Monty Python and Philosophy (9 page)

Slyly evoking the English pantomime tradition, the professional arguer simply contradicts every statement that the man seeking the argument makes.
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The customer objects that

The customer goes on to draw the distinction as follows: “Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.”

The sketch works for numerous reasons. It seems absurd to “try out” an argument clinic, especially when, as any British viewer at that time knew, any normal person could get abuse and contradiction for free, just by calling a tradesperson or trying to buy something out of the ordinary at a department store (most older Britons of the time would have found the cheese shop sketch only a
slight
exaggeration of their experience). The idea that someone is able to turn on and off the habit of irritated contradiction at will is also funny. One of the things that makes the sketch work is that the professional’s understanding of what an argument is fits well with a certain ordinary-language understanding of “argument.” But in
that
sense of argument it is so easy to have one that it is hard to imagine anyone paying for one. The customer who wants
to engage in something akin to a verbal game of chess wants his ideas to be taken on, thought through, and refuted, in an intellectually stimulating process. He wants, in other words, something like a philosophical argument, but, unphilosophically, has failed to specify what he wants.

The professional contradictor does, in fact, display an ability to argue in this sense: he correctly distinguishes ‘argument’ from ‘good argument’ and rightly points out that an argument can consist of mere iterated contradiction. But his arguing about the argument just makes it even more frustrating for the client. He will not engage in a true argument about anything substantive.

Philosophers like the sketch for at least two reasons. First, argument is just about all we are good at: it is not at all uncommon for a philosopher to exclaim dismissively “but that’s an empirical, not a philosophical, issue,” and by that they mean that evidence is irrelevant: argument is the only guide to the truth. Second, frankly, the idea of a world in which our narrow range of skills find a market like the market for accountants and hairdressers strikes us both as delightful and absurd; we fantasize that in that world we might make more money.

But the sketch also poses a puzzle. As I mentioned, viewers at the time would have known that contradiction could be accessed for free just by walking into any shop or workplace. Why, though, would someone go to an argument clinic for a “good” argument? What the client wants is for someone to show him what is wrong with his own beliefs and reasons for those beliefs. Why would he pay for
that
? Doesn’t it seem, as I said earlier, absurd?

One possible reason would be, simply, for intellectual stimulation: a kind of work-out for the mind, or mental game of tennis. But there is another, rather different, reason, which I shall spend the rest of this chapter explaining. It is, in short, this: that
only through a process of argument with other people can most of us hope to come to have true beliefs about matters of any complexity
. In explaining this, I am going to focus on my own area of expertise within philosophy, which is moral philosophy. But I think the claim is true in other areas of philosophy, and even beyond philosophy.

What constitutes a philosophical argument? How does somebody go about constructing one? What, in other words, would the client be getting if he got what he wanted, at least if he got it from a philosopher? Assuming that most readers have a limited exposure to professional philosophy, I want to describe how philosophers go about making arguments, focusing on a particular method popularized by the American philosopher John Rawls (1926-2002), known as
reflective equilibrium
.
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Philosophy is the systematic study of questions, the answers to which cannot be determined simply by gathering observational data about the world and making hypotheses about those data. “What is on the telly?” is not a philosophical question, because ultimately it has to be addressed through observation. “What is the nature of knowledge?,” by contrast, is philosophical. Without experiences we could not address it, but its answer does not rest on observation. Philosophical questions may well have determinate answers. There is a truth about them. But theoretical, rather than empirical, reason is the means to arriving at the truth. My own particular interest is in moral philosophy, the field within philosophy that asks questions about how we should live our lives, and what constitutes goodness. It addresses large general questions such as “What makes a flourishing human life?”; “Does the moral value of actions lie in their consequences or in the motives behind them?” and “Are states of affairs or the characters of persons the ultimate bearers of value?” and also much more specific questions such as “Is abortion morally wrong?” and “Is it ever right to lie?”

These questions simply cannot be answered by gathering empirical, or scientific, evidence. So how do we try to work out the answers to them? Philosophy rejects appeals to authority. Good philosophers never offer anything like “As the great thinker Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson argues . . .” as
support
for their claims (although they might preface an explanation of what is
wrong
with Arthur’s views with a comment on his greatness). So they can’t
resort to
The Holy Bible
, the Ten Commandments, or the sayings of Spike Milligan, profound as they are. Such appeals replace the question “What is moral?” with “Why are Spike Milligan’s, or
The Holy Bible
’s, sayings morally authoritative?” But we can’t answer that question without establishing what is moral in the first place. So we might as well have started with that question.

Since neither authority nor empirical evidence is decisive, how do we do it? As suggested above, the method that most contemporary philosophers use is what Rawls called
reflective equilibrium
. This method invites us to approach questions about morality, and philosophical questions generally, in the following way. Taking up a topic like justice, or punishment, or lying, we first list our considered judgments about specific
particular
cases, and look at whether these all fit together consistently. Where we find that they don’t fit together we reject those judgments in which we have least confidence (for example, those in which we have reason to suspect there is an element of self-interest pressing us to that particular judgment). We also list the general principles, or rules, we judge suitable to cover cases, and look to see if those principles fit together as well, again rejecting the principles in which we have least confidence. Then we look at the particular judgments and the principles in the light of one another—do
they
fit together? Do some of the principles look less plausible in the light of the weight of considered judgments, or
vice versa
?

Of course, all that this method gives us is, at best, a set of judgments that fit together; what philosophers call a
consistent
set of judgments. But if we engage in the process collectively, in conversation with others who are rational like us, we can have increasing confidence in the truth of the outcomes. Other people can bring out considerations we had not noticed; they can alert us to weaknesses in our own judgments; they can force us to think harder and better. If we converge on conclusions about particular cases with people with whom we otherwise disagree a great deal, we should have even more confidence in our judgment. We can’t ever be certain that we have arrived at a final, true view of justice, or punishment, or lying. But this method at least gives us a way of making some progress.

What exactly do I mean by “judgments about particular cases” and “principles”? An autobiographical comment which, I’m afraid, does not reflect particularly well on me, will help. In the
late 1970s I held a view that, I think, was quite common among British teenagers with my political outlook, which was that there was no reason to grant free speech to racists, or anyone with anti-social views, and that it was entirely fine for the government to censor offensive films. So, the principle I held was something like this: “Governments should have the power to censor expression when it meets some objective criteria for being anti-social.” One morning I turned on the radio and heard Jimmy Young (a DJ) announce that he was soon going to be talking to a Church of England vicar who was trying to have a new film, “Rimbaud,” banned from his local cinema. My reaction was outrage—“How dare this busy-bodying minister try to shut down a film about the great homosexual French poet Arthur Rimbaud?” (Here we have a judgment about an individual case: it is wrong to censor
this
film). When the discussion began, however, it turned out that the vicar objected not to the film’s portrayal of homosexuality, but to its excessive violence. The film was, in fact, entirely devoid of reference to homosexuality or poetry, and had I heard the vicar without having been confused about his topic, I would have agreed with every word he said (the judgment about the individual case I
would
have had: “It is fine to censor
this
film”). The film was, of course, called “Rambo,” not “Rimbaud,” and starred Sylvester Stallone (who would have been an eccentric, not to say Pythonesque, choice for Rimbaud). The two judgments are not strictly speaking inconsistent, but what the incident brought home to me was that my real reason for defending one rather than another film from censorship was not that one met some objective standard of anti-sociality, but that one reflected my values and the other clashed with them. In other words my judgment did not reflect the principle I brought to the cases, but self-interest of a certain sort; the same sort of self-interest that had, incidentally, led only a year or two earlier to calls for censoring
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
.

How do we isolate our judgments about particular cases? Usually we are not so lucky as to be forced by a disc jockey to think things
through. There are several methods of isolating our particular judgments, but I am going to focus on one of the most prominent, what philosophers call the
thought experiment
. Thought experiments tend to be very unrealistic inventions, in which the theorist imagines a situation in which implementing a principle has an unacceptable consequence, or in which two judgments that we previously thought were consistent in fact conflict. Often the thought experiment is supposed to be analogous to a real life case in all relevant respects, but shows up the inapplicability of some judgment to the real-life case. The most famous, and in my view the greatest, thought experiment in moral philosophy is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “violinist” case, in her article “A Defense of Abortion.”
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Thomson makes an analogy between the case of abortion in which the prospective mother has conceived as a result of rape, and the following case: a famous violinist is dying of a rare blood disease, which can only by cured by having you (the reader) hooked up to him for a certain amount of time (say nine months) so that he can use your body to cleanse his liver. No one else will do—because, say, you and he are the only people in the world with a certain blood type. A Society of Music Lovers takes it upon itself to kidnap you and hook you up to the violinist. When you awake you find yourself able to unhook yourself and walk away. Thomson asks whether the violinist has the right to your body in this manner, and assumes that most of her readers will say “no.” But, she says, what is the difference between this case and the case of abortion, where the pregnancy arose from rape? The prospective mother is being used by the fetus, and only she will do for its purposes. She is not in that situation out of choice: she was forced into it by someone else (not, admittedly, the fetus, but nor did the violinist force you into being hooked up to him). So, abortion, at least in the case of rape, is not wrong.

Thomson deploys other thought experiments to show that abortion is permissible in a much wider range of cases, but I want to focus on what this, very limited, thought-experiment actually shows. When I teach Thomson’s article I find that most of the students who oppose abortion are not persuaded that there is anything acceptable about abortion. But in fact Thomson’s article is
less directed at showing there is a right to abortion than to showing something quite different: that whatever is wrong with abortion has nothing to do with the right to life of the fetus. Whereas supporters and opponents of abortion rights frequently argue over whether the fetus has a right to life, Thomson concedes at the start that it does. Her thought-experiment is so striking because the violinist, who is supposed to be analogous to the fetus, is an adult, with all the rights and moral standing that adults typically have. When we say that we are entitled to walk away from the violinist, we do so in the knowledge that he is an adult who certainly has a right to life, and that he will die if we walk away, and, crucially, that even though he will die we will not be violating his right to life. Opponents of abortion believe the fetus has a right to life, and that the violinist has a right to life. They are not forced by Thomson’s thought experiment to give up the view that abortion is wrong, even in the case where pregnancy arises from rape. But, if they want to say that it is permissible to walk away from the violinist, they are forced to look for some other grounds than the right to life of the fetus for justifying the wrongness of abortion. In my own experience I find that students are, like Mr. Vibrating, quite ingenious. They can almost always find other grounds for supporting what they believe, but what they have given up is the central slogan of the anti-abortion movement: “right to life.” Sure, fetuses have rights to life, but that cannot be why abortion is wrong.