The most good you can do: a response to the commentaries

Anthony Skelton, Violetta Igneski and Tracy Isaacs share my view that our obligations to help people in extreme poverty go beyond what is conventionally accepted. Nevertheless, the other contributors argue that my view is too demanding, while noting some tensions between my different writings on this issue. I explain my position, drawing on Sidgwick’s distinction between what someone ought to do, and what we should praise or blame someone for doing or not doing. I also respond to the position that Skelton considers preferable to mine, drawing this time on an argument that Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and I have made in our recent book, The Point of View of the Universe. I also address Igneski’s concerns about gender inequality, and indicate my broad agreement with Isaacs’ suggestion that effective altruism could benefit from a more co-ordinated approach.     

In Defence of Direct Realism

In her careful consideration of my book, The Problem of Perception (henceforth, PP), Susanna Siegel highlights what she takes to be a number of shortcomings in the work. First, she suggests that a sense-datum theorist has two options–what she calls the "complex sense-data option" and the "two-factor option"–that survive the argument of my book unscathed. I consider these two options in the first two sections of this reply. Secondly, she criticizes my suggestion that there are three and only three basic and independent sources of perceptual consciousness: an issue I take up in my third section. Thirdly, she expresses reservations about my response to the argument from hallucination. In particular, she argues that the phenomenological considerations on which I put so much weight cannot settle the fundamental issue here. I address this criticism in the fourth section of this reply. Finally, she spends a certain amount of time discussing the notion of a "veridicality-rele-vant property", a topic to which I devote the concluding section of this reply.     

Kant and the creation of freedom: a response to Terry Godlove

In his review of my book, Terry Godlove raises some robust objections to the exegesis of Kant that I present in my recent book, Kant and the Creation of Freedom: a Theological Problem (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). I respond to these criticisms in this article. Properly to locate Godlove’s exegetical objections, I dedicate the first section to setting out the arc of the argument I trace. I then set out and treat in turn Godlove’s main objections to my exegesis: that it depends upon an interpretation of transcendental idealism which makes the doctrine ‘flatly inconsistent and probably just silly’; that I neglect the most plausible account interpretation of Kant’s various statements about transcendental idealism; and that I ‘pick and choose’ supporting texts too narrowly, leading to an unbalanced presentation, which is too convenient to my thesis. I conclude with some general methodological reflections—stimulated by Godlove, but not aimed at him—about how historical philosophical texts are often treated. I express some anxieties about the principle of charity that underlies much current exegesis, and ‘rational reconstruction’ of historical texts, and I propose a case for what might be called ‘creative decomposition’ (not of the text, but of the self).     

E-sports are Not Sports

The conclusion of this paper will be that e-sports are not sports. I begin by offering a stipulation and a definition. I stipulate that what I have in mind, when thinking about the concept of sport, is ‘Olympic’ sport. And I define an Olympic Sport as an institutionalised, rule-governed contest of human physical skill. The justification for the stipulation lies partly in that it is uncontroversial. Whatever else people might think of as sport, no-one denies that Olympic Sport is sport. This seeks to ensure that those who might wish to dispute my conclusion might stay with the argument at least for as long as possible. Secondly, the justification for the stipulation lies partly in its normativity—I have chosen an Olympic conception of sport just because it seems to me to offer some kind of desirable version of what sport is and might become. Thirdly, I give examples which show how prominent promoters of e-sports agree with my stipulation, as evidenced by their strenuous attempts to comply with it in order to join the Olympic club. The justification for the definition lies in the conceptual analysis offered—an ‘exhibition-analysis’ which clarifies the concept of sport by offering ‘construals’ of the six first-level terms. The conclusion is that e-sports are not sports because they are inadequately ‘human’; they lack direct physicality; they fail to employ decisive whole-body control and whole-body skills, and cannot contribute to the development of the whole human; and because their patterns of creation, production, ownership and promotion place serious constraints on the emergence of the kind of stable and persisting institutions characteristic of sports governance. Competitive computer games do not qualify as sports, no matter what ‘resemblances’ may be claimed. Computer games are just that—games.     

In defence of a faith-like model of love: a reply to John Lippitt’s “Kierkegaard and the problem of special relationships: Ferreira,Krishek, and the ‘God filter”’

In his major work on love, Works of Love, Kierkegaard clearly and robustly affirms the moral superiority of neighbourly love, and approves preferential love on one condition: that it serve as an instance of neighbourly love. But can an essentially preferential love be an instance of the essentially non-preferential neighbourly love? John Lippitt seems to think it can. In his paper “Kierkegaard and the problem of special relationships: Ferreira, Krishek, and the ‘God filter”’ he defends Kierkegaard’s position in Works of Love against my criticism (as presented in my book Kierkegaard on Faith and Love); specifically, against my claim that in using Kierkegaard’s view of neighbourly love as a framework for understanding preferential love, one fails to account for the latter’s distinctive character. Lippitt claims that I misinterpret Kierkegaard’s position and, using what he calls ‘the God filter’, he attempts to show how adhering to Kierkegaard’s view of neighbourly love allows one to sustain the distinctiveness (and value) of preferential love. In what follows I will defend my interpretation of Kierkegaard’s position and explain why I take the view he presents in Works of Love to be problematic. Furthermore, in my aforementioned book I offer a Kierkegaardian model of love that does precisely what Lippitt seeks his ‘God filter’ model to do: namely, preserve the distinctiveness of preferential love while allowing its possible coexistence with neighbourly love. Thus, against the background of Lippitt’s criticism I will demonstrate this model again, in hope of clarifying the advantages this view offers.     

Editor’s Introduction

The theme of the 2018 Spindel Conference was “Decolonizing Philosophy.” In this introduction, I will elaborate on this theme as a way to set the stage for the essays in this volume. Beginning with the question of what it means to consider philosophy “colonized” in the first place, I will focus on the subfield of the history of philosophy as a way to draw out my account. After elaborating what I take the claim that philosophy is colonized/colonizing to mean, I will turn to ways one might approach its decolonization. Again, my principle focus will be on the history of philosophy, though I take my analysis to extend beyond this subfield. Finally, I will elaborate four key tasks that I take to be essential to the decolonization of philosophy.     

Ethics Talk; Talking Ethics: An Example of Clinical Ethics Consultation

This written account of a clinical encounter - depicting fragments of a more extensive array of events - attempts to exemplify many facets and associated complexities of clinical ethics consultation. Within the general telling, I provide more detailed portrayals of several key events. In secion 1, I document briefly my initial interactions at the beginning of the consultation, focusing on the information gained - in the context of those interactions - as I read the medical chart of Mrs. Rose. Next in section 2, I briefly describes my initial conversation with Mrs. Rose's three sons. Section 3 illustrates several questions raised in sections 1 and 2. Then section 4 presents my encounter with Paul, the youngest son, as he was carrying out his vigil at his mother's bedside in the hospital. Section 5 chronicles my interactions with several care providers involved in Mrs. Rose's situation, including two different meetings that occurred with Mrs. Rose's attending physician. I conclude in section 6 by telling about a conversation I had with Mrs. Rose's middle son, Russell, approximately one month after Mrs. Rose died.     

DANCING WITH THE SACRED: EXCERPTS

Abstract. In excerpts from my Dancing with the Sacred (2002), I use ideas from modern science, our world's religions, and my own experience to highlight three themes of the book. First, working within the framework of a scientific worldview, I develop a concept of the sacred (or God) as the creative activity of nature, human history, and individual life. Second, I offer a relational understanding of human nature that I call our social‐ecological selves and suggest some general considerations about what it means to live meaningfully and morally in an evolutionary world. Third, I explore how we might be at home in a universe that is constantly changing and in which suffering and death are interwoven with life and new creation.     

Pogge on global poverty

Thomas Pogge has recently defended additional ways in which to eradicate poverty from the developing world. In this article, Pogge's argument is discussed. First the premises on which Pogge relies are summarized and the logic of ‘international borrowing privilege’ introduced. Then it is argued that Pogge's solutions to the poverty problem would face similar difficulties to many other solutions—that is, in order to work properly they all must gain extensive international support and political willingness, which they will not easily obtain. The final section looks at how the solutions might gain more support and why people tend to resist new suggestions.     

On Black Women, “In Defense of Transracialism,” and Imperial Harm

This essay is a response to the events surrounding Hypatia's publication of “In Defense of Transracialism.” It does not take up the question of “transracialism” itself, but rather attempts to shed light both on what some black women may have experienced following from the publication of the article and on how we might understand this experience as harm. It also suggests one way for feminist journals to reduce the likelihood of similar harms occurring in the future. I begin by describing a discussion that occurred in my classroom that bears some resemblance to the much larger debate that emerged around Hypatia. Next, I elaborate a concept of imperial harm. I then address how this concept comes to be relevant to the experience of black women within the discipline of philosophy in general, before briefly describing how academic feminism (including feminist philosophy) has served as a particular site of imperial harm for black women. Finally, touching on the idea of expressive harm, I conclude with an appeal for the adoption of more feminist publication ethics.     

Enactment as Therapeutic Hand Grenade: How Bursts of Emotional Honesty Can Get a Stuck Treatment Moving Again: Discussion of Holly Levenkron's Paper

In my discussion of Levenkron's article, I consider ways of understanding the patient's therapeutic progress that were not highlighted by the author. Adding my own criteria to Levenkron's definition of enactment, I suggest that what the author labels as enactment might be seen as a last-ditch but successful effort to get patient and analyst out of a stuck and painful place. I explore the interplay of confrontational and nonconfrontational interventions in contributing to cure, and I suggest placing a greater emphasis than did the author, on the intersubjective contexts out of which the patient's troublesome behaviors emerged.     

What is a philosophical stance? Paradigms,policies and perspectives

Since van Fraassen first put forward the suggestive idea that many philosophical positions should be construed as ‘stances’ rather than factual beliefs, there have been various attempts to spell out precisely what a philosophical stance might be, and on what basis one should be adopted. In this paper I defend a particular account of stances, the view that they are pragmatically justified perspectives or ways of seeing the world, and compare it to some other accounts that have been offered. In Sect. 2 I consider van Fraassen’s argument for construing empiricism as a stance, and look at some responses to it. In Sect. 3 I outline my conception of stances as perspectives or ways of seeing, and explain how stances so understood may be justified. I illustrate this conception by way of a discussion of the model pluralist position with respect to the units of selection debate in biology, and suggest that on the model pluralist view different perspectives on the units of selection, such as the gene’s eye view, are in fact van Fraassian stances. In Sect. 4 I discuss the view put forward by Teller and Chakravartty among others that stances should be understood as epistemic policies, and argue that it is consistent with the conception of stances as perspectives. In the final section I criticise Rowbottom’s attempt to assimilate stances to Kuhnian paradigms. I argue that he has overlooked some important disanalogies between stances and paradigms, so that the comparison obscures more than it reveals.     

Huston Smith Replies to Barbour, Goodenough, and Peterson

Responses and clarifications are given to the three respondents to my recent book, Why Religion Matters , in which I discuss what I see as the drawbacks and inconsistencies of Darwinism. While certain of their criticisms are understandable, others are based on a misreading of my work. Finally, my critics fail to show that my book is mistaken in its central claim that the modern loss of faith in transcendence, basic to the traditional/religious worldview, is unwarranted, because science has not been able to disprove the metaphysical claim that transcendence exists.     

How I Become a Psychoanalyst

In this essay, I focus on how my personal history contributed to my choosing to become a psychoanalyst, what I then encountered and the choices I made professionally, and the issue of being “inside” versus “outside” the classical tradition. In this context, I describe some of the political conditions that prevented Ph.D.'s from being able to be trained as analysts within the classical tradition during those years. I also describe how the training I received outside the classical tradition actually was much broader than what would have been offered within it and how it allowed for a level of intellectual freedom and critical thinking about traditional ways of working that would not have been possible in the classical institutes. I also describe briefly how I began developing the concept of working at the “intimate edge” in the analytic relationship, which I first began writing about in 1974 and which is detailed most fully in my 1992 book, The Intimate Edge: Extending the Reach of Psychoanalytic Interaction, and in several subsequent publications (Ehrenberg, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2003).     

Conservatism. A defence

Conservatism has an essence, or so I argue. Typical of the conservative attitude is to take what is an established fact or order to be worthy of preservation, precisely because it is well established. The question what fact is established must be answered in a context, and people of different political bent answer it differently. This is why we have left‐wing as well as right‐wing conservatism, sharing a common rationale. In my Conservatism for Our Time I discuss various different aspects of this rationale, and my answer to certain strictures raised by Robert Grant concerns several of them. The most important concerns a conservative or traditionalist criticism of rationalism. This criticism has been developed by ‐ among others ‐Michael Oakeshott. In my book, and in my answer to Grant, I defend and elaborate on this criticism.     

Reply to critics

ABSTRACT

In this reply to critics, I reply to Stephanie Leary’s, Kris McDaniel’s, Tristram McPherson’s and David Plunkett’s articles on my book Choosing Normative Concepts. One central theme in the replies concerns what is the best strategy for the so-called ardent realist when it comes to responding to the challenge I present in the book. Another central theme concerns the criticisms of my characterizations of what normative concepts and normative properties are.     

What Is Ignorance?

This article offers an analysis of ignorance. After a couple of preliminary remarks, I endeavor to show that, contrary to what one might expect and to what nearly all philosophers assume, being ignorant is not equivalent to failing to know, at least not on one of the stronger senses of knowledge. Subsequently, I offer two definitions of ignorance and argue that one’s definition of ignorance crucially depends on one’s account of belief. Finally, I illustrate the relevance of my analysis by paying attention to four philosophical problems in which ignorance plays a crucial role.     

Feminist Organizing and the Politics of Inclusion

This paper examines the attempts of one mainstream women's organization to organize and include women of color. Using the approach to social organization developed in the work of Dorothy Smith, I aim to make visible the complex of relations within which the work of this organization is embedded. In mapping the institutional relations structuring the activities in a local setting, the concern is to articulate how activities in the local setting are organized by and in relation to others. My analysis takes as its point of departure my work involvements with this organization over a period of two years. Beginning with my own activities and others' within the setting, the analysis problematizes the concepts of "organizing women of color" and "inclusion/exclusion." What comes into view are the ways in which "organizing" and "inclusion" are ideological constructs brought into service to account for the practices in which various members of the organization were engaged. Their ideological character came to be unveiled in the "troubles" the organization encountered in its attempts to "organize" women of color. The inquiry shows that those troubles arose out of the organization's location at the juncture between private foundations, grassroots women, and the state. On the one hand, the activities of the organization are articulated to an understanding of what funders might be willing to support, and on the other hand the organization's activities have to be seen as serving women of color by both women of color and others. Displayed through the mapping of institutional relations is the deep mismatch between the institutional characterization of what it means to be "organized" and the actual activities women of color were engaged in. I argue that the activities and practices of the mainstream organization embedded in a complex of relations with funding agencies, public policy makers and so on actually produce the definition of women of color as "unorganized."     

On <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Social Construction of Reality</Emphasis>: Reflections on a Missed Opportunity

The paper recalls my response to Berger’s and Luckmann’s book on reading it shortly after its initial publication. It seeks to convey why it was that I failed to make use of the book at that time, even though I recognised it as an outstanding contribution to my intended field of research, and how later I came to see that this may have been a lost opportunity. The story touches upon diverse important issues including the relationship between epistemology and the sociology of knowledge; the epistemic authority of the natural sciences; the relevance of causal accounting as topic and resource in sociology; the importance of Durkheim in the sociology of knowledge; and the great value of Berger’s and Luckmann’s book as a corrective to the undue individualism that has long been a feature of the social sciences in the English-speaking world. Even so, the paper is more recollection than analysis, and unreliable recollection at that, after many decades in which there has been time to forget, or even to reconstruct, a very great deal.     

DECONSTRUCTING THE SECULAR MAGISTERIUM: VOICES PAST AND PRESENT FOR CONVERSATIONS OF THE FUTURE

In this paper I offer a possible approach to accomplishing Benedict's goal proposed in his Regensburg address. 1 I take his goal to be twofold. First, we must expand our concept of reason beyond the privileged position of scientific empiricism and philosophical reasoning, both of which form what I have called the Secular Magisterium, put in place as the dominant intellectual force by the Enlightenment. Second, the motivation for expanding our concept of reason is for the purpose of greater dialogue across cultures, across religions and across academic disciplines. Since I take Benedict's goal to be twofold, my paper will address these issues in two parts, the second building from the first. In the first section, I will revisit the counter‐Enlightenment thinking of some well known, yet significantly marginalized voices, with the goal of hearing them again and reviving their critique to inform our own. By the end of this section, I will offer what I take to be a counter‐Enlightenment approach to knowing our world by means of an expanded concept of reason. In the second section, I will address what I take to be some of the more intellectual challenges to the possibilities for conversation across cultures, religions, and disciplines. It is my goal to show how an embodied version of the counter‐Enlightenment approach I offer in the first section can allow for genuine conversation that not only provides opportunities to better know our conversation partners, but also offers the possibility of honest persuasion in which the other sees reality differently and considers this way better.