The joy of bringing students to big issues, philosophy-style

Well, the first week of the semester is over, and it’s been pretty great. It’s nice to get back to teaching.

In class this week, I’ve explained the nature of philosophical issues, emphasizing philosophy’s focus on the highly fundamental and abstract—unavoidable issues for those with curiosity and a desire to get to the bottom of things.

Like many instructors, I employ “Blackboard,” software that allows us to anchor our courses in websites that contain announcement pages, readings, crucial course information (the syllabus, etc.), assignments, student grades, and just about anything you can think of.

It’s pretty freaking terrific.

And so, this morning, on my philosophy Blackboard sites, I “announced” an interesting book review that I found in yesterday’s New York Times. My announcement is as follows:

Philosophy can be about anything, and so it can be about “values.” We step back from the bigger world of nations and civilizations and inevitably puzzle at differences and tensions that continually arise there. And this brings us to the difficult question of whether and how there can be “absolute” or “objective” values.

Interestingly, two important 20th Century writers, one a leftist (socialist), the other a rightist (conservative), agreed on rejection of moral relativism. Or so says David Lebedoff, author of The Same Man. The book was reviewed in yesterday’s New York Times: Two of a Kind:

…[George] Orwell conjured up the nightmarish dystopia of “1984.” [Evelyn] Waugh’s best-known work, “Brideshead Revisited,” was a reverie about a vanished age of Oxford privilege, titled Catholic families, large country houses and fastidious conscience. Orwell was tall, gaunt and self-mortifying, a socialist with an affinity for mineworkers and tramps. Waugh was a short, plump, florid social climber and a proud reactionary.... Orwell fought on the loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Waugh announced, “If I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco.” … Orwell thought “good prose is like a window pane,” forceful and direct. Waugh was an elaborate stylist whose prose ranged from the dryly ironical to the richly ornamented and rhetorical. Orwell was solitary and fiercely earnest. Waugh was convivial and brutally funny. And, perhaps most important, Orwell was a secularist whose greatest fear was the emergence of Big Brother in this world. Waugh was a Roman Catholic convert whose greatest hope lay with God in the next.
…
Dissimilar though their causes may have been, Orwell and Waugh were both anchored by “a hatred of moral relativism”; that, Lebedoff claims, is what set the two men apart from their contemporaries. Yet in stressing this similarity, the author elides [omits] a deeper difference. Although Waugh despaired about the future, he saw the Catholic Church as an enduring bulwark against chaos. His moral order was backed by divine authority. Orwell too was a passionate believer in objective truth, including moral truth. But unlike Waugh, Orwell did not attribute transcendent power to the truth; indeed, he feared that it might ultimately prove impotent in history. Hence his terrifying vision in “1984” of a future of totalitarian sadism, of “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

...The two men admired each other—up to a point. Orwell thought Waugh was about as good as a novelist could be while holding “untenable” beliefs. “One cannot really be Catholic & grown up,” he wrote. Waugh thought Orwell was as good as a thinker could be while neglecting ­nine-tenths of reality: the supernatural part. He wrote to Orwell apropos of “1984” that “men who love a crucified God need never think of torture as all-powerful.”….

—I do hope students read these things. Some do, I’m sure. And what could be better than thinking about the likes of Waugh and Orwell viewing the world and its struggles essentially in the same way! How does our own thinking compare to theirs?

In class, I often note that those on both ends of the political spectrum do seem to approach the world as moral objectivists—people who suppose that there exists some set of values that apply equally to all of humanity. It is obvious that conservatives do: the more primitive among them often seem to view the beliefs and practices of foreign cultures essentially as 16th Century Europeans (or late 19th Century Americans) did.

Perhaps it is less obvious that leftists/liberals are often entrenched objectivists as well, for surely a willingness to wield “human rights” across cultures assumes that there is some objective standard of conduct and moral belief to which people around the world may appeal! (Hilary Clinton is big on "human rights.")

But I am a philosopher. And so I ask, “OK, what justifies that idea?” I mean, how is this supposed to work exactly? Is it that those nasty cultures that pursue female genital mutilation and the like are somehow blind to facts? Do they lack reason? Are their brains damaged? Did God neglect to send them a Moses?

These ideas are implausible.

OK, all you right-wingers out there. Know this. I routinely piss off leftists too.

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One kind of “objectivist” are those who favor including creationism in the curriculum, which involves the assumption that the Bible is an objective (universally applicable) account of history/science. McCain's running mate Sarah Palin seems to be in this category: 'Creation science' enters the race

Hilary Clinton and the Human Rights Campaign

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Don't get me wrong. I'm as horrified by female genital mutilation as anybody. But when we base our philosophies on assumptions, we need to identify them and ask whether we can defend them. Philosophy can be very harsh to what Orwell called our “smelly little orthodoxies."

It can be harsh on the fragrant ones too.

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I offer a "version" of this post that quickly diverges into philosophy on OC Blue Philosopher.