Philosophy and Pragmatism

This is an excerpt from a post by the influential political writer Mathew Iglesias on his Substack, Slow Boring. Iglesias is known for his pragmatic approach to liberal politics.

I fell in love with philosophy, majored in it, took lots of classes, and also read lots of academic philosophy books that I wasn’t even assigned for class.

My favorite was W. V. O. Quine, whose legacy loomed large in the Harvard philosophy department but whose actual ideas I think were held in relatively low esteem by the faculty there. I learned of [Richard] Rorty initially through Quine’s later, more explicitly “let’s talk about politics in a pragmatic way” stuff that made its way into the popular press. But I was fascinated to learn that Rorty was (or at least had been) a philosopher, and I read his older book, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” which is definitely a real philosophy book.

It’s a philosophy book with the thesis, I would say, that it’s not really a great idea to spend your time doing real philosophy.

This is a little bit of a paradoxical situation for a philosophy professor and, as a result, I agree that some of his later work is a little weird. Some of it just straightforwardly isn’t philosophy; he’s a smart guy writing smart essays about important topics. But there is also some tweener stuff, where you look at it and think “Is this really philosophy at all?” and I dunno what the answer is. For me, though, it was liberating. [Ludwig] Wittgenstein talks about the need to “show the fly out of the bottle,” and for me it was Rorty who helped me get out of the bottle and liberate myself from the desire to find foundational philosophical answers to certain kinds of questions.

I would also note that [Kwame Anthony] Appiah, while not having a formal commitment to Rorty-style anti-foundationalism, in practice manages to give people guidance on ethical issues without returning everything to first principles or persuading anyone of big points in meta-ethics. I don’t at all regret having studied philosophy. As I’ve said before, I think it’s one of the most worthwhile courses of study that a contemporary undergraduate can embark on. But that’s primarily because philosophy, for somewhat contingent reasons, has been less impacted by the dumbing down of curriculum and standards than most non-STEM fields. Spending time surrounded by smart students and listening to smart professors and discussing books written by smart people is a broadly worthwhile experience. It’s an experience you are more likely to have in a philosophy department than in other fields, but that’s not a guarantee or a law of nature.

Every week in the mailbag there are always tons of questions that, implicitly or explicitly, are asking me to be more foundational. To talk more explicitly about what’s political expedience and what’s genuinely the right thing to do.

And certainly I can talk about that stuff in some cases. There are some pretty purely technical questions, where I think it’s indisputable that it would be a good idea to have a tax on carbon emissions and offset it with lower taxes on work and investment. But it’s also clear that running on an idea like that would be politically toxic. I wish the background level of economics knowledge were higher, or that there were more spirit of bipartisan cooperation, so we could do more technocratic policy.

But there are also these huge swathes of politics where I think the push for foundational truth is kind of pointless. I vividly remember a 2016 Vox article hailing the fact that Hillary Clinton used the phrase “systemic racism” in a major speech, which Victoria Massie correctly pegged as a major departure from how Democrats normally talk about these things. I understand the systemic racism concept, but I don’t really like it. I think most people who have a negative affect toward it would want to try to argue that it’s not true or that it doesn’t make sense. But I have a more Rortian view. It’s a way of looking at the world, perhaps no more or less valid than any other, but you should ask yourself if this concept is helpful. What work does it do? The work it’s supposed to do, pretty clearly, is facilitate better outcomes for African Americans. But I don’t think it succeeds in its goal. There are indications that telling people the criminal justice system is biased against African Americans makes them like the status quo more, while telling people about white privilege makes them less sympathetic to the poor.

And I think in pragmatic terms — philosophically pragmatic, that is — about a bunch of other things these days.

Part of the frustrating discourse around trans issues today, for example, is that you have one group of people saying “trans women are women,” and therefore any time there is sex segregation, it should be done by self-identification. Then you have another group of people saying that the sex binary is defined by gamete size so if you’re speaking a language with gendered pronouns, you need to align pronoun usage with biology. But in actuality, all of these are human institutions. We can do whatever we want. There is no rule that says pronouns need to track gametes. We can ask what is the purpose of sex segregation in various contexts and what kinds of rules serve those purposes.

International law draws a hard distinction between ethnically motivated mass killing and mass killings with other kinds of motivations. This is not based on any particularly profound analysis; it just happens that when the Genocide Convention was written, the Soviets really wanted a legal text that would damn Hitler but not Stalin. Generations later, we might want to ask whether we really think that stands up as a good reason to draw a distinction. Or even to ask whether the genocide concept has successfully done the work that we were hoping it would do.

Similarly, a lot of my favorite works by philosophers actually end up leaving the terrain of pure philosophy to mostly use some of the skills honed in philosophy seminars to tackle more important questions. One of Appiah’s best books, for example, is “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.” He’s asking, as the subtitle implies, what cases do we actually have where people shifted their views en masse on morally important questions and what actually caused that to happen. Not philosophy classes, that’s for sure! . . .