Some Philosophical Mistakes to Avoid
Faux pas to bypass.
Philosophy has a way of humbling us over and over again. Because it relies on things like arguments and introspection, it’s much easier to be led astray than something like Biology, where the facts of the matter lay under a microscope for all to see. You tend to find yourself deeply convinced of a view one year, only to look back and think “My God, I was but a babe! A stupid and slightly more attractive babe! While I was misguided, now I really know what I’m talking about” - only to restart the cycle all over again. Interestingly, certain missteps crop up for many people in the same way. It’s as if we all have to walk over the same hot coals of confusion before we become philosophically mature. Now, I’m not philosophically mature yet - I only have a few years under my belt - but I have learned a few things the hard way that are worth expanding on and sharing.
Going for seconds to the Bullet Buffet
A lot of Philosophical debate takes the form of someone putting some proposition forward, and their interlocutor laying out the unintuitive entailments of their view. Someone will say “X is true!”, and another person will say “But if X is true, that means Y is true, and Y is clearly false, so X must not be true!”. We then all fight bare knuckle and make out for a few hours. I don’t know, I never went to university for this stuff.
Testing for logical consistency is a useful tool because if you have two beliefs that are incompatible, then you are guaranteed to have a false belief - and no one wants that. The problem you sometimes see, however, is people thinking that merely holding logically consistent beliefs is enough for their position to be respectable. You see, quite regularly, people chomp down on bullets so big they’ll be shitting gunpowder and metal shards for weeks. By simply saying “Yes, there is that entailment, and I accept that too” they imagine they’ve vindicated their view and the issue is settled.
Now, sometimes it really is appropriate to chomp on bullets. Basically every view has some unintuitive entailments or problems it needs to answer for. What I think is bush league, however, is the kind of bullet biting whereby you can tell the person is just allergic to admitting they’re wrong. Take animal rights, for example. It’s often argued that if it’s permissible to eat animals because they are less intelligent, then it’s also permissible to eat dementia patients and babies. I’ve had people say that they agree with that, but instead of thinking animals are moral patients, they opt to bite the bullet and say it’s permissible to eat babies and dementia patients. This is obviously wrong, to the point where I doubt the person saying it even believes it. If I took a baby in front of them, and killed them the same way animals are killed in slaughterhouses, I highly doubt they would not try to intervene. It seems they just want to say it’s okay because it absolves them of being logically inconsistent, and they know they’ll never have this belief tested.
This sort of approach misses the whole point of philosophy. We’re not here to win debates, or make our interlocutors look bad. We’re here to gain a better understanding of the world (among other things, probably). Philosophy is a form of inquiry, and the people that eat bullet sandwiches for lunch don’t seem to take that seriously. Valuing one’s ego over philosophical understanding is a fast track to having a deeply flawed and incorrect view of the world. When faced with absurd entailments of your view, it’s much better to consider alternatives or adjustments, rather than digging your heels in.
“You’re right, eating animals is worse than beastiality. It must be okay to fuck them then! Hooray!”
Moorean Shifts don’t beg the question
If you’re not aware of what a Moorean Shift is, it’s when you respond to a Modus Ponens argument with it’s Modus Tollens alternative. If you read that and have no idea what it means, don’t worry, I’ll explain.
A Modus Ponens Argument has this structure.
If X, then Y.
X.
Therefore Y.
So, for example, this argument uses Modus Ponens
If it’s raining outside, Connor has an umbrella.
It’s raining outside.
Therefore Connor has an umbrella.
This is held in contrast to Modus Tollens, which has this structure
If X, then Y.
Not (Y).
Therefore Not (X).
So, to use the example again:
If it’s raining outside, Connor will have an umbrella.
Connor doesn’t have an umbrella.
Therefore it’s not raining outside.
Both Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens are totally valid ways of reasoning. If the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true.
When someone puts forward a Modus Ponens, we can “shift” it to the Modus Tollens version in order to come to the opposite conclusion. So, for example:
If we don’t know the world wasn’t created 5 minutes ago, our memories aren’t reliable.
We don’t know the world was created five minutes ago.
Therefore our memories aren’t reliable.
One could respond to this argument by shifting it to this.
If we don’t know the world wasn’t created five minutes ago, our memories aren’t reliable.
Our memories are reliable.
Therefore we know the world wasn’t created five minutes ago.
It’s at this point that people proclaim “Ahh, you’re begging the question! Your belief that memories are reliable assumes that the world wasn’t created five minutes ago! Screee! Hiss! Burn the heretic!”.
The problem is, people don’t understand what begging the question actually is. We sometimes imagine that it’s something like “including a premise in your argument that your most ardent interlocutor would reject”, but that’s obviously not it. If that were begging the question, then basically all arguments would count as question begging.
Begging the question is when you assume your conclusion is true in one of your premises, not when you include a premise that only obtains if your conclusion is true. This is a subtle, but important difference.
Let’s say that you want to argue for a theory called the T-Shirt Error Theory. It denies the existence of T-shirts. I can shift your arguments by saying:
If T-shirt Error theory is true, there are no t-shirts.
But here is a T- shirt.
Therefore T-shirt Error Theory is false.
People who think Moorean shifts beg the question sound like someone saying “Ahh, but t-shirts existing is only true if t-shirt error theory is false! This argument begs the question!” - which is dumb. Saying this particular T-shirt exists, is distinct from saying T-shirts Error Theory is false, which is the conclusion I’m arguing for.
Now, Moorean Shifts in various scenarios may still fail. Maybe, for example, you think the skeptical Modus Ponens take on some issue is more plausible, and reject the Moorean Shift as a result - but my point is, they don’t fail because they're fallacious.
God of the Gaps
Spend any time on Reddit and you’ll run into the same Atheist over and over again. You know the type. They talk a lot about ‘flying spaghetti monsters’, and have a sex doll with a picture of Richard Dawkins’ stapled to it’s face.
I don’t scoff at Atheism. I’m only tentatively a Theist, because the problem of evil is a mighty big problem. However, a lot of Atheists still make bad arguments, and one I hear often is “God of the Gaps”.
“God of the gaps” is used to refer to Theists misattributing to God what can be explained by nature. Theists see something they think is strange under Atheism, say that it’s evidence for a God, and Atheists cry “God of the Gaps”. The idea is that Theists are just shoehorning God into an unknown, and filling any gaps in our knowledge with religion. This sort of approach has a history of not working out. Take for example, Natural Selection. It used to be believed that the complexity of the human body was evidence for God before we learned what evolution was. Science eventually won, and the Theists proposing God as an explanation for the majesty of the human eye were wrong.
I get the point, and I do think that people can be too ready to attribute to God that which plausibly has a natural explanation. In that sort of scenario, calling out “God of the Gaps” thinking can be right. However, what I think is a mistake is when Atheists think that it’s never rational to attribute something to God.
Take Fine Tuning for example. The constants and laws that govern our universe seem to be finely tuned such that interesting things can happen. If, for example, gravity was a bit weaker, planets would never form and support life. There are loads of examples of this kind of fine tuning, and if even one of these constants were out of place, we wouldn’t be here. That’s pretty weird! Given that we’re talking about fundamental constants and laws, it also doesn’t seem to have a naturalistic explanation. Fundamental features of the universe just are what they are - if they were caused by something else, then they aren’t fundamental.
Despite that, I still hear people crying “God of the Gaps” when they hear Fine Tuning arguments. I think the people that say it misunderstand what Theists are saying a lot of time. They imagine Theists are saying something like “We don’t know why X happens, so it must be caused by God” which would obviously be silly. However, that’s rarely what they are in fact saying. They’re usually saying “Some phenomenon is better predicted by Theism, so it acts as evidence for God” which is totally legitimate!
To illustrate, imagine that we landed on Pluto and found a book. Inside it said “The Christians are right. I am God, and here are all the parts of physics you guys don’t know yet” and it gave us enormous knowledge. Could this be explained by natural means? Maybe. Maybe an alien race is trolling us, or a really smart astronaut put it there. However, I don’t think it’s irrational to think it’s evidence for God. You could just as easily say ‘God of the gaps’ to it though, which makes me think - what evidence for God could be satisfactory for this type of Atheist? Does the Pluto book not act as evidence for God at all? Ironically, an over reliance on ‘God of the Gaps’ betrays a unshakable faith that there’s a naturalistic explanation for everything.
Abusing Occam’s Razor
Occam’s Razor is like a cucumber in a porn video - regularly used in ways it shouldn’t be. If you’re not familiar, it’s a epistemic rule that says we ought not multiply entities unnecessarily. That is, if we have two competing theories that explain the data as well as each other, we should choose the one that’s less complex. This makes sense. Complex theories seem less likely to be true because they have more steps to go wrong at.
I agree that simplicity is a theoretical virtue. Sometimes though, people think it’s the only theoretical virtue. They abuse Occam’s Razor, and interpret it as something like “the theory that is most simple is always better” which is way off base. Sometimes, the universe is complicated, and a theory requires nuance and a lot of moving parts to reflect reality. This is because there are other theoretical virtues beside simplicity - such as explanatory power and the ability to cohere with existing beliefs.
Let’s imagine that when we go to my house, we find my door lock is broken and the TV is gone. As it happens, I’ve had an argument with the neighbour recently. He’s mad that I blare episodes of Golden Girls all night (That Betty White. What a hoot!). You and I have competing theories about what happened.
Your theory: The neighbour, in his rage, broke into my flat and stole my TV.
My Theory: We’re just hallucinating.
My theory is simpler, but it’s also dumb as rocks. This is because it seems unlikely that we’d hallucinate something so coincidental and so vivid at the same time. Occam’s Razor is just one tool in the theoretical toolbox, and simplicity is not the be all and end all of any theory.
Misunderstanding Appeals to Authority
When you first start philosophy you often get into logical fallacies. These are common examples of fallacious reasoning that people deploy, and by learning them all, it’s easier to spot arguments that go wrong. They’re handy, but as time goes on I find you rely on them less.
This is because you become more effective at understanding reason itself, rather than relying on a list of rules. Instead of saying “Oh I think that’s a logical fallacy” you find you just know why the person you’re talking to is being irrational, and you skip the rule recollection.
The over reliance on logical fallacies is at it’s most apparent when you see people misuse them. They see an argument that vaguely represents a logical fallacy, call out that you’ve violated a rule, and imagine they’ve defeated you. One fallacy that’s often misunderstood is the Appeal to Authority.
Appeals to Authority are when you say that something is true because some expert in the field believes it. This is fallacious because it is in fact possible for experts to be wrong. So, it would be fallacious to say “Some expert believes X, therefore X is true”. I’m not actually sure anyone ever makes that argument though. They usually say “Some expert thinks X is true, therefore we have a reason to think X is true” which is totally right. It is rational to give greater weight to the opinion of experts than your own. If if it wasn’t, the fact that so many climate scientists believe climate change is real and caused by humans wouldn’t be a reason to believe it - but that’s crazy! I’m not sure how people who abuse Appeals to Authority learn much. It seems they’d have to reject all education. The fact that Biologists say that plants perform photosynthesis doesn’t mean we have reason to believe it - that’s just an appeal to authority after all.
Lying bastards.
"This sort of approach misses the whole point of philosophy. We’re not here to win debates, or make our interlocutors look bad. We’re here to gain a better understanding of the world"
Of course you would say this mere days before the verbal thrashing you will receive when we meet to hash out the whole consciousness thing
I agree that people sometimes bite bullets that don’t actually reflect what they believe in an attempt to remain consistent while clinging onto some prior position that they’ve voiced. And that this is especially prominent in discourse about animal ethics.
The one concern I would highlight though is what seems obvious or absurd varies from person to person.
For example, many people report having the intuition that it seems obvious to them that moral realism is true. I do not share this intuition - in fact it seems obvious to me that moral anti-realism is true.
There are other positions I hold, such as epistemic anti-realism, that many people would likely regard as me just biting obviously crazy bullets in a desperate attempt to avoid affirming moral realism. But this is not the case! I’ve always had epistemic anti-realist intuitions - the view has never appeared counterintuitive to me, let alone absurd.
Classical utilitarianism has many entailments that I would find deeply insane, but I wouldn’t accuse proponents of that view of valuing their own ego over taking philosophy seriously.
I’m a bit puzzled by some of your remarks on begging the question. You say the following:
“Now, Moorean Shifts in various scenarios may still fail. Maybe, for example, you think the skeptical Modus Ponens take on some issue is more plausible, and reject the Moorean Shift as a result - but my point is, they don’t fail because they’re invalid.”
Begging the question is an informal fallacy, not a formal one, so saying that an argument begs the question is not to say an argument is invalid. Begging the question doesn’t even suffice to make an argument unsound.
But I agree with you that there’s a risk of casting such a wide net when it comes to defining begging the question such that every argument would constitute begging the question.
Agree completely on appeals to authority. Fallacies are often misused on the internet, and the appeal to authority fallacy is one of the most common victims of this.