning hard
pornography), nor are they necessarily any better
than anyone else at deciding what should be our
fundamental taboos.
In spite of these occasional drawbacks,
philosophers can do good work in public life.
'Public' applied philosophy is best when it can
start from some central principle which is
accepted by more or less every civilized society
— for example, the principles of the UN Charter
relating to human rights. If some such basic
principle is accepted to start with, a
philosophically-minded committee or commission
can proceed to clarify whichever concepts are
important and relevant to the question under
investigation, and possibly too can begin to
develop practical ways of implementing its
decisions.
• A good example is the 1989 Draft Paper
on Informed Consent, published by the
New Zealand Health Council's Working
Party. This paper is a real-life example of
how philosophy can be usefully applied to
public decisions affecting many people; we
describe it below.
The Working Party was made up of doctors, nurses
and lawyers, and a number of lay people who
between them represented patients, and the
Maori community, and the rest of the general
public. One lay member was a retired
professional philosopher of no special fame
outside New Zealand but with a head screwed
on in the correct position.
• The draft paper moves easily and
unselfconsciously from philosophi­cal
analysis and disambiguation, to practical
ways and means, and back again. It
covers four main areas of discussion:
The Effects of Philosophy
Examples from ancient times: Hebrews and
Greeks
It has often been said, but it bears repeating, that
the whole of Western civilization is based on the
ethics of the ancient Hebrews and the science
and metaphysics of the ancient Greeks. Neither
the scribes and sages of Jerusalem, who
recorded the Ten Commandments and the
wisdom literature of the Hebrew people, nor
Jesus of Nazareth, were mere philosophers.
These great teachers taught more than
philosophy. (For one thing, in those times no
one distin­guished theology from philosophy, or
ethics from metaphysics. This is a comparatively
small point, however.)
There can be no doubt at all of the widespread
influence of the fundamental moral laws set out
in the Old Testament, and there can be no doubt,
either, about the enormous influence of the
personality and teaching of Jesus, who
reinterpreted and explained, often by means of
parables, those ethical laws. Judaic and
Christian teaching, broadly philosophical in
character, forms the bedrock of the national and
inter­national laws, and the moral thinking
generally, of Western civilization. That people
and their governments too often lapse from these
standards does not mean that the standards
themselves are not accepted as theoretically
correct.
John Stuart Mill

Those who in English-speaking countries

defend the principles of freedom of the
press and freedom of speech quite often
refer sooner or later to the ideas of John
Stuart Mill. Feminists too owe some of their
best arguments to Mill, and to his wife,
Harriet.
Logical positivism
In the 1920s the Vienna Circle, or logical
positivists, boosted science as superior to all
other human endeavors. Contemporary
governments too accept that science has an
exceedingly important role to pay in modern life,
not least because it is perceived as a creator of
wealth. Positivism provides professional and
governmental proponents of 'the scientific ideal'
with a degree of theoretical justification for their
stance, so that garbled or ungarbled versions of
positivistic principles can sometimes be heard in
public discussions about science and science
funding.
Logic and the computer industry
Readers who know things about computers
possibly found this strangely familiar. That is
because some of the inventors of the computer
were mathematicians who had studied modern
formal logic. The binary system embodied in the
computer is basically the same binary
('true/false') system we saw operating in the
truth tables of the proposition calculus. The
huge computer industry has been made possible
by the ideas of mathematicians and engineers -
and philosophers.
Does philosophy influence real life? It
certainly does. That is one of the reasons
why it is worth studying.