What philosophers think, 2020 edition

[image: the “Thinker” by Rodin outside Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, Wikimedia]

Philosophy, contra popular opinion (even among some philosophers) makes progress. I have written a whole (free!) book (summarized here) about how that works. The basic idea is that philosophy, unlike science, is in the business of discovering, exploring, and refining conceptual landscapes defined by the questions in which philosophers are interested in.

For instance, if the issue is the articulation of frameworks for thinking about moral philosophy, the corresponding landscape includes a number of peaks that identify virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, ethics of care, etc.. Progress then consists of first of all identifying new peaks in the landscape. Utilitarianism, for example, did not exist until Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill put it on the map in the early 19th century. Subsequently, progress consists of exploring and refining a given peak: Mill’s version of utilitarianism was more sophisticated than Bentham’s, and various modern varieties of the philosophy are more sophisticated than Mill’s.

But do we have any empirical evidence that this is the way philosophy works? Yes, from two major sources. One, of course, is the history of philosophy itself, as recently argued by my colleague Peter Adamson. Another is to periodically survey professional philosophers about what they think of the major questions in their field and see if the results are compatible with the conceptual landscape model.

The latter approach has been pioneered by David Bourget and David Chalmers, who first published their results in 2013, and have recently updated their data. I commented on their first paper here, and I’d like to highlight some of the results of the more recent survey in this essay.

The major thing you will notice is that there is no unanimity on pretty much any of the big questions, something detractors of the field take as evidence that philosophy does not, in fact make progress. But that criticism is based on a misconceived analogy with science. (And even there, it isn’t always the case that scientists actually agree on what’s going on, including in the alleged queen of the sciences, fundamental physics!) In science it makes some sense to ask whether a theory, say, Einstein’s general relativity, is “true” or not, meaning whether it corresponds with the way the world works. Even…

At any rate, the situation is very different in philosophy, where it makes no sense to ask whether virtue ethics, say, is true. True with respect to what criteria? This, however, doesn’t mean that philosophical stances are arbitrary, or a matter of taste, because we can evaluate and compare them according to different criteria. One such criterion is their internal coherence. A philosophical account of something that is incoherent, meaning that it entails logical contradictions, isn’t worth much. Another criterion is whether they are useful for certain purposes. Virtue ethics has survived for two and a half millennia as a moral framework because it is useful, and that’s why we keep going back to the Greco-Romans for help when it comes to moral philosophy.

If the above is correct, then we expect to find differences of opinions among philosophers, but we don’t expect a large variety of such opinions, especially if the question has been explored for a long time. That’s because we have presumably discarded a number of unpromising peaks in the pertinent conceptual landscape, and the remaining ones have already been carefully and perhaps even exhaustively explored.

So let’s take a look at the latest Bourget-Chalmers survey with the above considerations in mind and see where philosophy is at the onset of the third decade of the 21st century. I will not present an exhaustive coverage, focusing instead only on some of the major questions, or on questions that interest me particularly. As an exercise, I suggest to ponder each question and see wether you agree or not with the majority opinion of professional philosophers.

One of the most acrimonious debates in 20th century epistemology was whether there is such a thing as a priori knowledge, that is knowledge that can be arrived at by sheer thinking rather than by way of empirical input. That issue seems largely settled, as 73% of professional philosophers agree that a priori knowledge is possible, while 19% disagrees. I’m with the majority here, as I think mathematics and logic are obvious examples of a priori knowledge. (Incidentally, whenever the totals don’t add up to 100% it is because there is an “other” category, or minor positions that I don’t bother to mention.)

More controversial is the question of the existence of abstract objects, like mathematical constructs. 38% of respondents identified themselves as Platonists (yes to abstract objects) while 42% identified as nominalists (no to abstract objects). I am a nominalist myself, but the almost equal split means that there are compelling arguments in favor of both positions, and I don’t expect the debate to be settled any time soon, possibly ever.

In philosophy of mind, 52% of philosophers consider themselves physicalists, believing that consciousness is the result of physical processes. Still, 32% are non-physicalists, too many, if you ask me. I predict the number of non-physicalists will go down with increasing discoveries in neuroscience, until philosophy of mind will cease to exist as an independent field within philosophy and move entirely to science (as it has happened already for physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology). If you are wondering, no, I don’t think there is any such thing as the hard problem of consciousness, pace Chalmers (the same guy who co-authored the survey we are discussing).

Meta-ethically speaking, 69% of my colleagues are cognitivists about moral judgments, while 21% are non-cognitivists. Cognitivism is the position that moral claims express propositions, and can, therefore, be true or false. I am a cognitivist myself, though I don’t like to use true / false here and prefer useful / not useful. This is because I think morality initially evolved to facilitate cooperation and nowadays also serves the function of maximizing individual flourishing. If this is the case, then the useful / not useful categories are more apt than the true / false ones.

Another area where we encounter two major peaks in the conceptual landscape, with philosophers pretty much equally split, is aesthetics: 44% think aesthetic judgments are objective, while 41% think they are not. This is far from my field of expertise, but I have always had a hard time justifying the alleged objectivity of aesthetic judgments, except in very broad, biologically informed terms (e.g., we tend to like symmetric features, especially in other humans, possibly because they are indicative of good health). But then I think of certain paintings or pieces of music and I say to myself, hell yes, that’s truly good (or bad)!

Back to ethics. I mentioned above three major peaks of that particular landscape: virtue ethics, deontology, and utilitarianism. It appears that, finally, virtue ethics has taken the lead here, though philosophers are near-equally split: 37% favor virtue ethics, 32% deontology, and 31% consequentialism (of which utilitarianism is the major version). Again, the reason I favor virtue ethics is because I find it far more useful than the other two, not because it is “true.”

One of the perennial questions in metaphysics is that of what constitutes personal identity. Here 44% favor the psychological view, according to which what makes someone a person is the continuity in their psychological states (like memory, character, etc.). 19% endorse the biological view, the notion that a person is a physical, spatiotemporally continuous biological entity. 15% go for the “further fact” view, which holds that personal identity depends on some (more or less mysterious) fact in addition to physical and psychological continuity. My opinion is that the whole question is misguided. There is no metaphysical answer to what constitutes a person because “person” is a human concept, not something that has invariant, mind-independent metaphysical attributes. But that’s because I in general reject pretty much the whole of so-called analytical metaphysics as a type of “chmess,” as Dan Dennett famously put it.

By contrast, a true metaphysical question is whether there is such thing as an external world. Here I’m squarely with the majority (80%) who endorses non-skeptical realism (largely, in my case, because I think it is parsimonious to think that if the world looks like it’s real, then it likely is real). The other two major positions are decidedly minoritarian, with idealism at 7% and radical skepticism at 5%.

Switching now to political philosophy, 44% of philosophers profess to be egalitarian (a la John Rawls), 27% communitarian (a la Michael Sandel), and 13% libertarian (a la Robert Nozick). I haven’t made up my mind about this. I lean egalitarian but I can see some of the points put forth by communitarians. I decidedly reject libertarianism, even though Nozick’s version is far more sophisticated than that of popular dilettantes like Ayn Rand.

What about free will? The majority (59%) go for my favorite position, compatibilism, which is the notion that we live in a deterministic universe and yet we own our decisions because our decision-making apparatus (i.e., the brain) is part and parcel of the cosmic web of cause-effect and not just a passive recipient of it (the “puppet with strings” model favored by authors like Sam Harris). 19% of respondents believe in contra-causal free will, and I’m guessing many of these are also Christians or affiliated to similar religious views that require free will to respond to the famous “why did God make a universe that allows evil?” argument. (In a parallel fashion, 67% of philosophers are atheists and 19% theists.) Interestingly, only 11% of philosophers think there is no free will.

63% of colleagues believe “race” is a social construct, and they are damn right! In fact, it is more than a bit disturbing that still 19% think it is biological. 15% think that it is “unreal,” but I’m not sure how they can deny its social reality.

The landscape concerning gender is more complex: 63% think it a social construct, 29% a biological one, and 22% a psychological notion, though it is hard to imagine how psychology here could possibly be distinct from either biology or sociology, rather than influenced by either or both. I certainly think that gender roles are socially constructed, which then has a psychological impact. I’m a bit more agnostic about gender per se. The existence of gender dysphoria may be interpreted as hinting at a genetic component, but my general take on nature-nurture questions in humans is that we don’t know and won’t likely know, and that the most plausible answer is that any complex behavioral trait is characterized by pervasive non-linear gene-environment interactions.

One discussion, in epistemology, surprises me for apparently being still alive and well: empiricism (44%) vs rationalism (34%). I thought we had settled it since Kant that this is a false dichotomy. Knowledge is a combination of a priori (rationalism) and a posteriori (empiricism), but maybe Bourget and Chalmers simply didn’t provide that option to the respondents.

Want another example of the sorry state of analytic metaphysics? Here we go. Are philosophical zombies — entities that look, talk, and behave like us, but experience nothing inside — conceivable, possible, neither, or both? 36% think p-zombies are conceivable but not possible (in my opinion, the correct answer), 24% say they are “metaphysically possible” (whatever that means), and 16% think they are inconceivable, in which case one wonders how they could possibly understand the question in the first place…

Since the survey was carried out once before, it is now possible to see if philosophers’ opinions shifted significantly over time. They did, in some cases.

Non-classical logic gained some ground over classical logic; non-cognitivism about moral judgments is slightly less unpopular; more people opt for not switching tracks on the darn trolley problem; Platonism has unfortunately gained as a view of abstract objects; and there are fewer people who believe in free will.

Finally, Bourget and Chalmers also added a few new questions to their survey. Here are the highlights: 82% think abortion is sometimes permissible and 75% are against the death penalty. 51% endorse revising gender categories while 40% favor eliminating race categories. 30% support capitalism and 53% prefer socialism. And here is my favorite: only 2% think particles could be conscious. So much for the alleged popularity of panpsychism!