This time from Kristof, who is certainly not the most intellectually feeble of their columnists, and he usually seems a humane and well-intentioned person. So perhaps professional philosophers need to think a bit about why stuff like this constitutes the public perception of the field. Writing about the movement in recent decades towards more humane treatment of animals, Kristof notes:
[T]he movement is also the product of a deep intellectual ferment pioneered by the Princeton scholar Peter Singer.
Professor Singer wrote a landmark article in 1973 for The New York Review of Books and later expanded it into a 1975 book, “Animal Liberation.” That book helped yank academic philosophy back from a dreary foray into linguistics and pushed it to confront such fascinating questions of applied ethics as: What are our moral obligations to pigs?
I am not entirely sure what is meant by philosophy's "dreary foray into linguistics," but I assume it means a philosophical interest in the nature of language and meaning. Singer's 1975 book certainly did not do any "yank[ing]" of philosophy away from work on this topic, as anyone familiar with the history of Anglophone philosophy in the last 30+ years knows. Indeed, it was precisely many years after 1975 that philosophy of language came into very close contact with linguistics, which remains a rather lively interdisciplinary field to this day. I admit I find this kind of work "dreary," but I feel the same way about recent work in geophysics: but I actually don't think the geologists should shift their work in the direction of enhancing the quality of life for pigs. "Interest" is in the eye of the beholder, and in matters intellectual it is probably best to let a thousand flowers bloom. Peter Singer is no David Beaver, but undoubtedly Singer's work is more accesible than Beaver's. Why think we need to choose or that philosophers should do one kind of work rather than another?
Why, though, is "our moral obligations to pigs" deeemed a "fascinating" question? What about our obligations not to launch criminal wars of aggression against other countries? Or to prevent vast inequities of wealth and life fortunes? Or to view Palestinians as human beings with equal moral claims on freedom, bodily integrity, and opportunity? Is it that our moral obligations to pigs do not present much threat to the Manhattan bourgeoisie, whereas the other questions would be especially unsettling?
Mr. Kristof continues:
John Maynard Keynes wrote that ideas, “both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.” This idea popularized by Professor Singer — that we have ethical obligations that transcend our species — is one whose time appears to have come.
Keynes seems right about ideas, but the problem is journalists never have them (dare I quote Karl Kraus yet again? "No ideas and the ability to expres them: that's a journalist"). Why, though, is Professor Singer's idea about "animal liberation"–far more radical than Kristof seems to recognize–an idea whose time has now come? It obviously can't be because of Singer's actual arguments for his views, since his hedonistic utilitarianism also entails the permissibility of infanticide of the severely retarded, to name just one of the views for which Professor Singer is often denounced. Singer and Bentham (as Mr. Kristof note) may both agree, "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?," but it is quite clear that most citizens, and most moral philosophers, do not agree.
Query: why do members of the educated public think that it is an objection to philosophical inquiry that it is unintelligible to them (or that it does not have immediate application to the quality of life of pigs, say), whereas no one would think to put such objections against esoteric work in the natural sciences? Are other humanities subjected to this same expectation of "practical relevance and intelligibility"? I am curious to hear what readers think. Signed comments are strongly preferred; post only once, comments may take awhile to appear.
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