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23| Paulina Sliwa — Moral philosophy as puzzles of daily life
131 Plays11 months ago
Why do men do less housework? What happens when an apology is offered? What are we looking for when we ask for advice?
These are the sorts of problems drawn from everyday experience that Paulina Sliwa intends to resolve and in doing so make sense of the ways we negotiate blame and responsibility.
Paulina is a Professor of Moral & Political Philosophy at the University of Vienna. She looks carefully at evidence accessible to us all — daily conversations, testimony from shows like This American Life, and our own perceptions — and uses these to unravel our moral practices. The results are sometimes surprising yet always grounded. For example, Paulina argues that remorse is not an essential feature of an apology, nor is accepting that behavior was unjustified.
This is illuminating for its insights into moral problems, but I also really enjoyed seeing how Paulina thinks, it's a wonderful example of philosophical tools at work.
Links
- Paulina's website with links to many of her papers
- Multiverses.xyz
Milestones
(0:00) Into
(3:00) Start of conversation: grand systems vs ordinary practices of morality
(5:30) Philosophy and evidence
(6:39) Apologies
(8:40) Anne of Green Gables: an overblown apology
(10:50) Remorse is not an essential feature of apologies
(12:00) Apologies involve accepting some blame
(15:30) Why apology is not saying I won’t do it again
(17:17) Essential vs non-essential features of apologies
(18:12) Apologies occur in many different shapes, is a unified account possible?
(20:00) Moral footprints
(24:10) Apologies and politeness
(26:20) Tiny apologies as a commitment to moral norms
(29:50) Moral advice — verdictive vs hermeneutic (making sense)
(33:30) Moral advice doesn’t need to get us to the right answer but it should get us closer
(36:30) Perspectives, affordances and options
(38:40) Perspectives vs facts
(46:45) Housework: Gendered Domestic Affordance Perception
(49:40) Evidence that affordances are directly perceived (and not inferred)
(52:00) Convolutional neural networks as a model of perception
(53:00) Environmental dependency syndrome
(54:30) Perceptions are not fixed
(59:30) Perception is not a transparent window on reality
(1:01:00) Tools of a philosopher
(1:03:20) A Terribly Serious Adventure - Philosophy at Oxford 1900-60 — Nikhil Krishnan
(1:04:50) Philosophy as continuous with science
(1:06:17) Philosophy is not a neutral enterprise:
(1:09:00) Santa: Read letters!
(1:10:10) Apologise less
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Paulina Sliwa
00:00:00
Speaker
The term moral philosopher might conjure up images of folks in ivory towers, drawing up grand schemes of the way that the world should be arranged. Perhaps coming up with a calculus from which we can derive the way that we should act in every circumstance. This week's guest, Paulina Sliwa, is not one of these people.
00:00:19
Speaker
Polina is an old friend of mine. We studied physics and philosophy together at Oxford many years ago. She went on to do a PhD at MIT and was for almost a decade a fellow at Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge. Now she's a professor in moral and political philosophy at the University of Vienna.
Exploration of Everyday Moral Practices
00:00:36
Speaker
But instead of constructing moral systems from the top down, Pauline is interested in our everyday practices. What we do when we are apologising or making excuses. What we're asking for when we ask for advice. And even why it is that men tend to do less housework than women.
00:00:54
Speaker
And in places her conclusions run counter to some of the things that you might expect. For example, with apologies, it's not an essential feature of Pulina's account that we must express remorse in an apology. Nor is it even that we are accepting that what we did was unjustified.
00:01:12
Speaker
And yet I think you'll agree that her account really does chime very well with what we do when we're apologizing under a large range of circumstances, from the very big, very important apologies to the really teeny tiny ones that might fill our days.
Gender Disparities in Domestic Chores
00:01:27
Speaker
And with housework, Paulina's account that she developed with Tom McClelland is perhaps even more startling. It suggests that men don't even see that there are things that need to be done. And I mean that in quite a literal sense. They don't perceive that the dishes need washing, for example.
Use of Ordinary Language Philosophy
00:01:44
Speaker
So this was a tremendously fun conversation. It was great to catch up with an old friend, but it was also wonderful, not only to talk through these particular conclusions, but to see the way that Paulina thinks. She draws on the techniques of ordinary language philosophy, looking very carefully at how we use our words, where it feels right to say something and where a particular word doesn't feel right, where something doesn't strike as an apology, for example.
00:02:11
Speaker
And she looks very carefully at her own perceptions of the world, the phenomena that she has direct access to, and also draws on things like accounts from This American Life to look at however people are thinking through situations that they're in, to understand, for example, what it is that we do when we're asking for advice.
00:02:30
Speaker
So this is data that, in a sense, we all have access to. You don't need a particle accelerator to create the data sets that Pauline's using.
Podcast Context and Welcome
00:02:39
Speaker
It's the data of everyday experience. And with that, this is Multiverses.
00:02:59
Speaker
Paulina, thanks for joining me on multiverses. Thank you for having me. It's really great to see you after after a long time. Yeah, so you you're a moral philosopher. What does that mean? What do you do? Well, there are different kinds of moral philosophers. So there are more philosophers who think really abstractly about, you know, what we do, what kind of moral
00:03:24
Speaker
What are the moral rules by which we should live our lives? How do we justify those rules? How do we put them together into a system of rules?
00:03:32
Speaker
And often when people think of moral philosophers, that's the kind of first thought that occurs to them. You know, people like Kant or Jeremy Bentham or Sidgwick. That's not quite the moral philosophy that I'm interested in. What I'm really interested in is the kind of our ordinary practices of morality and in particular our practices around
00:03:56
Speaker
holding ourselves morally responsible. You know, so when we hold ourselves morally responsible, when you hold others morally responsible, that's something that we do. It's something that's a really important part of our lives. And I'm really interested in making sense of those practices. And making sense of them means kind of figuring out why we have them. So what function they fulfill,
00:04:24
Speaker
try to figure out what norms govern them, like what are the rules, and think about to what extent they're justified or unjustified, to what extent they might need modification.
00:04:35
Speaker
Okay, good, yeah. This is something that I've really enjoyed about your work. As you say, there's this kind of picture of the Manichaean moral philosopher who's looking at the insanely large questions of good and evil and bringing lots of their own opinions to bear immediately and trying to construct a big system of how the world should be. And that's maybe the kind of, like you say,
00:05:00
Speaker
the vision from the outside of what moral philosophers do. But yeah, your work is really grounded in the everyday nature of life. You know, you've looked at housework, you've looked at excuses, apologies, things we all do all the time. And they can be really big, like an apology can be for a massive thing, or it can be for a really small thing. And it seems that you try to encompass what we actually do
00:05:28
Speaker
into your explanations. You're using the data of everyday life, right? Yeah, it's very much in the spirit of trying to
00:05:38
Speaker
hold philosophy to the standard, like, you know, to the evidence and to the standards of our actual moral experience. And I think one thing that I try to do, even when thinking about these big topics, like, you know, forgiveness or apology or excuses, I think even the philosophers who like to think about those actions or those kind of practices, even they tend to think more grandiosely than
00:06:07
Speaker
would I try to do so, you know, they will think of apology, but then their model of an apology that they built their theory around, it's going to be like this apology for genocide or like apology for murder.
00:06:20
Speaker
And then I really like to pause and be like, well, that's a neat account of that apology. But does it work for the kinds of apologies that we exchange every day? Does it really work for the kind of apology you make for standing up your friend in front of the cinema? So I really try to bring it back always to the ordinary relationships that we have.
00:06:46
Speaker
So maybe this is a good place to start. Let's talk about apologies and what the kind of, what the competing accounts are out there perhaps. And then going into, you know, why there's some problems with them and how you deal with them. I mean, maybe we can start with that apology of your friend. You know, someone stood someone up for an unimportant event. It's not an apology for genocide, right? But they've got something to be sorry for.
00:07:15
Speaker
What's going on there? What are they doing when they're apologizing? Yes, I think there's this idea that a lot of people have had that apologies, they have something to do with repairing a relationship or that apology is something that aims at
00:07:36
Speaker
reconciliation, and that therefore apologies are something that is kind of very emotionally heavy and emotionally laden, you know, an ideal apology is an apology that expresses remorse, that expresses that that is done with feeling that isn't just cold, and it tries to repair this ruptured relationship
00:08:02
Speaker
which was ruptured because you didn't act as you should have, you violated some norm. That seems like a big thing to do if you were late for the sema, right? I know. Gosh, how do we get back to the age of innocence, right? How can I take this back?
00:08:25
Speaker
I know, I know. I mean, I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think if you think about giving such an apology, this model of apology in the context of the kind of ordinary minor transgressions that we apologize for, like it just becomes ridiculous. And in fact, there's this amazing, you know, if you know Anne of Green Gables, do you know that one? This is the novel.
00:08:48
Speaker
I don't know the story in detail, but I remember. Yeah, but I mean, that's like this, this children's book I grew up with. But basically, like the protagonist is Anne of Green Gables is this orphan that was taken up by these, but this elderly sibling, and she's very spunky, and she's got orange hair, and this, this neighbor of these siblings, she she's this, this matron,
00:09:13
Speaker
who on the first time she sees Anne, she's like, oh, you know, what will they do with this child? Just look at her. She's so scrappy and skinny and her hair is like orange, like a carrot. And Anne just like flies into a rage and basically tells Miss Lind to mind her own business and that she's ugly and old and rude.
00:09:38
Speaker
And then the grown-ups, so the sibling, Marilla, she forces Anne to apologize. And Anne really doesn't want to, but then eventually she relents. And not only does she relent, but she comes to enjoy the idea of herself apologizing.
00:09:57
Speaker
And she kind of forms in her mind this ideal apology that she will give. And then when she arrives at Miss Denchys, she kind of skips and hops all the way there. And then as soon as they get to this woman's place, she starts stooping and just looking really depressed. And then she gets into the room and she kneels down.
00:10:19
Speaker
before Ms. Lind and says, you know, I am so sorry. I should be cast out of civilization. Like I would have to use the whole dictionary to describe to you the extent of my remorse. And I said these horrible things to you. And they were true, but I shouldn't have said them. And you said these things to me and they were true. And like, will you please forgive me?
00:10:47
Speaker
like it's such a hilarious moment and like this like this old lady is completely taken aback and like totally accept this apology and just thinks it's so remarkable but like this the scene is so comical and the reason it's so comical it's because you've got this like ideal model of apology that is being presented for something that really is a very minor transgression and
00:11:11
Speaker
And the issue is not so much, I mean, in that case, it's really exaggerated, and she's over egging the pudding, as it were. But it's not just so much that remorse is being deployed in bucketfuls, and that's the problem. But it's also just that remorse, in some cases, is just the wrong flavor, right? Yeah.
00:11:33
Speaker
it's not the thing that's being expressed at all. It's not a matter of quantity, but it's just not what the apology is offering up, I guess. And I think the cinema example is really clear there, because it just doesn't cross one's mind to be remorseful. And yet we feel the need to apologize. I mean, one might be tempted to say, oh, it's just politeness. And perhaps sometimes it is, and there's nothing kind of
00:12:02
Speaker
interesting about that, or perhaps there is something interesting about politeness, but what is happening? Like, does your friend need to apologize or is it just kind of a formality? Well, I mean, I think there is something genuinely, there's something genuinely moral that has happened when you come late. And then, I mean, there is also a part of convention, right, or norms of politeness as to then how you deal with the thing.
00:12:33
Speaker
that happened. So there's an element of both and apologies. So let's just think about the moral thing that happened first. Okay, so you've made those plans, you promised to meet your friend at the cinema at a particular time, and you didn't show up. Well, what happened? Well, if you promise someone something, one thing that happens is that you create a right for them
00:13:03
Speaker
and you put yourself under a corresponding duty. So once I've promised to meet you, I have the duty to meet you and you have a right against me that I should be there.
00:13:17
Speaker
So when I don't show up, I've violated that right. The way I like to think about it is that if you violate someone's right, and in the case of promise, it is a moral right, what you do is that has normative consequences. So you create something which, I like to think of it as like a moral footprint. So by violating a right, you create a bunch of other rights. So what other rights do you create?
00:13:46
Speaker
As a consequence of violating this right, you now owe your friend an explanation of why you showed up late. You owe them maybe some form of recompense or repair.
00:14:03
Speaker
you, you know, they are entitled to something they're entitled not maybe to present you but they're entitled to, you know, to feel annoyed with you. And in the small things in the kind of small
00:14:18
Speaker
moral violations, that's pretty much it when it comes to the moral footprint. And so now you've got all of these duties, and the apology is basically a way of discharging them. You know, when you apologize, you say, you know, I'm so sorry, I'm late, I'm acknowledging that I have
00:14:39
Speaker
that I have violated this right. I'm telling you why it is that I was late. I might as a recompense, you know, promise you a drink afterwards or promise you to not to make sure I'm on time the next time. And I kind of validate the fact that that was an annoying thing for you to happen.
00:14:58
Speaker
And so that's the bit that the apology is basically doing. It's satisfying. Part of it is fulfilling those follow-up duties that were created by you failing to meet the initial one. So that's the kind of moral mechanism that's going on. And then of course, there's the kind of conventional stuff, the fact that we have a conventional way
00:15:22
Speaker
of addressing this by saying like, I'm sorry, or I apologize, whereby you clearly signal that what you're in the business of doing is to kind of address those follow up duties that were created by your initial violation of one. Yeah, you mentioned something interesting there that might get people thinking of an objection here, which is just
00:15:42
Speaker
One thing that the person apologizing might do is say, oh, I'm not going to do it again. And I remember being taught as a child, oh, saying I'm sorry just means I won't do it again. And that's the analytic definition of what it is to apologize. It's just not going to happen again. That's clearly a simpler explanation. What can we say about where that goes wrong? Yeah, I don't think that can be right. I think it might be right for some. It depends on what it is that you've done.
00:16:12
Speaker
because I think we apologize when we...
00:16:18
Speaker
for example, break a promise, even when doing so was justified. So suppose the reason why I was late to the cinema is because a cyclist on the road that I was crossing got into a bad accident and I had to make sure that they were okay and I checked up with them and I stayed with them until they came to themselves. So I missed a tram and that's why I'm late.
00:16:44
Speaker
Well, in that case, you still owe the other person an apology. You'd still say, oh, I'm sorry to keep you waiting. Here's what happened. But in that case, you're not saying it's not going to happen again. I mean, of course it would happen again. If you were in the same situation, you would act exactly the same way as you did. You would also break the promise. So that's why I don't think we should build this into an apology.
00:17:11
Speaker
Even though in cases of, you know, unexcused, unjustified wrongdoing, our apology might well as well convey the fact that we are committed to not letting this happen again. Right. So that commitment is a little bit like remorse in that it's something that can be
00:17:30
Speaker
appropriate to include in an apology, but not in all cases, right? So I guess what you're saying is, yeah, when we look for what's essential about all apologies, it seems to be that we're kind of cleaning, I think you've written that it's something like cleaning up the moral residue and it's restating or resetting
00:17:53
Speaker
the commitments that we have and saying, yeah, actually, I still intend to make it to the cinema on time, notwithstanding accidents with cyclists and so on. Yeah, does this work then across the board, like for the big and the small apologies as well? And how do things change when we think about the really big things? I don't know, politicians apologizing for historical horrors committed by a country or something.
00:18:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's, I mean, I think this is what makes these questions so interesting, right? Because like, when you think about apologies, they really, this is where the methodological challenge lies in thinking about how they work, right? Because you're right, like on the face of it, the apology to like, the quick apology to a friend who you stood up at the cinema or you've arrived late at the cinema, it's an apology. And then the apology for like a terrible, like imagine like a terrible marital infidelity
00:18:50
Speaker
Like, that's an apology. And then you've got an politician apologizing for something terrible that their country did. Well, that's an apology. Well, but like, they look like such different things. We expect such different things for them to, like, we have such different expectations that they must need in order to be acceptable qua apology for that.
00:19:16
Speaker
So on the face of it, you have this phenomenon which you recognize as one. They're all apologies. But on the other hand, it seems like the way they work in these different cases are very different.
00:19:28
Speaker
So how do we kind of manage to capture that? And one thing that we don't want is to say, oh, they're just different beasts, right? You know, apology is really this dis-unified thing. And there's like apology one, those are the little apologies, apologies two, those are the apologies for big injustices. So ideally you want to build an account that has the flexibility to capture all of them.
00:19:49
Speaker
Okay, so how do you do it on my way of thinking about apologies? I think the way you do it is by realizing that this idea of a moral footprint, so of the moral consequences of the initial wrong that you have done, that that's a really powerful idea. It sounds very simple, but it's very powerful. It's very powerful because it allows you to capture
00:20:14
Speaker
that different kinds of norm violations, different kind of wrongs are going to have very, very different moral consequences. So if I have committed a terrible marital infidelity that has jeopardized my relationship, it's not just that my partner is entitled to feel annoyed with me. They are entitled to feel terribly disappointed and distressed,
00:20:41
Speaker
and betrayed and I haven't just I mean it's not just that I owe them some kind of recompense but really
00:20:48
Speaker
I have kind of lost my default entitlement to their trust in our relationship. I have lost maybe some default entitlement to their goodwill in that relationship. So the moral footprint here is pretty large compared to the cinema example.
00:21:11
Speaker
And I think that kind of that idea naturally gives us a way of thinking about what makes for a good apology. Like a good apology is going to be commensurate or it's going to be, you know, it's going to match the kind of outlines and the degree of the moral footprint. So an apology of for like a terrible marital infidelity that's going to have to acknowledge a much greater wrong
00:21:39
Speaker
It will have to acknowledge that the other person is entitled to some very big feelings. In fact, my wrongdoing might put me under the duty to feel terrible. And one way in which I can show that I am meeting that duty is by expressing this in my apology. So that's the kind of idea of how
00:22:06
Speaker
we get some continuity, but also difference between the small trivial apologies and the kind of big heavy interpersonal apologies. I think what it captures quite well is that moral footprints may not only differ in their size, but they can differ in the sort of things that they encompass. So the kind of rights, like you say,
00:22:29
Speaker
one footprint might entail that the person apologizing should feel terrible, another might entail the personal guilt of someone, whereas for example the politician apologizing for historic wrongs of their country wouldn't necessarily entail their personal guilt. It's nonetheless a very large undertaking that's going on.
00:22:53
Speaker
Yeah, so I see the flexibility. This kind of issue of guilt, actually, which has just come to mind, might get people wondering as well. I mean, if we just think about the words for apologies or, you know, saying I'm sorry in different languages, they seem so intimately related with guilt. In Spanish, we have like, this called para, which like, just remove my guilt. And in German, it's very similar, I think. I'm not gonna try to say that because you would do a much better job than me.
00:23:20
Speaker
I mean, that's interesting because you're not saying necessarily that guilt is an integral part of apologies, or it's not the one thing. Is that right? Well, guilt isn't, but responsibility is, right? So, yeah, if you think of kulpa,
00:23:41
Speaker
you know, it's not just an emotional thing, the feeling of guilt, but you think of it as a responsibility, as a matter of owing the other person something, then what you're doing through the apology is you're trying to kind of go some way towards paying off, you know, if you want to put it this way, discharging what you owe through the act of apology.
00:24:06
Speaker
OK, good. Yeah, that makes sense. And I want to come to this idea of politeness as well. It also seems that sometimes we use the words that we use for apologizing in contexts where I'm not sure it is an apology that's happening. I'm sorry, can you repeat that, right? And I don't think there's anything that's being, I don't think an apology is happening when you ask for someone to repeat the last thing they said because you didn't quite catch it.
00:24:35
Speaker
Yeah. Is there something interesting there? Or is it just that Apology is kind of bleeding over into kind of related contexts? Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting. I think the English in particular are the most extensive users of Apology, including in order to like passive aggressively. Right.
00:24:58
Speaker
I remember when I was cycling in Cambridge and someone yelled, I'm sorry behind me. And I just reflexively started thinking about what I could have done wrong in that situation. And then I felt really assimilated. You know, I think the way we explain it, I don't think you're doing exactly the same thing that you're doing in the case of moral apologies, but you are piggybacking.
00:25:22
Speaker
on a feature of moral apologies, right? A very minimal feature. The very minimal feature is that you are, and the moral apology is that you're acknowledging that you violated some norm. And I think in a lot of those social settings, you're not acknowledging that you violated a moral norm, but you're kind of acknowledging that you're inconveniencing the other person. Where the inconvenience isn't like,
00:25:49
Speaker
It's like a big moral deal, but it's like this kind of rule of politeness that we, how we interact. So we don't interrupt people. So when you interrupt something, you'll say, I'm sorry for interrupting. And you just acknowledge that you violated that norm, but you're committed to it. I think that's what's, it's really just like acknowledging a norm and upholding it at the same time.
00:26:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I mean, even for the case of asking someone to repeat themselves, you're saying, well, normally, I wouldn't want to inconvenience you. Yeah, but so, yeah, it's kind of close enough and, you know, yeah, it actually, yeah, has that same flavour of restating one's commitments to, to, to moral norms. I mean, I think there's a more puzzling case, which, um,
00:26:41
Speaker
someone put up as an objection to my paper, which I still haven't quite figured out how to think about it, which is that we will apologize for making requests, even if those requests are done in the context of friendship, where kind of doing what this request asks you to do is kind of part of what the friendship involves. So suppose, for example, that I
00:27:11
Speaker
I lose my key and you have a spare key to my apartment. And so I call you and I say, you know, I'm so sorry, I've lost the key to my apartment. Do you think you could come over or could I come over and pick up the spare key? So here, again, we are inconveniencing someone and I guess that's partly what we're acknowledging, but at the same time, that part of convenience is supposed to be part of what it is to be friends with someone.
00:27:38
Speaker
Right. Your friend has an obligation to help you out in that circumstance. So, you know, one might say, I guess you're apologizing, but actually you're not saying I violated the moral kind of footprint. I'm actually saying we need to take advantage of that. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That seems a bit puzzling.
00:28:03
Speaker
I guess like, as you point out, you are inconveniencing someone. And I suppose sometimes it can just be hard to, you know, we can have competing duties within that moral footprint, I suppose. And so perhaps it's just sometimes difficult to have a very coherent set of things that we need to do. And therefore we might kind of just apologize, I suppose,
00:28:28
Speaker
because we're not sure if we're like totally in line with the profile. Yeah, that's right. So part of it is you might be kind of, you might be unsure whether that is fully meeting. Like if this really is like fully in the realm of the obligation that the other person is under. Another thing that you might be doing is, you know, even if they are obligated to it, it is still an inconvenience. And so you are just,
00:28:56
Speaker
politely expressing the fact that you acknowledge that you are inconveniencing them by cashing in on the obligation that they have towards you.
00:29:09
Speaker
Or the other thing that you could be doing is, you know, because even though the other person is obligated to it, they're still doing you a favor. And in virtue of the favor, you owe them gratitude, you might owe them a return favor. And so the apology here might also just be expressing the fact that you acknowledge that
00:29:28
Speaker
Again, the kind of moral landscape has changed, that what they've done for you is a morally significant thing that you will keep in mind, that will change how you, even if it changes it in minimal ways, it will change the relationship to the other person in some ways. Yeah, good. Okay, good. Okay, so we've talked about, apologies.
00:29:52
Speaker
Let's talk about advice because people might think, well, moral advice, that's got to be simple, right? Give someone some moral advice. You're telling them what to do. What's wrong with that account? Well, what's good about it? Yeah. I mean, I thought for a long time, I thought that was the right account of advice. I thought moral advice is just telling the other person what they ought to do or what unbalance their reasons.
00:30:20
Speaker
supported, which course of action, their reasons supported. And that's just it. And that's good. I mean, it's simple. And I think it does capture, it does capture at least some of the advice that we look for, right? Like we might sometimes
00:30:36
Speaker
decide whether to accept a job or like which charity to donate money to. Like, that's a very concrete, like, do I give to this charity or to that charity? Well, then maybe I can turn to a particular advisor or to a particular website, which is going to tell me which one to favor. So like some of our advice seeking is like that. But then, like, there was one, like,
00:31:02
Speaker
That's how I was thinking about it. And then I started to think that account is false or not incomplete. Really just by thinking about the kind of conversations I was having where there would be ways in which something would happen and I wasn't, it felt morally significant
00:31:26
Speaker
And maybe I was upset about it, and I was trying to figure out what to do in the situation. And then I would talk to a friend, and then the friend would say, oh, I think this is what happened.
00:31:41
Speaker
And then I would be like, oh, yeah, that's right. That's the right way of looking at it. And then once I had this way of looking at it, the kind of options of what to do became really clear. And then I thought, well, actually, the thing that this friend was doing in this situation was giving me a way to think about the situation.
00:32:00
Speaker
That's like a really morally significant thing. They are giving me, in a way, moral advice, but they aren't telling me what to do. And moreover, it's not just that they're not telling me what to do. I themselves didn't really ask them what to do when I was looking for that advice, because it's not like I had a menu of options that I was thinking about and I was trying to decide between.
00:32:23
Speaker
So then I was thinking, okay, that part of our moral advice that we that's really important to us is this kind of advice where someone gives us a new way of thinking about the situation. And then it's really interesting to figure out how that advice works, because it's not just a matter of telling you not be a
00:32:44
Speaker
So it's not just giving you an answer to a question, what should I do A or B? It's giving you an answer to a question, how do I make sense of this? Well, that's not just a one sentence simple proposition. So what exactly is it that the other person is giving you? So that's the kind of moral advice that I think is really interesting, I think it's really important, and that I've been trying to figure out how exactly it works.
00:33:12
Speaker
Yeah, and it's interesting because it makes clear that very concise, directed advice, which, you know, could sometimes be exactly what's needed, in some cases might be much worse than something more expansive, perhaps a bit vague or acknowledging the vagueness. We don't always, we don't want to be told what to do necessarily with advice. That's sometimes what's needed. Yeah, you've talked about
00:33:43
Speaker
kind of advice giving us a perspective, I suppose. One might just say, oh, well, the perspective that advice is supposed to give is the one which naturally points us squarely in the right direction. And therefore, perhaps there is like a really quite strong link between advice telling us what to do and advice just pointing us to what to do. And so maybe one might say, oh, well, this is interesting, but it's not so different from what we initially thought advice was.
00:34:12
Speaker
Would that be correct, or are there cases where the things separate a little bit further? Yeah, I think even if they are connected, they present us with different puzzles. I think some of those puzzles maybe are more interesting if you're a kind of
00:34:32
Speaker
if you are a philosopher, the puzzling thing simply being that we have a clear, philosophers have a lot of tools for thinking about how conversation works and what exactly is transmitted when you transmit, when you give someone an answer to a question. And basically the way you think about it is like, well, if you ask a question, what you're doing is you're kind of carving up
00:35:00
Speaker
the space of possibilities into different options. That's what a question does. And then when someone gives you an answer, they eliminate some of those options.
00:35:11
Speaker
So they narrow down your set of possibilities. And that's great because that gets you closer to the actual possibility that you're in. Right. So that's like, that's a very well, they're very well worked out accounts that kind of dive with chime with linguistics about how that works. And kind of part of the puzzle is that whatever perspective is, it's not simply just a partition of possibilities.
00:35:41
Speaker
right? Because a perspective is something that has consequences for like, what you notice about the situations would involve not just your kind of cognitive like, Oh, what are the different possibilities, but it affects kind of what jumps out to you in your attention, which features of the situation you think are important and which ones aren't important, how you think those features fit together,
00:36:09
Speaker
So part of it, like taking up your perspective might lead you to partition the possibilities in a particular way. But that's only part of the thing. So kind of one of the interesting and puzzling question is just like, what else is there? What else is involved in this perspective taking? And how is this thing, which is like really complicated, involves these components about drawing distinctions, it involves
00:36:33
Speaker
directing your attention, it involves what kind of images are in your mind. How is that a thing that can be transmitted in a conversational context by one person saying one thing and you accepting it? So that's I think like, I think that is really puzzling. But also, but then the other thing is that you said, well, doesn't want a perspective automatically nudge you in the right direction of what to do? Well,
00:37:01
Speaker
One thing it might nudge you to is to perceive, not quite, but it will typically nudge you into perceiving the relevant alternatives, right? So, for example, if you
00:37:15
Speaker
If you don't think of, take something like really upsetting. So I have this example that I think about where a woman is raped and it takes her quite a while to think of it as rape. Like she starts thinking of it as just bad sex. If you think of what happened to you as simply bad sex, then that particular opportunities for action won't occur to you. It won't occur to you that that's something that you might report because bad sex is not something that we report to the authorities.
00:37:45
Speaker
Once you start thinking about the situation as rape, one consequence of that will be that now certain options for how to deal with it are on the table which weren't previously. And the perspective might not settle for you which of these options is the right one to take, but it will allow you to perceive those as the options that you have. So that makes perspectives really powerful. Yeah, I think one of the other things that intrigues me about perspectives is that
00:38:16
Speaker
you can't really review them externally. When you talk about these possibilities that can be conveyed in conversations, if the possibilities are just ways that the world might be, they're just facts, you can kind of weigh them up and look from the outside and see, you know, treat them just as facts, you know, which of these is more likely? Was it rape? Was it not rape? But when thinking with perspectives involves
00:38:44
Speaker
inhabiting those perspectives. And you sort of can't, you can't hold multiple ones in mind so much as you step into one. And you see, you kind of redraw your world from that perspective. And like you say it would, it would change the
00:39:01
Speaker
it would give you a different set of possible courses of action that you perceive. So there's something quite different about the way that we process those types of information, for want of a better word.
00:39:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right. You can't just, it's like one thing that you can't, like when you have a menu of options, right, a petition of possibilities, well, you can step back and think, which possibility is the one that's most likely to be true? How do I weigh my evidence? You can't do that with perspectives. Like you can't put various perspectives in front of you and be like,
00:39:42
Speaker
Okay, let me like review which perspective is most likely to be optimal in that situation. That's not an option. What you can say can kind of take on the perspective on the trial basis and see what it feels like. And maybe the perspective will kind of work. It will speak to you.
00:40:05
Speaker
Maybe it won't, or like you will take on a perspective and realize like, no, that doesn't feel right. That's not how, doesn't sit right with the experience or my perception of the situation. The tricky thing is of course, that whether or not a perspective feels right, won't merely have to do with its accuracy. It will kind of have to do with you and whether you are, you know, maybe
00:40:29
Speaker
you're not ready for that perspective. Maybe like you have feelings that get in the way of appreciating it, even if it would be the most accurate to take on. So that's a bit of a sort of settling on the right perspective is a different kind of process than arriving at a true answer to a specific question.
00:40:52
Speaker
Yeah, so I think that comes back to my initial question of where these things come apart, where the traditional account of advice is just, oh, it's giving you the best version of the truth. And one might say, okay, well, it doesn't sound so much different than what we're doing with this account with perspectives. We're just putting someone right in front of the optimal solution. But what you're saying is that actually there can be cases where
00:41:21
Speaker
Even that is not the appropriate way for advice to go. It's just not possible to convey a perspective that puts someone right in front of, I guess, the kind of moral truth. But I suppose what we can hope to do is just try to make things a bit better for the person, so to improve that perspective.
00:41:40
Speaker
I mean, I think this is true in the example, right? Like this woman that, like, this is, this is a story that I took from this American life, where this woman, like, she starts out thinking of what happened to her as bad sex. And then she's like, ah, no, that's not what it was. I mean, that guy was an asshole.
00:41:57
Speaker
And then she starts thinking about it in this way. And then that doesn't quite sit right with her. And then she arrives eventually through actually a conversation with a friend. She arrives at realizing like, no, this was rape. What happened? I was sexually assaulted. That's why, like, that's why this is so upsetting the situation. So, you know, neither the perspective of dealing with an asshole nor the perspective of bad sex was an accurate perspective.
00:42:26
Speaker
But you might think it might not have been possible for her to go from the bad sex to rape perspective immediately. Like maybe she needed to go through the asshole perspective to kind of appreciate some moral features of the situation which weren't at all on the table in the bad sex scenario. And then once she started appreciating those, that kind of made her more receptive
00:42:53
Speaker
to kind of be able to take on the perspective of like, oh no, this was actually rape, what happened to me? So it was necessary, the journey had to go through an inaccurate one in order to arrive at the accurate one. Even though in some sense, you know, bad sex and dealing with an asshole is no more accurate than bad sex, right? But still like, so in the sense of accuracy, it's not like,
00:43:20
Speaker
you can't say like, oh, she was kind of converging on the true perspective, right? Because there's no like, there's no sense in which you can say like, Oh, well, that perspective is clearly better than the bad sex perspective. Still, it was, it was getting her closer to the accurate one, in the sense that it highlighted some features which accurate one had in common, and therefore kind of
00:43:46
Speaker
prepared her for appreciating those and other moral features of the situation for what they were. Yeah, that's really fascinating. So yeah, advice is just not a one-off drop of knowledge, but it's a process of stepping through these perspectives many times. Are there cases, though, where we might say, well, actually, advice
00:44:11
Speaker
that perspective account just doesn't work. Like your very early examples where you're just choosing which charity to give money to, is that a different kind of thing? Are they united in that you're trying to get to some way of thinking about things but in the one case it really is a perspective that one's trying to inhabit and the other it's just I need an answer and I'm gonna do something, I need a fact.
00:44:35
Speaker
I mean, I think there's something in common and I think the perspective stuff is always in the background, right? So in the case where you just need an answer, you have a way of thinking about the situation in that case.
00:44:49
Speaker
So you have a perspective. It's just like you're not questioning it. You might not even notice that it is a perspective. You're just like within that way of seeing the situation, here are the options. And now you're looking for someone who's going to share the perspective that you have in order to decide which of the ones to do. So ideally,
00:45:15
Speaker
The perspective is just not up for question. It's not something under discussion. And it's something that's shared by your advisor. And then within that perspective, you're just engaging in this inquiry, which option is the correct one?
00:45:33
Speaker
So I guess both cases use perspective, but there's a very different emphasis. In one case, you're moving through different perspectives to try to get the right take on things. And in the other case,
00:45:49
Speaker
That's not up for grabs. You consider that you have the right tape, but you just need a bit of additional knowledge. Like you don't know enough about these charities and the work they do. And you're kind of inviting someone in to your perspective or trusting that they already have it and just getting the missing piece. Yeah, it's like in the one case, you try to settle a question that arises within a particular perspective. And in the other case, you're looking
00:46:19
Speaker
for a perspective on the situation. Either because you're just like really confused and you have no idea how to think about what happened at all, or because you have a way of thinking about it, but you're like, you're just not happy with this way of thinking. Like you sense that something is not quite right about this way of thinking about it. Yeah, that's the kind of distinction.
00:46:40
Speaker
It might be a good time to talk about perhaps the most prosaic thing that you've looked out, which is the division of housework. And it strikes me that that overlaps with this bespectival account. And if I pracy very briefly your hypothesis with Thomas Welland, it's something like men just don't see housework. Typically, men see fewer things around the house to do.
00:47:10
Speaker
So they just don't see the dirty dishes as something that is a job to be done, to be cleaned up. It's kind of not in the view that they have of things. Again, I'm being very unkind to much of my gender here, but let's just take that gloss on things. How's that for a replaying of your pieces?
00:47:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's like, uh, that's the correct gloss. I mean, I think more specifically, it's so it's interesting in the back in the sense, like, what does it mean to say we don't see housework? Because obviously it's not like men don't see the dishes, right? It's like, it's not like they're visually impaired, but there is something about, so we were kind of, Tom and I were trying to get at the case, like what exactly is it that they don't see? And so one thing that Tom had done a lot of work on,
00:47:59
Speaker
is this idea of affordances, which is this idea that when we look at our environment, we don't just see objects, we don't just see colors and shapes, but we actually see possibilities for action. So when we look at an object, we see what we can do with it. That's a part of our perception. It's not something that we reason our way towards or that we infer, but it's something that's kind of part of our
00:48:26
Speaker
of our perception of the object. So if I look at a cup, I see it as something that I can pick up, that I can drink from. And so that's the sense in which men don't see housework. It's not that they don't see the dishes, they don't see the dishes as to be washed, or they don't see the trash as to be taken out. That's the element
00:48:46
Speaker
the perceptual element that is missing in those cases. And then our idea was simply like, you know, take that as a hypothesis. Well, if that's true, then of course, it's less likely that you're going to do the work if you don't perceive it. And so we explain some of the gender gap in housework.
00:49:06
Speaker
It's a wonderful explanation because, yeah, it sort of explains, you know, not only why less housework happens from the men's side, but why they often say, oh, well, I just didn't, I didn't realize we needed to do that. The kind of typical excuses that come up.
00:49:22
Speaker
are not the ones of like, oh, you know, I was meaning to do it all day, but I just didn't have time or, you know, it's just, oh, didn't realise. It seems quite fundamental that affordances are something that one perceives directly. And everyday language kind of supports that view. Like one might say, oh, I just didn't see that it needed doing.
00:49:43
Speaker
or I didn't see I could do that, even in some cases, is there kind of stronger evidence for that? What else can we say about why affordances are something that directly seen and not reasoned? Yeah, that's a kind of larger, that's a larger question that Tom is the expert on, because he's worked on affordances in the philosophy of mind. But there there is
00:50:11
Speaker
at least some experimental evidence that supports this kind of view. And it's not like there's one experiment that's going to prove it. It's more like different bits of experimental evidence which kind of jointly make that hypothesis plausible. So one bit of evidence has to do with kind of activation of motor areas of the brain when you look at objects.
00:50:41
Speaker
So it looks like kind of looking at, like looking at a ladder, for example, like activates part of your brain that have to do with moving, with climbing. There's some evidence from people with brain damages, like they know these kind of Oliver Sacks type scenarios. But I think the,
00:51:10
Speaker
We do lean so you can point to those beds.
00:51:14
Speaker
We do lean quite a lot as well on simply kind of first personal phenomenological experience, right? That's what it feels to us. And that's something that is not uncontroversial, but it's also standard methodology in the philosophy perception that you appeal to the phenomenology of perceptual experience in order to draw conclusions about the nature and the content of that perception. And then it's a bit of like, how much can you explain
00:51:41
Speaker
by having that hypothesis. If it's doing a lot of explanatory work and it's phenomenologically supported, then that kind of makes it legit. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think, yeah, we can sort of
00:51:55
Speaker
personally see the evidence that when you look at particular objects, you just know what to do with them without any kind of reasoning or inference. I think there's probably some interesting study that could be done here that really tries to tease this out, not by philosophers, but by some sort of scientist. What comes to my mind is
00:52:15
Speaker
convolutional neural networks and how, you know, you have these different layers. And the first layer might just pick out pixels, right? And the second layer might turn those into circles and lines. And yeah, it makes sense that near but not right at the top of that set of layers in the human
00:52:34
Speaker
perceptual apparatus, we have something which adds in affordances. So it's kind of prior to all the reasoning, but it's got to be quite far down the stack as well. So one can imagine something of a model that would do that with neural networks.
00:52:49
Speaker
But yeah, I also really like the idea of the kind of Oliver Sacks-types things. I've always thought of his books as almost like real, philosophical thought experiments. You have a really intriguing example in your paper about environmental dependency syndrome. Perhaps you can walk us through that. Tell us about what EDS is and why it's relevant here.
00:53:12
Speaker
I confess that I do not remember. Isn't the danger of having read your paper just like last night? That's what I was saying, like, oh, it's the Oliver Sacks type thing. But and I know we have one in that paper.
00:53:29
Speaker
I'll embarrass you by walking you through it because it's such a beautiful example. It's a condition where people are unable to reason from their surroundings to action, but they just immediately act on the clues in the environment. You put them in a situation with certain objects and they're just going to use them.
00:53:54
Speaker
The fascinating case for this purpose is an experiment where people laid out this kind of conference room or something with a buffet and this guy goes in who's got this EDS syndrome and he just sees all the food. He's like, oh, this is great. I'm going to be eating. And then a woman goes in and she just says, oh, there's some chairs here. I need to like stack them and get everything ready.
00:54:18
Speaker
And there, that really brought it home. I mean, the other thing we might wonder about here then is, OK, so men are not good at seeing things that need to be done. And that sounds like that's a pretty good excuse, right? I mean, can I just take that to the bank and be like, oh, yes, my house is a mess, but it's not my fault. I just can't see the stuff that needs doing. Is that a problem? I mean, maybe not for me. Like, I could work with that.
00:54:48
Speaker
No, it doesn't just because the fact that you don't perceive it does not mean that it's impossible for you to do it. It just means it's a bit you have to work a little bit harder to do it. And in fact, it's not like Florence perception is fixed. It's not
00:55:08
Speaker
It's not genetically determined. It doesn't sit on the Y or X chromosome. It's something that's learned, that's acquired through a habit.
00:55:20
Speaker
so you can change. And I mean, I think, you know, part of the idea of the paper, like for me was, was a colleague of Andreas's of my partner, he was looking after the baby with his partner together. And then he started going to like his paternity leave ended, and he started going to work. And then he like he told you, I remember he told us he was like, it's so weird, you know, like, I used to do all this stuff. And now I just come home, like, I see the tissue on the couch. And I just like, it doesn't occur to me to move it.
00:55:50
Speaker
And so this is really, you know, so that he knows how to do all those things. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
00:55:58
Speaker
I have just like one more comment on the environmental dependency syndrome, which is, you know, in terms of evidence for affordances, which isn't quite as weird as the environmental dependency syndrome. But I think that might be an interesting study that like it's again for psychologists to think about. But one thing that always strikes me about babies
00:56:21
Speaker
Is that as soon as babies acquire a new skill, they compulsively act on that skill. So, you know, like take the like six months old who can grab things and put them in their mouth, like they'll be putting everything in their mouth.
00:56:41
Speaker
And it seems to me like this is, and it's not like, it seems really implausible to think that they reason. They're like, oh, here's the object and I'm able to put it in my mouth. Let me put it in my mouth. It really seems like.
00:56:54
Speaker
their perception of the environment changes and all of a sudden they see everything in their environment affording this thing that they are able to do and they just cannot help but do it because they don't really have the cognitive control needed to not put things in their mouth. So I think that's really like nice, I think that's like
00:57:17
Speaker
If it works, it's a cleaner example than the environmental dependency syndrome of affordance-driven action. I think it's really interesting. And it reminds me of another example you have in your paper, which is of babies. It's a different point, but it's also baby-related. So I'll squeeze it in. Yeah. Famous experiment of this kind of tiled floor, and then you create a section on the floor that looks like there's a massive cliff.
00:57:46
Speaker
and the baby crawls towards it, and if there's sort of no human around, they will be pretty wary of that thing that looks like a cliff. But if there's a person, they'll look up to them, if their parent's there, the baby will approach the trompe l'oeil cliff, look at their parent, and if the parent smiles and sort of encourages them, they'll ignore the cliff and they'll just, they'll go straight over it, and it's not a real cliff, don't worry. It's just a visual effect.
00:58:13
Speaker
I mean that really shows that these affordances, in this case the affordance of the thing that looks like a cliff but actually is quite safe and walkable, are something that are learned. The other thing I love about that example is it plays into something that
00:58:30
Speaker
I talked about in a couple of previous podcasts, which is kind of over imitation, where children are prone to ignore the empirical environmental affordances that you might just get from reasoning. So in the baby's case, if they would just look at that thing and reason about it, they clearly see that it looks kind of dangerous.
00:58:51
Speaker
But that will be overridden by clues from other humans. So in contrast, it seems to maybe other species, like we're just really prone to copying others. And the clues can be so subtle. I mean, that shows that I do not have an innate inability to see dishes, right? Yeah, yeah.
00:59:14
Speaker
the explanation for why it's harder for men can be, you know, it may depend on very subtle clues that have been picked up in childhood and over years. Yeah, and I mean, I think it raises a more like general philosophical point about the nature of perception, right, which is that we
00:59:31
Speaker
there's this ideal, you know, I mean, from that like, underpins a lot of the empiricist project in philosophy that like, somehow, observation is the gold standard of, of knowledge and our perception is this window to the external world.
00:59:49
Speaker
But if affordances really are part of perception, then affordances are the kind of prime thing which is dependent on our social conditioning, on what we learn, on what we're capable to do, on our actual physical limitations.
01:00:07
Speaker
But at the same time, of course, when we look out in the world, we see patterns and we perceive affordances. And it's not like we screen out, in our perception, we screen out those affordances. And we say, well, the patterns, the shapes, those are objective. That's the objective bit of perception and the affordancy bit. That's the kind of acquired bit. It all presents ourselves as this package that's seemingly out there and independent of us.
01:00:36
Speaker
It means that when we think of perception as our guide to reality, we need to be really careful and we need to appreciate that not everything that is given to us is in fact given to us because it's really there as opposed to because we are projecting it out of our environment.
01:00:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think we both learned many years ago that all observation is theory-laden, right? But this really brings it home. And perception is not a transparent window. But there's kind of all these different layers, I guess, of theory that go in. And the theory that the cup has a handle because you can use it is something that just becomes ingrained and part of the perception. Presumably, even things that are
01:01:19
Speaker
more abstract and grand than that can get added on to the perceptual machinery. And it's probably wrong to think of it as like there is a perceptual machinery and there is like some reasoning on top. There's a continuum, right? And we can probably reason our way to change the almost innate or like what feels like innate but are actually learned perceptual reactions. I suppose my final question is, you know,
01:01:49
Speaker
Your work looks a lot at practices in everyday life. And I love how you take things, for example, you talked about how you took this case from this American life. You have quotes from the New Yorker. And it kind of dispels this myth of the philosopher in a library tower. Well, he might be in a library tower, for all I know. But you're drawing on the sources of everyday life.
01:02:15
Speaker
Yeah, maybe you can talk just a little bit about the practice of being a philosopher. What tools do you think one should draw on? That's a good question. Okay, so when it comes to philosophical tools,
01:02:34
Speaker
I think there's like lots of bits of philosophical machinery that are really helpful. So I do think it's always really helpful to think about what we say and think about how conversation works. And philosophers have developed quite sophisticated models. And sometimes those models are really helpful in kind of allowing you to
01:03:04
Speaker
home in on like particular aspects of those exchanges. I was reading this book about Oxford philosophy of language by Nikhil Krishna. It's called A Terribly Serious Adventure. Have you read that one actually? No, no, no. That sounds cool. Oh, you love it. It's so good. It talks about basically the advent of ordinary language philosophy and intersperses.
01:03:31
Speaker
the kind of anecdotes of those personalities in that time, like Gilbert Ryle, Dale Austin, Isaiah Berlin, Flippa Foot, with their kind of philosophical approaches and the questions they grappled with. And I think when I was reading this book, it just struck me how much of that resonated with how much I am a product.
01:03:50
Speaker
of that environment and of this way of thinking really carefully about what we say and what we should say, why we say the things that we say in order to describe this, how we could say it slightly differently. I think often that reveals quite a lot of our practices. It shouldn't be taken as the knockdown standard of evidence, but I think it helps to keep you honest in some sense because I think
01:04:19
Speaker
the distinctions we draw in our language map onto distinctions often that we draw in our practice. So that means in the cases of apology, thinking really carefully, like, well, how do we apologize? What's the language that we use? What would sound right in that situation? Why would saying this sound ridiculous in that situation? That's the kind of methodology. And then kind of marry this with some of the formal tools
01:04:46
Speaker
that we have from the philosophy of language in order to render things more precise. So I think that's kind of one part of the philosophical toolset. But then of course like there's like all of moral philosophy, you know, the way of thinking about moral principles and how they weigh in thinking about different approaches to moral responsibility.
01:05:06
Speaker
And then also, you know, as the work on affordances shows being mindful of how philosophy slots in somewhere between ordinary practice and scientific practice and is continuous with both. Right. So if you theorize something in terms of
01:05:23
Speaker
philosophical construct, like the construct of affordances. Well, that better not be completely at odds with what psychologists might be talking about. Like there better be ways of checking whether that thing is a reasonable thing to postulate. So I guess I really, yeah, so maybe that's the, maybe I have talked myself into an answer where, you know, I think of philosophy as sitting kind of
01:05:46
Speaker
in between this ordinary phenomena ordinary practice and science and kind of it has its own distinct methods which have been developed in response to phenomena and thinking through them but it needs to be also responsive to the methodologies
01:06:03
Speaker
of both of the other areas, right, to scientific methodology in one case, but also to the kind of methodological methods and observations and ways of expressing aspects of ordinary practice. Yeah, yeah, it's sort of the meeting place of all those pieces and
01:06:22
Speaker
It's almost like there's knowledge coming at philosophy from many different angles. Like you say, we can learn about our practices from looking at how we deploy our words, but also our words. They're somehow a good mapping of what there is in the world. I mean, for some people in extreme viewers, they are all there is in the world. I don't hold to that, but they somehow capture something of reality. So just looking at how we're able to arrange words tells us incredibly about
01:06:51
Speaker
at least how we think reality is. And obviously we get that from our theories too. But I suppose what's really fascinating about philosophy is it's not just trying to organize all those things, but in some places it's trying to push back a little bit and say, actually maybe our concepts here are wrong.
01:07:09
Speaker
So it's like trying to reset one's perceptions again. You look at what you do see, but you can actually take back your conclusions from that and change it, change what you see. That's right. In some cases, it's also a matter of it's not a neutral enterprise. Particularly in the area, if you do what I do in the area of moral philosophy, it's always
01:07:38
Speaker
It's always a morally-laden enterprise in the sense that sometimes you're trying to diagnose what is the mistake that people are making, right? Like, what is the mistake that someone is making when they think of a particular encounter that it's more
01:07:54
Speaker
accurately captured as rape in terms of bad sex. Like, where exactly do they go wrong? And what would it take to get them to a better place? So in that sense, you're not just describing psychological facts, but you're engaged in something that aims at
01:08:15
Speaker
amelioration, right? In some sense, you can turn that to concept. So you might think sometimes our concepts are defective, what would it take to have better content concepts. And sometimes once you have described the practice, and you kind of figure out how it works, you know, why do we have apologies, then you can look at apologies in particular circumstances and say, okay, that's a bad apology. Or in this context, this is a pernicious practice. It's a pernicious practice, because
01:08:45
Speaker
it creates certain social conditions or it creates certain social facts. So I think when you do moral philosophy within that methodology, your mind is always not just oriented towards the descriptive adequacy, but also it tries to answer to specific forms of moral critique that we're interested in making.
01:09:10
Speaker
And on that point, do you have any advice? This is a big question. Yeah, just anything that people can take in general. I know this is a tough one because it's so open-ended. And I think you've pre-figured some of it and just like paying attention to what we do.
01:09:28
Speaker
Yeah, so any more, you think about like any moral advice or any advice if you want to think about- Yeah, maybe we can, maybe, okay, let's make the question a bit more concrete. Where it's early January now, and there's a guy in the North Pole who's got two really difficult tasks every year. One is delivering like a lot of packages very quickly. And that's the one that gets like a lot of focus. But probably the even harder task is like adjudicating who deserves what in terms of presence.
01:09:56
Speaker
Do you have any advice to that guy? Not really, I mean, except that he should read those letters that get submitted to him very carefully. Very good. I mean, as a matter of
01:10:16
Speaker
I don't know if it's moral advice, but here's like an interesting consequence that having thought through some of the topics, in particular the topic of excuses and apologies has had on me ever that seems like writing about excuses, I find myself making much fewer of them. All right.
01:10:36
Speaker
like sometimes something goes wrong and I come late and I think about what like my mind goes towards like what excuse do I have and then I think nah. It's not gonna bother me. I'm not gonna try to reduce the blame on this it's not worth it. Yeah yeah I'm just gonna so I don't know if that's a bit of moral advice but that was a bit of my takeaway after thinking through some of that.
01:11:07
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that's a good, I like it. Excuse oneself less, right? Be less British. Oh, very good. Well, that was really fun. Yeah, I'll cut the recording here, but yeah, just, yeah.
01:11:34
Speaker
So,