The Futility of Their Minds . . .

Today, our department heard a lunchtime talk by BGen Malham Wakin (USAF, Ret.), former head of the Philosophy department at the Air Force Academy, among much else. It was a participatory talk, and some of that back and forth is recounted here as best as I can reconstruct it from memory. Comments in brackets are those I would have made had time and discussion dynamics allowed.

WAKIN: If your daughter came to you and said, "I need help writing an essay defending the proposition that we should tell the truth," what would you say?

PERSON #1: I would tell her that if she lies, bad things will happen to her.

WAKIN: Okay, so you would discuss the consequences of untruthfulness. Anyone else?

PERSON #2: I would show the dangers of allowing people who lie to hold positions of responsibility, say, like a physician.

WAKIN: Good. Anyone else?

PERSON #3: I would cite the 9th Commandment.

WAKIN: Well, you couldn't really say "God said so" at a [publicly funded] institution.

[The legal prohibitions (such as they are) against using one's teaching position for religions proselytizing (if such could be construed) is irrelevant to the strength of the argument. A much better objection would be that the persuasiveness of the Decalogue depends on a pre-existing religious committment; however, it is the long-standing conceit of philosophers that their reasoning is somehow more accessible than religion in actually persuading anyone of anything without a pre-existing committment to either the philosophical school or the specific result.]

WAKIN: But I often point out that a universal moral principle like truthfulness is common to most religious systems, and therefore has presumptive validity.

PERSON #3: Perhaps. But that's not what I said. I happen to think that "God said so" is a pretty good argument.

WAKIN: No it isn't! If one of your students showed you an answer to an engineering problem and said that it was correct because "God said so," you would not accept it.

PERSON #3: But that's because engineering has a different methodology . . .

WAKIN: So do we!

[Let me be more specific. Engineers are not wedded (or should not be wedded) to their mathematical models out of religious or philosophical devotion. Engineers use their models because the models accurately predict the behavior of physical systems in the real world. The closest analogue to this in philosophy would be some form of Consequentialism, which, as BGen Wakin well knows, has a number of limitations.

One of those limitations is that it does nothing to address the problem of freeloading. We can probably all of us agree that a society in which nobody told the truth would not be a pleasant society to live in for anyone. But that knowledge, in and of itself, does nothing to address the individual member of that society who finds marginal utility in deception while externalizing its costs on everyone else. It's a classic prisoners dilemma.

Indeed, Nicholas Wade, in Before the Dawn wrote that it was specifically to address the problem of freeloading that organized religion evolved in the first place. So whether you are a Christian or a Darwinist (or both), you wind up in the same place: "God says so" remains the most compelling argument in favor of ethical imperatives. (Wade, as near as I can tell, does not adhere to any religion himself, and argues that the modern state has found replacements for religion in this regard, which he does not specify, but which I take to refer to bureaucratic/administrative enforcement mechanisms. I'm not convinced.)]

WAKIN: Let's try something like this. The purpose of language is communication. When people tell the truth, they improve communication; when they lie, they impede it. So untruthfulness undermines the very purpose of language in the first place.

[You've got to be joking. Do you think that anyone who does not believe that truthfulness in the abstract is A Good Thing will be persuaded that communication in the abstract is A Good Thing? Let me know how it works out, but I couldn't convince a twelve-year-old with it.]

Summary: we all had a good time today, but I couldn't help thinking that, if this is the best our philosophy department can do in ethical education, we have much to fear.