A Companion to Applied Philosophy

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee, David Coady, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee, David Coady

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781119287261, 9781118869130
• eBook ISBN: 9781118869123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Applied philosophy has been a growing area of research for the last 40 years. Until now, however, almost all of this research has been centered around the field of ethics. A Companion to Applied Philosophy breaks new ground, demonstrating that all areasof philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind, can be applied, and are relevant to questions of everyday life.

This perennial topic in philosophy provides an overview of these various applied philosophy developments, highlighting similarities and differences between various areas of applied philosophy, and examining the very nature of this topic. It is an area to which many of the towering figures in the history of philosophy have contributed, and this timely Companion demonstrates how various historical contributions are actually contributions within applied philosophy, even if they are not traditionally seen as such.

The Companion contains 42 essays covering major areas of philosophy; the articles themselves are all original contributions to the literature and represent the state of the art on this topic, as well as offering a map to the current debates.

Part I
Introductory Articles

1
The Nature of Applied Philosophy

KASPER LIPPERT‐RASMUSSEN

Introduction

Applied philosophy is a form of philosophy, albeit one that differs from non‐applied or, as some put it, “pure philosophy.” Presumably, the distinction between applied and pure philosophy is exhaustive and mutually exclusive, though there might be borderline cases. What distinguishes the two?

Here is one way to approach the question: When we apply philosophy, we apply it to something. If I say that I am working on a piece of applied philosophy and if, in response to the question what I apply philosophy to, I say “Oh, nothing. I am just writing a piece in applied philosophy,” I show myself to be conceptually and/or grammatically confused. “To apply” is a verb that takes an object.

On the assumption that applied and non‐applied philosophy are mutually exclusive, this suggests that pure philosophy has no object. But, non‐grammatically speaking, this is not so. Work in a field of philosophy outside applied philosophy, such as general metaphysics, has an object – for example, the nature of properties. Hence, applied philosophy does not distinguish itself from pure philosophy in that the former is philosophy applied to an object, whereas pure philosophy is not. Pure philosophy being applied philosophy in this sense is not marked by the use of the term “applied.” This is because the problems it addresses are ones that are normally considered philosophical problems in a narrow sense. Metaphorically, pure philosophy is philosophy applied to itself – that is, to philosophical problems such as the fundamental nature of reality, knowledge, morality, and so on – whereas applied philosophy is philosophy applied to non‐philosophical problems broadly construed.

There are many views on which problems belong to the narrow set of philosophical problems. These differences we can set aside and instead focus on the fact there are also a number of different conceptions of applied philosophy. One reason for this multiplicity is that there are different views regarding what philosophy is. For example, is it a special approach to addressing problems, or is it a set of substantive principles that one can apply outside philosophy itself (or both)? On the former view, at its core applying philosophy is a matter of, say, approaching a particular question through meticulous conceptual analysis, making explicit how one’s conclusions follow from one’s premises, and so forth. On the latter view, applying philosophy is a matter of applying substantive philosophical principles. Often, doing so will consist in carefully identifying the relevant empirical facts of the matter and then feeding them into the relevant principles. For instance, applied ethicists who discuss capital punishment and believe that deterrence effects may justify punishment will look into whether capital punishment, as a matter of empirical fact, reduces overall crime rates.

Another reason why there are different conceptions of applied philosophy is that there are different views regarding what it is to apply something. For instance, some think that the notion of application differs across different philosophical disciplines; for example, it differs across ethics and aesthetics because the latter embodies “only in a limited manner a tacit imperative toward the kind of hierarchical taxonomy that we find expressed in ethics as traditionally conceived” (see Chapter 34, Applied Aesthetics).

In this chapter, I introduce seven conceptions of applied philosophy and clarify the differences between them. Along the way I will draw on examples from the contributions to this Companion. One core claim in this chapter – one that underpins the entire Companion – is that while applied ethics forms an important part of applied philosophy, applied philosophy is much more than applied ethics. This might seem odd, since applied ethics is a more established, self‐conscious applied philosophy discipline than others. However, there are historical reasons why this is so, which are compatible with the fact that any philosophical discipline – for example, epistemology or metaphysics – has an applied sub‐ or co‐discipline. This non‐applied ethics‐centered conception of applied philosophy is a consequence of all of the seven conceptions of applied philosophy discussed below. The editors of this Companion hope that the Companion in its entirety constitutes an even more effective argument for this broad construal of applied philosophy.

The Relevance Conception

In an article from 1970, Leslie Stevenson made a plea for applied philosophy. In his view, most of what went on in philosophy departments reflected “legitimately specialized concerns” with little or no “wider relevance” outside the various subdisciplines of “pure philosophy” such as “mathematical and philosophical logic, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and most of the questions now discussed by professional philosophers about ethics, politics, and aesthetics (e.g., the validity of the fact‐value distinction)” (Stevenson 1970: 259). By “applied philosophy” he meant philosophy that is “relevant to ‘the important questions of everyday life’” (Stevenson 1970: 258). These are a mix of quite different questions ranging from existential ones such as why death is bad to political questions such as what we should do about global warming. On what I shall refer to as the relevance conception of applied philosophy,

1. (1) Philosophy is applied if, and only if, it is relevant to important questions of everyday life.

As examples of questions in applied philosophy so construed, Stevenson mentions:

rational discussion of particular controversial moral questions, such as sexual morality, the Catholic ban on contraception, the use of hallucinogenic drugs, abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, the definition of death, and many other medico‐ethical‐legal problems raised or soon to be raised by the coming “biological revolution”; also certain aspects of various difficult and social political problems, such as educational policy (comprehensive schools? religious education?), the need for public participation in planning (Do people know what they want twenty years from now, and is it identical with what they need? How can many and different pressures result in a sensible and just decision?), world economic development (Do the richer countries have a duty to help the poorer? Should the Indian peasant be forced to change his agricultural methods?); also the critical examination of various political and religious ideologies in the forms they take now (e.g., Marxism, and the various denominations of Christianity); scientific or supposedly scientific theories (e.g., Freudian psycho‐analysis, and various sociological theories). (1970: 259)

Four thoughts spring to mind. First, this list reflects the time at which Stevenson wrote his article as well as the particular audience he addressed (cf. Singer 1993: 1). This is as it should be, if applied philosophy is “relevant to ‘the important questions of everyday life,’” and such questions, to some extent at least, vary across time and audience. Indeed, if we attend not just to actual variation but take into account possible variation, the present subdisciplines of pure philosophy would qualify as applied philosophy if, say, people in their everyday lives were pure‐philosophically more inclined than almost all of us are, and were pained by unresolved questions about the nature of entailment and reference. This reflects the fact that the relevance‐based distinction between pure and applied philosophy has nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of the two fields of philosophy, but turns on which questions are raised in “everyday life.” Hence, on the relevance conception there is no reason to expect that applied philosophy is any different in terms of its methods from non‐applied philosophy. Or, at least, there is no such reason unless we have some independent grasp of which questions are the important questions of everyday life and have reason to believe that the way in which these can be answered is different from the way in which questions that are not in this way important can be.

One aspect of the audience relativity of the notion of “important questions of everyday life” is worth emphasizing. Many subdisciplines within applied philosophy address “questions of everyday life” for members of particular professions – for example, ethics of war. Here philosophy addresses important questions bearing on the everyday professional life of members of armed forced (see Chapter 24, Collectivism and Reductivism in the Ethics of War). However, as the example shows, some questions that are important questions of everyday professional life are also important questions outside the professions, such as the rights of combatants fighting an unjust war to kill enemy combatants.

Second, while most of the questions Stevenson mentions fall within the scope of applied ethics, construed broadly enough to include applied political philosophy (see Kagan 1998: 3), there are exceptions. For instance, the critical examination that Stevenson had in mind in relation to various “scientific or supposedly scientific theories” is not an ethical one, but, at least in good part, an epistemic one. Also, a conceptual exploration of the relation between wants and needs does not itself tell us anything about what weight should be given to people’s wants regarding their future.

Third, Stevenson ties part of his plea for applied philosophy to the “coming biological revolution” that forces us to rethink a number of moral issues. Some argue that something similar can be said about other disciplines in applied philosophy. For instance, David Coady contends that the “rise of new technologies, such as mobile phones and the Internet, along with the decline of older sources of information, such as newspapers and traditional reference books, have significantly changed the way in which we acquire knowledge and justify our beliefs,” and that this motivates a similar wave of applied epistemology (see Chapter 4, Applied Epistemology).

This connects with a fourth point – namely, that applied philosophy is “relevant to ‘the important questions of everyday life.’” Thus, to qualify as applied philosophy on the relevance conception, philosophy does not have to answer “the important questions of everyday life.” This is a stronger requirement. By way of illustration, accounts of what makes someone an expert on climate change do not in themselves answer the question that, currently, is an important question of everyday life: what should we do about climate change? But they are relevant to how we should do so – for example, because they are relevant to who can make any claim to climate expertise and, thus, to whose predictions and opinions should be trusted (see Chapter 10, Experts in the Climate Change Debate). Similarly, determining whether freedom of expression promotes truth (or other epistemic desiderata) does not answer the question of the degree to which people should enjoy freedom of expression (see Chapter 11, Freedom of Expression, Diversity, and Truth; Chapter 30, Freedom of Religion and Expression). However, to the extent that we (ought to) care about truth, it is relevant to how we should answer this question. Hence, even on the relevance conception applied ethics is not co‐extensive wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introductory Articles
• Part II: Epistemology
• Part III: Metaphysics and Philosophy of Language
• Part IV: Ethics
• Part V: Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Law
• Part VI: Philosophy of Science
• Part VII: Aesthetics
• Part VIII: Philosophy of Religion
• Part IX: History of Applied Philosophy
• Index
• End User License Agreement