About
The Public Philosopher extracts, analyzes and unpacks the moral and philosophical issues lurking behind debates over public policy and domestic and foreign affairs. It’s not an academic exercise. Our national dialogue is impoverished through inattention to the role principles and values play in nearly every issue that matters.
Our approach is strictly non-partisan. Like anyone else, we here at The Public Philosopher have certain core values and beliefs. We think it’s our job, however, to illuminate the complex philosophical arguments at stake in public policy without acting as moral arbiter. The only way that the character of our national discussion will improve is if everyone, in some sense, learns to become a public philosopher.
This blog aspires to provide people with the tools necessary to accomplish this.
Why do we need public philosophers?
Values matter in politics. Governments, markets, and other collective institutions exist because they provide us with the things we want and need. They satisfy our fundamental desires, which include things as profound as physical safety and education or as mundane as clean streets and working traffic lights. When we criticize these institutions, our complaints take one, or both, of two possible forms:
- The institution in question has failed achieve its stated goal
- The goal in question in not, in fact, worthwhile
To understand the difference between these two kinds of criticism, it’s best to take a concrete example: the Iraq war. The first kind of criticism would be to question whether the war has achieved its stated objectives. Iraq is no more stable, the skeptic would say, adding that we have failed to establish a working democratic government. He might then suggest alternative means by which to accomplish these goals: a troop surge, more money for infrastructure, etc. These arguments might be countered by showing that current attempts to force a stable, democratic Iraq have been successful, or will be in time. In this case, the skeptic and the apologist are not debating the merits of the Iraq war, simply its implementation.
A criticism of the second kind would have a distinctly different character. Before the Iraq war began, it would be to argue that the war’s fundamental aims (assuming they were true) are not worthwhile. And, during the conflict, it might be to argue that working to increase stability there is not worth the cost in money or lives. It is a question of which outcome – invading or not invading; staying or leaving – better reflects what we can agree is desirable. Faced with this opposition, the Iraq war apologist would have to show the merits of the Iraq campaign. He would have to argue that the Iraq war is morally justified. Successful or not, it’s something we ought to do.
The first debate is one about facts – whether something works or doesn’t – and the second is about values. Often, both kinds of debate come into play in public policy and they are usually interrelated. Otto Von Bismarck, the nineteenth-century “Iron Chancellor” of Germany, famously called politics “the art of the possible.” Our ability to come to collective decisions about how to solve the problems that face society generally requires us to decide what we can agree is right, or just, within a set of boundaries the constrain what we are able to do. Far more people would be likely to support higher social security payments if we were so limitlessly wealthy that our national coffers might never run dry. Nuclear power would be more popular if the waste it creates was not toxic. Our belief in what is right and wrong is circumscribed, in part, by the realities of the world in which we live.
There are a lot of experts to help inform decisions about how to accomplish our ends. Far fewer voices contribute to the debate over just what our collective ends should be. The result is that questions of value are often left unresolved in public debates. Unfortunately, this leads to confusion and hinders our capacity for making effective, well-reasoned collective choices.
Some people think that politics isn’t the place to discuss value. Economists, doctors, lawyers, scientists and all the other specialists who help us make decisions about public policy share knowledge they’ve spent years cultivating. But everyone is an expert on value, right? Values, principles and morals are the things that we bring into politics from the outside—from our faith, our upbringing, or our own personal ideology. When our values overlap, we put them into practice through politics.
In some sense, this is true. Values aren’t like economics or medicine. One of the things that make humans special is that each one can decide for him or herself what is right or wrong, good or bad, desirable or repugnant. Freedom of conscience, after all, is enshrined in the First Amendment to our Constitution.
This view is tempting, but it suffers from two problems. First, political debates do not concern merely the domain in which our values overlap. Gun control, abortion, tobacco—all of these issues condense heated contests over the right way to live. Are guns too dangerous to allow personal ownership or do people have a right to defend themselves? Is a fetus a life? Is it wrong to sell a product with detrimental health effects or must we let people take their own risks? These are just a few particularly incendiary questions, but the reality is that our different values come into conflict in nearly every public debate.
Second, though values inevitably figure in political discussions, the relationship between specific policies and some of our personal values is quite complex. It’s true that we bring many of our moral beliefs with us into politics, but it can be difficult to know how those beliefs apply to particular cases. The growing field of issues we refer to as “bioethical” form a good example of this dilemma. Many people believe – for different reasons – that it is wrong to interfere with certain natural processes. How that abstract beliefs applies to abortion, stem cell research, genetic counseling, and genetically-modified foods can be difficult to grasp and the answer often depends on what assumptions we make about the facts.
In that sense, there is room for the “value expert,” though in a different way than other experts. Rather than telling us what values to have, the way an economist might explain how to solve a discrete problem such as rampant inflation or widespread unemployment, the “value expert” simply adds clarity to the moral side of public debates. The “value expert” shows us which moral issues are at stake.
The good news is that there are “value experts” out there. They’re called “moral philosophers” and they mostly inhabit universities. The bad news is that we rarely ask for their help in politics. But that can change. The equation is simple. If we’re really committed to making the right choices, then we need to combine the right means with the right ends. There’s an abundance of eager voices to help us figure out the means. It’s the public philosopher who’s going to help figure out the ends.