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A
This is Philosophy Bytes with me, David.
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B
Edmonds and me, Nigel Warburton.
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A
Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybytes.com. we probably should have asked this question 19 years ago when we first started Philosophy Bites, but better late than never. What is philosophy? A question for Janet Radcliffe Richards, author of among other books, the Skeptical Feminist and Human Human Nature After Darwin.
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B
Janet Radcliffe Richards, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
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C
Very pleased to be here.
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B
The topic we're going to focus on is what is philosophy? So my first question is that really what is philosophy?
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C
Well, it's silly to try and give a general answer because everybody has different ideas. But I think what is probably relevant is where you begin doing philosophy. And I find in it's not at all with philosophy as grand or mysterious. One thing I do is suggest that if you're talking to children and you ask them how they know somebody is lying, one of the things they can do is say that the person has told something which they personally know isn't true. But the other thing they can do is notice that the person has contradicted themselves. And these are two completely different ways of knowing something. One depends on your having the information, the other doesn't depend on your having it at all. You just know that what they've said can't be true because they've said things that contradict each other. And I think that's a very good way of thinking about philosophy. It's a kind of inquiry you take to all kinds of subjects. And one way of colleague of mine put it was science is about getting your ideas to match the world and philosophy is about getting your ideas to match each other. And they're two completely different kinds of thing. They often occur when you're doing the same subject, when you're discussing the same thing. But recognizing the different kinds of criticism you can make is absolutely crucial to any kind of discussion. And this is real ground level stuff. It's nothing to do with metaphysics or the ultimate purpose of life. It's just basic and you need it for everything.
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B
That's really interesting because some people think philosophy is about the pursuit of truth, discovering what the truth about the nature of reality is and reason is, the means by which we do that. That's not what you're saying?
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C
Well, it is. But on the other hand, to get the hang of reasoning, you need to start at fairly basic levels, because otherwise you may think that this kind of is only possible at these higher levels. What I think is interesting is how this penetrates right to the bottom of things. For instance, if you're asking ethics questions, a lot of people think, well, I've got to find out the truth about ethics. And therefore we start doing meta ethics. And you can't get any agreement there. You can't always get any agreement about whether there's anything to be known. But, but if you often start about the kind of things that people are really concerned with in ethics, the day to day things where they have disagreements, you very often find that they haven't even looked at the logic of the argument and they're coming to wrong conclusions by their own standards, but they don't realize it. And they remain convinced that the two things they believe are both true and they're really incompatible. And although that isn't a very exciting place to start, it's actually more likely to get you somewhere than going around in the stratosphere and never coming to an agreement.
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B
Could you give a real example of that kind of inconsistency?
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C
Well, the simplest is one I have a feeling I've talked about in Philosophy Bites before. It's something that struck me over 30 years ago now, and I've never been allowed to drop the subject. I was experimenting with journalism at the time when the first scandal arose about selling organs. And it was discovered that Turkish peasants had come to Britain to sell their organs, their kidneys, I should say, in Harley Street. And when this first erupted, there was an outcry. The people involved. One of them was struck off the medical register. The two others were sent for ethical training. And immediately the whole world started saying, this is absolutely wrong, it should be prohibited. And we got a prohibition through in no time at all. Now it struck me immediately when I heard this. Everybody said, what terrible things we've been doing. The rich exploiting the poor and all the rest of it. And what struck me immediately about the thing was, well, here is one person being saved either from death or a life on dialysis, which is as near as makes no difference to death, probably worse. And on the other hand, somebody who was trying to sell his organ actually, as it happened, to save his daughter. Now, if he had been giving his kidney to save his daughter, people would have said, this is heroic, it's wonderful. He's sacrificing it here he was trying to sacrifice his kidney to save his daughter. And people said, oh, terrible, you're being exploited, this won't do. So here were two people trying to make an exchange which would have benefited both. And everybody immediately said, this is outrageous. It seemed to me not only that this was surprising, but that it was actually inconsistent with most people's view of ethics. Most medical people take the view now that people are allowed to be the judges of their own best interest. You shouldn't stop people doing what they think is good for them unless it's bad for someone else. Where they would say, well, it is bad for someone else. It's this poor exploited donor. That person admittedly wouldn't have been getting rid of his organ if he hadn't got expecting to get money for it. But he was, and the money was necessary to save his daughter. So there are two free agents doing what they want. And yet this was said to be illegal. And it was even more complicated when you looked further into it, because it was already decided in law that an organ could be given altruistically to somebody who needed an organ. All that was needed was your consent and rules about proper treatment. Why should the involvement of money make any difference? I was worried because there were two people being left worse off by this. So the question was, could you analyze this any further? When people believe two things which are shown to be, on the surface, inconsistent, this is incompatible with our laws about donating organs. It's incompatible with our ideas about letting people be the judge of their own best interests. How could they say it was a universal principle that nobody should be allowed to sell their kidneys? So they kept finding excuses. And this is a thing that Jonathan Haidt discovered as a matter of psychology. If people are convinced of two things which you've shown are incompatible with each other, they will try to find ways of joining them. And this was the beginning of a long journey where I went to conference after conference, and people were trying to prove that it was wrong. And yet the arguments which they were trying to prove it was wrong with themselves didn't work. The point is that we do medical ethics with a few general principles which we regard as fundamental, and then all the rest of the arguments come within that. Now, you could challenge the fundamental principles if you want to, but we don't. Generally, people were claiming that this no selling of organs should come at the level of a fundamental principle. It should be absolutely out. And that's where the problem is. I wasn't trying to say you should have a trade in organs. Anybody can deal in organs as much as they like. It was just that it was completely wrong as a fundamental principle because it was incompatible with the other things we had as fundamental principles.
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B
So as a philosopher, you weren't presenting their arguments, you were taking the arguments they gave and showing that they led to inconsistencies can you spell out what's wrong with inconsistency? I mean, some people say they're large, they can embrace inconsistencies. There's no problem in having inconsistent beliefs. We all have inconsistent beliefs, but we.
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C
Try to get rid of them if we're serious about them. And this was one of the interesting things about taking ethics seriously, because I don't doubt that these people who are against paying for organ donations, I don't doubt that these people have genuine principles and they really feel that it's wrong. But there's a different level of taking principles seriously, which is being willing to question the principles themselves. Now, that sounds like an infinite regress, but it isn't, because you've got two sets of inconsistent principles at the same level. And if you go along with allowing autonomy to people, you can't also go along with allowing the prohibition of any payment because they're incompatible with each other.
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B
Now, you've shown rather than explicated why this is philosophical. We're talking about what the nature of philosophy is. You're showing philosophy in action, as it were, taking a particular real life example, showing it led to inconsistencies among the people who are putting forward certain sorts of views. Are you saying that's the main activity of philosophy?
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C
No, I suppose I'm saying after having done lots of philosophy and having dabbled in metaphysics and philosophy of science, I keep finding all these ordinary, everyday things where if people had an understanding of the different ways in which arguments work, we might avoid some problems at the ground level. For instance, one of the things I've noticed in the context of going back to the Victorian arguments about the position of women, Mill put forward some very convincing arguments about the logic of his opponent's position. Sometimes they were about the empirical claims, sometimes they were about the logic, and so on. And I thought, how can people not go along with these arguments? And then I looked at some of his opponents and I realized that they were presupposing a totally different metaphysics, a totally different view of the way the world works. And if you accepted that view of the way the world worked, their arguments went through. And Mill's arguments wouldn't have worked against that view. That is, looking at the two from the point of view of logic, you can see that each one was working logically within its own terms. But there was the question of which of the metaphysics was true. And the reason I think Mill comes out best in that is because I think science has now got rid of the alternative metaphysics which it hadn't quite at the time.
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B
The alternative metaphysics might have been that there's a God given hierarchy which makes men superior to women or something like that.
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C
I don't even think that was necessary. But essentially, yes, yes.
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B
The way you've been describing philosophical activity so far, it puts logic at the centre. Is that the core of philosophy in your view?
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C
I think that is the core tool philosophy uses. That is if you. Well, I mean, if you go into metaphysics, for instance, I don't think it's logic that's overturned metaphysics, I think it's the advance of science. But then science also includes a lot of philosophy, where Kuhn said, where you're getting a radical change in the fundamentals of scientific views, there's always philosophy involved and there is because you're having to rethink the concepts from the start. So I think you have to know about metaphysics and you have to know about how science works. But I think for practical ethics, which is what I'm mainly concerned with now, you have to first unpack the arguments to show where the metaphysics comes in. And then when you've got two people who want to stick to their original views, you can show, yes, your views might be consistent on this metaphysics, yes, yours might be consistent on this metaphysics. Which of you is right? And then you have to move up to the metaphysical level.
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B
You've always struck me as a very elegant and clear writer and communicator of your ideas. How important is that in philosophy?
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C
I think it's tremendously important, but on the other hand, people misunderstand, however clearly you write. You know, I've always found my ideas misunderstood, not just in just saying generally, oh, they don't understand me. This organ selling business, I have not yet got across to a lot of people.
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B
How important generally is philosophy in education?
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I think it's hugely important because if you don't understand how arguments fit together, you just have a lot of isolated bits of knowledge. And that's the trouble we're having with all these things that you can look up as individual questions on Google in no time at all. If you don't grow up with an understanding of whether they fit together, you're giving up on intellectual inquiry altogether. Anything can happen. I mean, we must have queries about how politics works, how ethics works, how science works, and if you just have isolated bits of information, you've lost that altogether. And I don't think we have enough of it. So even though it's very basic stuff, I think it's what's needed in all these discussions. It's very boring. It's not high level. Here is the vision ahead. Can we just get the next step right?
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B
Janet Radcliffe Richards, thank you very much.
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C
Thank you very much.
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A
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