Philosophy today: contemporary issues and perspectives

Philosophy Today

The final chapter of Soccio's Archetypes of Wisdom brings philosophy into the present day, by discussing several current practioners of philosophy and hinting at applications that can be made of their ideas. I would like to discuss three problem areas in human life -- poverty, gender difference, and sexual ethics -- to look at how contemporary philosophy seems to be approaching the subject.

The issue of poverty is raised interestingly in Soccio's account by Princeton ethics professor Peter Singer. Soccio describes Singer as "controversial" and marks his philosophical affiliation as the "relentless application of utilitarian principles" (Soccio 532). Yet the example that Soccio gives of Singer's argument for eliminating world poverty just shows to me the limitations of a certain form of utilitarian philosophy. Singer shows that it would be an ethical necessity for Bob, conveniently located next to a lever that will change the track of a runaway train, to choose destruction of his prize possession (a Bugatti race-car) over allowing a child to be killed so the car might remain intact. If so, Singer asks, why is it not an ethical necessity for Bob to liquidate the Bugatti and help starving children in Africa right now with the proceeds? The problem is that Singer seems to be selectively employing a persuasive egalitarian argument for selective purposes of cultural guilt -- he is willing to overlook a lot of waste on the part of the charitable organizations he touts (and gives phone numbers for, so the reader may act on the impulse) in order to insist on a kind of voluntary international economic leveling. So why is Singer not insisting on internal economic leveling within one country? Merely because Marxism is currently unfashionable, but rock stars like Bono and Madonna have proved that African poverty is? But I think the real disproof of Singer's argument comes straightforwardly from his own conclusion. Singer writes "When Bob first grasped the dilemma that faced him as he stood by that railway switch, he must have thought how extraordinarily unlucky he was to be placed in a situation in which he must choose between the life of an innocent child and the sacrifice of most of his savings. But he was not unlucky at all. We are all in that situation." (Soccio 534) Yet it is the ways in which we are not in such a situation that makes this a weak argument. Does Bob have a spouse or children, parents, a large family, friends, a judgmental social milieu? There are a lot of different factors that go into the making of any moral decision, and the abstractness of Singer's little scenario is enough to make us suspect it of omitting much of what is true and relevant. Also, my eyes honestly rolled at Singer's inclusion of the phone number for Oxfam. Does he really think his rather pedestrian prose will produce a Damascene conversion in readers of the Sunday Times magazine? Clearly there is a mystical faith lurking somewhere in his otherwise dessicated Utilitarianism if Singer believes that.

This approach to ethics is also something that Soccio brings out in his discussion of Carol Gilligan, and it seems to me that Gilligan's arguments are persuasive and useful in understanding gender difference. To a certain degree, the arguments that I have made against Singer represent a version of Gilligan's critique: she has noted that women's instinctive approach to epistemological and ethical matters differs from men's, and that it represents "other ways of knowing." Gilligan criticizes a survey of "moral reasoning" that relied on an all-male survey population, and points out that female methods of moral reasoning may not be as centered on the kind of abstract utilitarian rationalism that marks Singer's hypothetical. It strikes me that Gilligan's point is extremely valid, partly because I think any philosophical stance which increases our capacity for pluralism is probably a good thing. Whether gendered or not, I would suggest that "other ways of knowing" need to be taken seriously.