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w/c 29/09/13: Assertion

28/9/2014

Something declared or stated positively, often with no support or attempt at proof.

Saracens - the best team in England?

This week’s WotW is for my year 10 students - however might as easily apply for many of my year 11 “All Stars” as well! They recently made their first attempts at IGSCE exam questions – the “describe” questions went well enough, but the “explain” and “evaluate” still have some way to go! It’s not that they did not know their evidence, bible quotes, Christian teachings, logical objections etc. it was just that they failed to deploy them! In short, there were too many assertions!

An assertion is a positive statement that lacks support or reasons. We make them all the time in everyday life and most of the time they cause no problem; “The Earth is round”; “Light travels faster than sound”; “Saracens are the best Rugby team in England”. These statements are widely accepted (especially the last one in my household!) and so don’t require us to offer any evidence to support them. Indeed, life would be rather tedious if we had to justify such statements every time we made them.

However in Philosophy and Ethics we have to be very wary of assertions; they have the potential to make arguments seem better than they really are and should be avoided if we want to be sure of persuading someone of our case. In equal measure it is the job of a critical thinker to spot when someone has made an assertion and challenge them for their reasoning and evidence. Many students forget this fact, especially when the subject of the debate is something which is well established such as a societal taboo or religious tradition (see the previous word of the week; Irrelevant Appeals).

In the last 100 years many philosophers have developed ideas around where the “burden of proof” lies and have generally concluded that it always lies with the person making the claim. One famous example of such a philosopher is Bertrand Russell and his celestial teapot. This is an analogy which tries to demonstrate why the philosophic burden of proof is always with those making the claim, rather than shifting it onto those who would dispute the claim.

Russell claims that this is what religious people have a tendency to do; to say that the sceptic has a duty to prove the theist wrong. To show the absurdity of this Russell said that if he claimed that there was a teapot orbiting the Sun, somewhere between the Earth and Mars, it is nonsensical to expect others to believe him on the grounds that they cannot prove him wrong.

In an article titled "Is There a God?" commissioned, but never published, by Illustrated magazine in 1952, Russell wrote:

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. (Russell, 1952)

So this week when you are making an argument or writing an essay have a think about where the burden of proof really lies and if it is up to you to prove the point you are making. Thinking about assertions will not only get you more marks in an exam but much more importantly will make you into a better thinker.

Have I made any assertions in this post?

References:

Russell, Bertrand. "Is There a God? [1952]" (PDF). The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 11: Last Philosophical Testament, 1943–68. Routledge. pp. 547–548. Retrieved 28 September 2014.

w/c 22/09/14: Existentialism

21/9/2014

A broad philosophical approach that emphasises the existence of the individual, freedom of the will and personal responsibility.

Last week I was extremely pleased to receive Fordthought’s first request from a student for a topic of discussion – I was less pleased that it was for a concept that is extremely hard to define! Never-the-less I decided it would be a good word of the week as it is a concept that most people have heard of but probably have not had time to explore very much.

Existentialism is a philosophical movement of the late 19th and 20th Century that has a very loose definition; even those philosophers that we might categorise as existentialist such as Sartre and Camus actually denied that they are existentialists!

Nevertheless there are some broad, common features:

1. Philosophy is a way of life: rather than being just another academic subject or a fun past-time, philosophy should be an all pervading activity that is essential to your life. Questions of how to live your life are crucial and philosophy can help you deal with these questions.

2. Freedom: There is an assumption in the thinking of existentialists that we are absolutely free to will as we would like. However for some, such as Sartre, this was a source of anxiety – in his words “we are condemned to be free”. By this he means that we cannot rely upon a deity or society to make choices on our behalf. We are personally responsible for our actions - this idea has its origins in the ideas of philosophers such as Kant.

3. No Absolutes: By and large existentialist philosophers say that life is full of anguish for humanity because there are no objective or universally known truths. It is up to us to create value in our own lives and live it for ourselves.

4. Not just Rationality: Philosophy should not be a purely rational process but has subjective elements too; this combination is the only way to counter the absurdity of the world – we need to create our own order and understanding in order to avoid a sense of disorientation that comes about from the meaningless world we live in.

As I said, this a very rough approximation of the movement and every thinker associated with it was different. Philosophers that might be tagged as existentialist include, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Satre, Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Existentialism has had a number of important influences upon other areas of life such as the Arts and Psychology. Interestingly it did not have such a strong influence upon the rest of Philosophy as you might think; put simply the subject moved on, new ideas took over and existentialism became less popular. One area that you might well think about existentialism at A-level is when studying the issue of Free-Will and Determinism and more specifically the approach of Libertarianism – the idea that we are totally free in our moral choices.

I hope that this satisfies my inquiring student and that more students ask for other terms to be explained in the future!

http://bit.ly/1re9MNu

Dig Deeper: St Martin in the Fields Lecture Series; Living without enemies

17/9/2014

If you are serious about Philosophy and Ethics it is important to take every opportunity to further your experience of the subject. The idea of this new feature of Fordthought is to bring you details of opportunities to stretch and challenge yourself.

The first of these is a 6-part lecture series that runs from 22nd of September to 24th November. These are all at St Martins in the Fields in central London, near Trafalgar Square. The focus of the talks, in the centenary year of the outbreak of the Great War, is on conflict, what humanity has learnt and how those who believe in a God of Justice and Love can respond.

Speakers include Sam Wells, the vicar of St Martins and professor of Christian Ethics at King’s College London; Baroness Shirley Williams the life peer and co-founder of the Liberal Democrats; Andrew White the chaplain of St George’s Bagdad and Richard Harries, former Bishop of Oxford.

The lectures are entitled:

Can there ever be a Just War?
Living without enemies in Northern Ireland.
What has our nation learnt from war?
Living without enemies in Bagdad.
What have we learnt from war? A view from the front line
The Christian concept of peace.

These lectures of course link directly to the OCR AS Ethics course but would also be great for those who in study History or Politics.

You can find more information at http://www.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/education/lecture-series/ or by downloading the flyer - Here:

w/c 15.09.14 - Irrelevant Appeals

14/9/2014

Irrelevant appeals are attempts to sway the listener with information that, though persuasive, is irrelevant to the argument.

A few weeks ago the word of the week was Fallacy – and I promised that we would examine some specific versions of fallacies. If you need reminding (which I am sure you don’t) a fallacy is a logical mistake in an argument. This week we think about a whole range of them which appeal to an authority that is not logically trustworthy – but often people think that it is.

Appeal to Tradition

The first of these is to claim that something is right because it has a long tradition– within ethics this might be, for example, arguing that humans have been eating animals for the whole of human history and so it would be silly to stop doing it now. Or, to take a pertinent political example, some are arguing that Scotland should stay part of Great Britain because the Union has been in place for over 250 years; how can you just throw away all that history?

This kind of argument has a natural appeal because people often look back to the past through rose tinted spectacles. Many like to imagine that things were somehow better, more honourable and more decent in the past. Things with long traditions are given great kudos and seen as intrinsically valuable. Whilst it may be true that some things do fall into this category, it is certainly not the case that all things do. Take for example the tradition of slavery, subjugation of women or homophobia. Not many would seriously make the argument that these things are good because they have a long history within human societies! Just because something his a long tradition does not make it good per se.

Appeal to Popularity

Another irrelevant appeal is the appeal to popularity – this is saying that something is right because the majority of the population agree with it – “it can’t be wrong if that many people think it is right”! One example could be someone, when debating Euthanasia, making the case that it should be legalised because most people say they would like the option of ending their own life when they want. This does not make the argument valid all it does is make the argument popular!

Take the example of Racism; the majority of people who lived in Britain at the turn of the 20th Century did not believe that members of other races should be afforded the same rights as white people – there was a great deal of what we would now call racism. Does that mean that racism was permissible then? Most people would not be happy with this argument and prefer to argue that racism is intrinsically wrong; wrong in and of itself.

http://stuartsorensen.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/appeal-to-popularity.jpg

Appeal to religious authority

Finally we might consider another form of irrelevant appeal; appeal to religious authority. This is when someone argues that an ethical principle or value judgement is right purely on the basis that it is contained somewhere in a religious text or oral tradition. I am not saying that all religious arguments are fallacious – only when they rest solely on the basis of religious authority.

A very simple example would be that of stealing; is it good enough to say it is wrong just because it is one of the Ten Commandments is “Thou shalt not Steal”? Surely factors such as the inability to universalise the action make it immoral (Kant’s view) or the consequences of stealing have to be considered when deciding if it is immoral (Utilitarianism)?

In reality the reason why moral laws such as not stealing have made it into most religious codes is because the logical arguments for them are very good and so they have been adopted by religious communities.

Lazy arguments

What all irrelevant appeals have in common is that they are lazy arguments – they do not require much thought or effort on the part of those who make them. They come effortlessly from society, or tradition or religion and can be trotted out too easily. Do not be lazy yourself and not challenge them!!

Do you want to challenge anything I have said in this post?

w/c 8.9.14 – Relativism

7/9/2014

The doctrine that knowledge, truth, and morality exist in relation to culture, society, or historical context, and are not absolute.

The word on the week two weeks ago was absolutism (read it here) and so now we turn to the opposite ethical viewpoint; relativism.

One could be forgiven for thinking that relativism is a modern phenomena, perhaps born in the “swinging 60s” when social attitudes towards a huge number of issues began to change. However it has roots that go back much further: As early as 450 B.C. Protagoras, a Presocratic Philosopher, is remembered for his relativist statement that “man is the measure of all things”. He argued that Humans create moral standards for themselves and he is hailed as the first cultural relativist (Fieser).

Another major contributor to the relativist position came a long time before the 1960s – Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was a revolutionary thinker for his time. He shunned conventional views of religion and morality and adopted instead the radical opinion that the only measure of good was the outcome that brought about “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” and that this “is the measure of right and wrong” (Bentham). He threw out the received wisdom of absolute moral laws given by God (indeed he was an avowed atheist) or dictated by the monarch. His moral philosophy was further developed by J.S. Mill and later Sidgwick, Hare and Singer amongst others; these philosophers adapted the basic tenets of the theory to deal with various criticisms but all hold to the notion that there cannot be one moral rule for all situations.

So what about the swinging 60s? Well they did have a big influence upon another major relativist ethical theory; Situation Ethics. Thinkers such as J.A.T. Robinson and Joseph Fletcher recognised that society had become rather disillusioned with the seemingly inflexible ethics of Christianity. The story may well be apocryphal, but Fletcher was apparently inspired by talking to a Chicago cabbie who told him that “sometimes you just have to forget the rules and do the right thing!” These theologians focused on agape (unconditional love) as the only absolute and that all moral rules should be adapted and altered to ensure that agape is achieved.

So does relativism work? Well in general in does produce moral answers that are flexible and seemingly more compassionate. Students I teach often agree that real-life problems require an approach that is able to adapt and react to the situation. However the serious objection is that relativism is inconsistent and impossible to apply accurately; for example how does Bentham propose we accurately measure pleasure? How can Fletcher ensure all people are shown agape? Surely it is better to use a set rule that everyone knows in advance and furthermore can show no unintentional favoritism or bias?

Are you a moral relativist? Or are you more convinced by absolutism?

w/c 29/09/13: Assertion

w/c 22/09/14: Existentialism

Dig Deeper: St Martin in the Fields Lecture Series; Living without enemies

w/c 15.09.14 - Irrelevant Appeals

w/c 8.9.14 – Relativism

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