Erik Angner Why the Science of Well-Being Needs the Philosophy of Well-Being—and Vice Versa

Um, so thanks everybody for coming. I'm Anthony Skeleton, a teach philosophy here at Western.

Um, and I want to thank everybody for coming today. And also, if you've come to the other events that was part of our well being in happiness series, I thank you for that.

Uh, it's my great pleasure to be able to introduce, um, the soccer news speaker. Uh, our speaker today is Eric Adner.

He is currently a professor of practical philosophy at Stockholm University.

Uh, in Stockholm's week, of course. Um, he has two PhDs, one in economics and one in philosophy, both from University of Pittsburgh.

Uh, he specializes in sports philosophy of science and also in for philosophy, uh, social, political issues, um, engaging in particular with a wide range of topics, but in particular, uh, well being, rationality and social order and seeking to bring, uh, philosophical other kinds of theories about those issues into contact with, uh, the most recent and the most relevant science.

On them, reviving the great 19th century tradition of not just doing moral philosophy, what what they call the moral sciences, which include political economy and things like that's no surprise that some of the great 19th century economists like, uh,

John Stuart Millen his father, Edtham, St. Rick and others, Edthworth, we're all also, uh, really steeped in philosophy.

Uh, Eric's mission, as I said, is to revive that tradition, um, and to, uh, make sure that we learn a lot about it today.

He's published many articles and lots of great journals, and also is the author of two books, sorry last night I said four, because there's some translations of one of them,

uh, including Hayek and Natural Law, which has got a 13 citations themselves.

Uh, things are much better for his, uh, uh, other book, which is of course in being really economics, which has got an Italian translation, and also a Chinese translation, so markets of vast magnitude are open to him.

Today he can be talking about why the science of well being meets the philosophy of well being, and vice versa.

So please, please join me in, uh, welcoming our speaker.

Thank you, Anthony, um, uh, for these kind words, it's an honor and a pleasure to be here among so many friends, old and new,

and at the Institute, which you guys who are here might not realize, like, what a good name the Institute has internationally.

It's, uh, it's really, uh, very well known and highly regarded, um, institutions, so, um, that's, um, great.

Um, I particularly grateful to those of you who were came out last night, also, and get, like, grand total of four hours of me speaking about happiness, you're very brave.

Um, today I want to, uh, talk about something slightly different, though, from last night, uh, basically the project that I want to talk about here represents a sort of massive, personal failure.

So I started writing a book on happiness, like some years back, and I wrote a complete manuscript to, like, a 300 page book, and whatever, and it was almost done.

It was pretty much done. And then I organized a little workshop where some people, with impeccable judgment, like, really nice and good people came to, to read my manuscript and give me feedback on it, and like everyone hated it.

And so I had the choice between, like, publishing it fast and hoping nobody would ever see it, or, like, abandoning the project.

And so I decided to just like, abandon it. But then over time, I, um, I came to see that there is a, sort of thread running through the different chapters of the previous book manuscript that might be worth exploring in, in full.

And it says, it has to do with the relationship between science and philosophy, so that the various ways in which the study of the one thing can inform the study of the other.

To some extent, I guess that's there because it serves to sort of justify my existence. So somebody who moves between the sciences and philosophy, I get a lot of questions of the nature, like, what is that? Like, what do you even care?

Like, what does philosophy matter? Why, why should I listen to it? And so I spent a lot of time sort of justifying what sort of interdisciplinary work, the attention to the details, scientific theories and methodology, and so on in my philosophy and the attention to philosophy in my, in my economics.

So what I'm trying to do here is, so there's a synthesized, um, some of these ideas. I'll warn you right away that this, uh, what I'm giving you today, sort of like a broad brush, uh, picture each one of the separate arguments is going to need to be fleshed out in great detail.

But I thought nonetheless that it might be interesting to give you like the, the big picture here, and then we can get back to the details, um, as you see fit as we see fit.

I want to start with a quotation from Mario Bungie, and I think is is really nice. He wrote a paper that hasn't been cited as much as it should have been in 1976 that, um, a bigger sense of symmetrical interaction between science and philosophy as desirable to close the gap between the two camps and to develop a scientific philosophy and a science with philosophical awareness.

This is sort of like, um, a nice description of what I've been trying to do. A scientific philosophy and a science with philosophical awareness.

The picture that I'm going to defend is a picture that looks a little bit like this, where philosophy and science are not identical, right? They're distinct.

There might be some boarded lands in between between the two, where this kind of unclear what we're talking about, but nonetheless, it makes sense to individuate or this separates philosophy from science.

But I represent them like this side by side to sing all that, um, no one of these two disciplines dominates the other or some stands above the other, whatever. These are two separate enterprises that can inform each other in the way that these, that these arrows indicate.

So I want to argue that philosophy matters to science and that science matters to philosophy.

I'll present this argument in the context of my area, which is the philosophy and science of wellbeing, but at least some of the points I'll be making are intended to apply more widely, might apply to the sciences quite generally.

Because my thesis has two parts, because there's two arrows in this picture, my talk will also be divided into two.

And I'll start with what I think of as, like the less controversial part of this, certainly I imagine in this audience, which is this idea that philosophy and wellbeing is relevant to the science of wellbeing.

The philosophical reflection matters, even if the only thing you're trying to do is the science of the thing.

Hey, first off, would anyone deny that philosophy matters? Yes, people would deny that science, that philosophy matters. Here's my favorite example of this.

It's from our UCLA economist Jack Hirschlifer wrote a book called The Dark Side of the Force, economic foundations of conflict theory, which is about what he calls the economics of the dark side.

So economics of crime and corruption and so on.

Trying to apply traditional economic modeling to the anti-social in many ways harmful behaviors.

Like, early on in the book, he has, he has this to say, as we come to explore this continent, the dark side.

Economists will encounter a number of native tribes, historians, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers and so on, who in their various intellectually primitive ways have preceded us.

Once we economists get involved, quite properly will, of course, be brushing aside these eight theoretical average of originates.

I want to note right away, like, the decidedly genocidal touch to this passage, right?

This is dark continent, right? That's occupied by these natives, these primitives, right?

To need to be brushed aside, you know, the moment the economists arrive and like, you know, try to make sense of this.

And it signals quite clearly, I think, a shall we say dismissive attitude to philosophy in these other areas.

Now, what's interesting about this is that throughout the book, he cites people from all these different disciplines.

And so he notes that he has to explain, like, how it makes sense to cite philosophers and anthropologists and so on, having said this.

And so immediately goes on to say this, how do I reconcile these comments with the undoubted fine work being produced by all these other people?

The answer is simple. When these researchers do good work, they're doing economics, right?

Notice that, like, philosophers don't even appear in the list of intellectually primitive aborigines in this and this and this list, right?

But when these people do something that's worthwhile, it's because they're doing economics, right?

And they don't get it, they don't even know, right? But what's he doing is economics.

So here's, I think, a good example of somebody who's expressing maybe not, like, the modal view among economists,

but nonetheless of you that's pretty common in my experience. You hang out with economists, they're extremely arrogant.

They cite other fields, less than many other people do, right? They're sort of insular and in that respect and the, and so the attitude captured here is not, is not that unusual.

But I want to give you, now, a couple of reasons to think that philosophical reflection is critical, not just like useful at times,

but absolutely critical to this kind of enterprise. And not just because philosophers can act as a sort of proto or primitive economist, but that, that they actually matter as philosophers. Okay, here we go.

So here's the first reason I want to talk about.

The first reason is that philosophical literature is actually a gold mine for empirical hypotheses.

So if you read classical philosophical literature, I mean, if you read Aristotle or if you read the classical utilitarian, so whatever, these texts are full empirical hypotheses of various kinds.

Many of them are actually quite interesting, and many of them have not been picked up by actual scientists. Now I'm not suggesting we look at Aristotle, it's like,

this like, cakey's word for it. But if I may use the old fashion distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, when you're in the context of discovery, you're generating hypotheses to explore,

looking at these philosophers is actually, at least potentially a pretty good idea. They were a cute observers of human nature, they're very perceptive, they spend a lot of time thinking and reading and writing about this.

And so we have, we have good reason to pay attention to what they're saying. Now you don't need to take my word for it.

You can take the word of George Lohnstein, for example, who's one of the leading behavioral economists, and somebody who's done a lot of work on, on happiness,

he says it's perhaps an indication of the glacial progress of social science that decision researchers and behavioral economists had only recently begun to appreciate

the importance of the full range of human motives enumerated by Bentham in the principles and morals and legislation.

Right, so Bentham here, this is not an obscure treatise, right? But what he's saying is that there are ideas here that are worth exploring for contemporary scientists that we haven't yet picked up on.

And so what this is suggesting is, on the margin, if you're a scientist and you want to pick up some new ideas to explore, you know, this is a place where you might go.

So that's one reason to pay attention to the, to the philosophers. Now in this case, it's easy to say that what these philosophers were, we're doing, we're just like some primitive form of social science, right?

Social science didn't exist as such during the, this year, certainly not during Aristotle's year, but there are other reasons as well. So let me move on to the second reason to think that philosophy matters.

So scientists tend to depend on normative and therefore philosophical assumption, assumptions to a remarkably large degree.

So if you read people published on happiness, for example, the policy applications loon large, very many of the papers will start off with some comment about policy.

The deficiency of the GDP as a measure of well-being, the importance of maximizing well-being and our personal lives and in policy and so on.

And so these questions about how the world ought to be and what we ought to do to make the world a better place, loon very large in the literature.

I'm depending here, obviously, on some sort of distinction between the descriptive and the normative, but I imagine you'll, you'll endorse as well.

There's other ways to sort of capture the same idea. Here's a formulation I like to this from Rebecca Goldstein, it says there are two kinds of questions, what is and what matters.

I like this formulation because it signals that what would suggest one of the things that a matter to science is what matters to human beings.

When scientists choose what to study, for example, it's not wouldn't be unusual for scientists to study things that they believe matter.

That's an obvious normative question. What are the things that matter? And it's sort of saying that as a normative claim, presumably philosophy has something to say about.

The principles underlying public policy implications are obviously normative, obviously philosophical and that respect.

You're going to get from empirical findings to some sort of policy. You need some sort of normative criterion. You need to assess what it means for an individual to be well off.

You need to assess what's good for a society. You need to assess the relative value of maximizing welfare and promoting equality.

And you need to assess things that have to do with justice and fairness and whatnot. And all these questions are clearly philosophical nature.

And of their questions that social scientists, including economists and psychologists, deal with a lot.

In a way that's by and large not particularly informed by philosophies. If you read so many of the happiness economists, you'll find people who without any hesitation.

That's obvious from the text, well, in door, spent them as the last word of moral philosophy. So, Richard Layard, for example, at law and school of economics.

We'll tell you that Bentham was right about maximizing happiness. And we should ruthlessly apply his principle in our personal lives and in policy.

There's no attention here to the stuff that happens since Bentham and the various complications that people have have explored in the philosophical tradition.

And I think it would be a good idea if at least some of the people who relying on these assumptions spent a little more time attending to what their advantages and disadvantages are what the alternatives might be in the relative costs and benefits.

What else?

Well, so here's another thing that matters. I've organized these points by the way, and roughly in order from less to more controversial.

So, I think that the first couple of claims that I'm making you agree with quite quickly, some of the others might be slightly harder to swallow, but I nonetheless think they're true. And so here's one thing, even purely descriptive scientific research, even the sort of thing that we think about as purely descriptive scientific research.

Stuff that isn't immediately policy oriented and so on cannot but proceed on the basis of philosophical assumptions. There's particularly nice line from Dan. Dan and here where he says that there's no such thing as philosophy free science.

There's just science that's being conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

So what Dan is getting at is that we don't have the option to do science in a philosophy free way. The philosophy is there whether we want it to be or not.

And we can choose to acknowledge it, we can make it explicit, we can explore its advantages and disadvantages, but we don't have the option of getting rid of it.

One takes the of the science of well-being and science quite generally, one place where this sort of point becomes really important has to do with a concept of measurement.

So it's widely agreed in this literature that in order to do science of something you have to be able to measure it. So the people work on happiness and whatever.

I have only rarely come across people to say that it doesn't matter if we can measure it or not. Pretty much everyone will say that in order to build a science of this, we first have to figure out a way to measure it.

But then they proceed to say that we know how to measure it now, not only just in principle, but we know how to measure it in practice. We know how to do this.

I'm not going to explore exactly how the way the argument goes, but I just want to draw your attention to the fact that when a scientist makes an argument to the effect that something can be measured.

Like that argument presupposes some sort of conception of what it means to measure something that contains some sort of conception of what conditions have to obtain for us to legitimately assert that we've succeeded in measuring this thing.

And that's a core issue in philosophy of science, right? The concept of measurement is something we've done for 100 years or more is one of the central issues in philosophy of science.

And if you're a scientist, you want to argue about whether happiness can be measured or not, and they do argue about this.

It's a big debate between the people who do happiness, research, and the more orthodox economists, for example, is a big topic of conversation.

And you can't have that conversation, and you can't assert either one of the standard positions in that literature without making some sort of assumption about what it means to measure something, under what conditions you can say, we now have licensed to assert that we've measured this thing.

And so there are all sorts of ways in which sort of standard the counts of theories and philosophy of science pop up in the sciences and in a way that isn't just incidental, right?

But in ways that are like absolutely critical.

Maybe I should mention right away because then, then it's on the screen here that I don't mean to suggest that you have to be a professional philosopher to philosophize, right? In fact, I think there are many scientists who are superior philosophers and some philosophers.

But the point here is that there is an activity that we know as philosophy and you have to engage in that sort of activity, even if the only thing you want to do at the end of the day is the traditional science.

What else? Well, another thing that philosophy does, and that philosophy does, well, is to explore conceptual spaces and articulating advantages and disadvantages of occupying various niches in that space.

Now, it's true that if you look at the philosophy of well-being, for example, there's not like a whole lot of consensus about what the correct view is.

And I think this is a large part of the reason why scientists hesitate to go to the philosophical literature.

If you come from the outside and you look at philosophy, you see this like vast mess of like positions and people disagreeing with each other and you might not see a whole lot of progress over time.

I don't want to deny that there is progress over time, whatever, but it's true that there's not exactly like a consensus among philosophers on the topic of what the nature of well-being is.

But there is something that there is not consensus, but a much more agreement about any ways in philosophy of well-being, and that has to do with what the space of live alternatives are.

So there are a couple of views out there that have defenders and that have had defenders over the generations.

Those options are relatively stable. They're new variations, right?

Being presented at every new doctoral dissertation in this area has to add a wrinkle to several of the existing views.

But the broad outline, the classes of live use, the views that people take seriously, remain relatively constant.

That's what I'm getting at here. So even if philosophers can't tell everyone what well-being is, what they can tell them what we can tell the rest of the world is, like, here's some options.

Right? Here's some views you might want to take, right? Here's some consistent accounts that you could choose from.

And not only that, we also have a pretty good idea of what the advantages and disadvantages are. We have these standards, odd experiments that you could use to articulate what the advantage this theory has over this theory over here.

And so there is a great deal of agreement, not consensus on what the options are and what the advantages and disadvantages are.

This is actually a pretty useful information for a scientist, right?

Even if you're like dead set on measuring happiness and arguing that we should maximize happiness, which is fine, if you want to do.

You can go to this literature and figure out what the advantages are, what the disadvantages are, like what the costs are of going this way.

This is useful information and it's useful for scientific reasons, right?

I'm not coming from the outside here, telling scientists they ought to be doing something they're not already committed to, right?

They are all ready committed to spelling out to their assumptions and assessing advantages and disadvantages that you just saw.

And looking at the philosophical literature can help you do this. It's not even very hard, and so there are these fantastic resources now.

So here's the Rutledge handbook of philosophy, well being that came out a couple of years ago.

A couple of us in the room have chapters in here.

It outlines in short, concise, well written chapters.

Like what the main competitors are and what the central issues are in this area and whatever.

So the cost to a scientist reading up on this literature has become exceedingly low.

You just pick up this one book and read it and you'll get a good, very good grasp of what the live issues are.

I really wish they had done this and I think the sciences would have progressed faster.

So when people started to be all enthusiastic about the economics of happiness, like in the 90s, people made lots of people made extremely strong claims about the importance of happiness.

So that science of happiness is being around for at least 100 years. It's not actually a new thing.

It became really popular in the 90s.

In early all, I guess, following or as a result of the work of some superstars, I get dinner and Marty Seligman and so on.

Layered being one of them.

And they affirmed sort of bent them like claims in very strong terms.

So I mentioned Layered. There's another famous chapter titled Back to Bentham saying, you know, which is the band and the stuff we've been doing and go back to Bentham.

Coming to this as a philosopher, it was pretty clear already then that they were going to have to backtrack many of these claims because they made this exceedingly strong claims.

And that's exactly what happened.

So 10 years later, these researchers started realizing that the happiness, maximization idea was not like quite as good of an idea as they had thought and then they started backtracking.

These ideas started thinking about well being as having multiple components, which happiness would be one or, you know, various modifications.

But in philosophy, we've been through this hundreds of years before, right, they could have bypassed like 10 or 15 years of conversation on this just by reading the literature, right, which is not even that hard.

Or they could have like walked across campus and paid for lunch for one of the philosophy or could have walked them through this stuff, right, we're not, we're not expensive by a large right, you can buy us lunch and we'll talk to you about content until your ears fall off.

And so again, this is not difficult for a scientist to do, right, it's very, very straightforward.

All right, okay, and here's the, the last thing I want to, I want to mention during this half of the presentation, which is that,

another thing that philosophy does is to examine how different frameworks were paradigms or images or whatever, hang together.

By the way, I might, I might mention, I should maybe I mentioned before that I'm trying to do this in a sort of non-committal way, in the sense that I don't want to commit myself to any one conception of philosophy.

I also don't want to commit myself to any one conception of science.

What I'm hoping to do is to appeal to as wide an audience as possible by pointing to a number of things that scientists undoubtedly do.

And a number of things that philosophers undoubtedly do sort of things to sort of claims we can agree on, even if we happen to operate with different conceptions of science of philosophy.

And I think I think you may agree that this is one of the things that, that the science that philosophy does and does well.

Of course, the implicit reference here is to, for its sellers is that precisely that the aim of philosophy abstractly formulated is to understand how things and the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.

I think this sort of project is becoming particularly important now with increasing specialization.

So it's a fact, I think, in the sciences that various disciplines are getting more and more specialized.

So there used to be a time when neuroscientists could be on top of all the things that happened in the neurosciences.

But now, like you go to the annual conference and there were like 30,000 people at this conference, is it not humanly possible for one person to know what's going on in neuroscience anymore?

Like people are more and more specialized.

And if you're a grad student, you might be feeling this pressure to specialize, right? You might be actively discouraged from beating too much in neighboring fields.

You might be told to just focus on your thing, right? To get done here. So there's a lot of pressure on people researchers of all all career stages to like narrow down what they're doing.

Work we're looking at is a scenario where people know one memorable formulation more and more about less and less until in the limit.

You know, we'll have these people who know everything there is to know about an inadvertently small part of the science.

And I'm not arguing against it, very specialization has all sorts of different virtues, but specialization much like divisional labor works only if there's arbitrage or if there's a change, right?

If people who operate in the one discipline, when the one sub discipline communicates with people in the other ideas to

To for us to reap the synergy effect, or whatever, and in the visual scientists is pressured into not doing that sort of thing.

So there's a need for somebody who sees how the different projects that the scientists are involved in, hang together with each other.

And the context of the philosophy of wellbeing, I think this is particularly clear because so many of the people who operate or who do research on wellbeing or happiness,

have in mind, I think, quite clearly more or less the same thing. They haven't mind the thing that philosophers talk about as well being the sort of thing that's good for us sort of thing that makes for life well live the sort of thing that we care about when we care about how somebody else is doing, and the sort of thing that we treat as a currency in comparisons in policy context where we have to weigh one person's interest against against another.

And all of these scientists seem to be interested in the same thing. They're interested in that which policy should be designed to promote or enhance or even maybe maximize.

And yet they're going about these studies in radically different ways.

It will come as no surprise to you that when economists and psychologists of happiness or wellbeing get together, conversations are not always constructive, right?

There's so many different assumptions that go into these ways that people study this.

These assumptions are radically different. They're often not articulated.

If you travel from the one discipline to the other, you often have experience or traveling to foreign countries because people do all these weird things that you don't understand.

And it's only like when you reverse yourself along enough that you begin to see what they're doing and what they're thinking about it and why and how and so on.

And what I want to suggest is that this is like one principle aim of philosophy is to check how these different things hang together.

What we can learn about wellbeing from the psychology, what we can learn about wellbeing from the philosophy and the economics and how these things hang together. Something we do, I think, as philosophers and something that that we do quite well.

All right, so here were some reasons to think that the practicing scientists has reason to look into what the philosophers are up to.

So, there are lots of things I'm not saying. I'm not saying that there's always like a ready-made answer like pre-packaged in the philosophy book that the scientists can borrow and take with them.

But there's certainly reflection to be had and some of it is quite productive and there is a sensing which philosophers actually agree on many interesting and relevant things that the scientists could take advantage of.

All right, but let's move on to, oh yeah, okay, so right, so scientists don't have the option of not relying on on philosophy, right, that option that they do have is whether they want to rely on the best available philosophical theorizing or whether they want to win it.

Okay, you can win it. But what happens if you win it is that you're likely to express some view that's completely obsolete and that's obsolete for a good reason. And if you put it this way, I think.

It's quite clear that it's better for the scientists to try to proceed on the basis of philosophically justifiable positions rather than reaching for whatever comes to mind or that's my view anyway.

All right, here's the second, the second half, which is this claim that the science of well-being is relevant to the philosophy of well-being.

Like the first half is relatively, relatively easy, I should say, to convince people of. So, among philosophers, anyway, it's people are quite happy to be told that philosophy matters, right?

We, we tell each other oftentimes that what we do is really relevant to people outside of the department and it is, right? That's good.

This bit is harder for many people to swallow, they claim that what happens in the sciences might matter to the philosophers.

First off, would anyone ever deny this? Well, yes, and there are lots of people who deny it. So first off, there's this traditional view of philosophy as the queen of the sciences.

So this is a depiction that goes back to the Middle Ages, where philosophy here being depicted as a queen sitting in the middle of this image is surrounded by these differential figures around her who are the sciences.

And the idea is that she generates wisdom there, the wisdom radiates from the center and outwards, which means that the sciences benefit from the reflection and the wisdom that philosophy generates.

Down here, you have Socrates and Plato, by the way, who are like communicating the insights and language that the scientists with her limited powers can understand.

But the influence is unidirectional, right? The influence in this picture goes from the center and radiates outwards, the scientists benefit from the wisdom of philosophy, but the radiation does not go in the opposite direction, right?

And this picture philosophy is nothing to learn from the sciences.

And this view is actually not that uncommon among contemporary philosophers. So here's one example of this, the philosopher called Fred Helman, who wrote a book, what is this thing called happiness, which is really an interesting book.

And the one hand, it pays extremely close attention to what happens in the sciences of well-being.

He spent a lot of time reading the scientists to do this, to tease out what sort of philosophical assumptions underlie this project in what now.

So he's really done as a great favor, looking at this so closely. But the funny thing is that even though he spends so much time as a philosopher reading this empirical literature, at the end of the day,

he really doesn't think any of it matters to the philosophy. So what he says is, is this. There are many instances in which it's alleged that somebody of empirical research has important implications for some longstanding philosophical question.

The suggestion seems to be that philosophers had better pay more attention to the work of their colleagues in psychology or economics.

Less they embarrass themselves by being ignorant and important findings that bear directly on their philosophical work. This suggestion meshes nicely with a current science worship prevalent among some philosophers.

He's cautionary tale here is Dan Hayburn who's done a lot of work on the philosophy of well-being in a way that sensitive to the empirical findings. So Hayburn thinks it's really important for philosophers to pay attention to what the empirical facts are.

But hey, Bellman thinks that's a cautionary tale. Now he does, Bellman doesn't say explicitly that it's all completely irrelevant. He sort of hedges his bets.

He says, I haven't said that the empirical research and positive psychology is pointless to re-relevant to philosophical questions.

Maybe there is some other researcher has discovered something that bears on some philosophical question.

In spite of the fact that I have looked, I have not found. I doubt that it will be found.

Notice that he's not talking about logical implication, right? He's not saying that the empirical results don't logically entail philosophical conclusions.

Like nobody believes that to my knowledge, he's saying that it's not relevant, right? Has no bearing on, which is a much weaker claim, and even so he denies it.

But when I want to do next, this will give you some reason to disagree with Bellman here and to say that there actually are some pretty good reasons for philosophers to pay attention to what the empirical results are.

What are those results? Well, again, I'm going to talk about these in order from less controversial to more controversial.

So I'll start here, philosophers routinely make claims about the well-being of the poor old sick and so on and about various trade-offs that we face.

You know, so in the applied ethics literature, for example, right, if you look at youth in Asia, philosophical discussions of youth in Asia, philosophical discussions about abortion and so on.

There are philosophical assumptions in these papers, right?

There's like utilitarian principles and stuff, but a large part of the argument hinges on claims about how good it is for a person to be handicapped.

If it's disabled, sorry, if it's better to be dead than disabled and so on, on severe disability needs to be for it to be better to be dead and so on, right?

And then there are claims about trade-offs that we face. So here's a quotation from Toby, or does it lead in figure and the effective altruism movement, who says that he realized at some point that his money would be vastly more good for others than it could for me.

And I decided to make a commitment to donating to the most effective charities I could find. Many people contacted me asking how they could do this as well.

And so I set up giving what we can, which is an organization that encourages people to donate their resources to whatever organization will do the maximum good.

So easy utilitarian, and notice how strongly empirical claims are that you need in order to complete this project.

It's not enough to know that some person would be made better off if they got a little more money, right? He wants us to do the most good that we could.

So if you have like one dollar and you're going to give it to the most effective charity, you need to know the marginal effect for each and every charity, right?

So much good will come from donating here rather than here. And if you're talking about redistribution, I can think of context of political conversations and whatever.

You need to know what are the total effects of like taking one dollar from over here and handing it over here.

The economists denote this marginal rates of substitution that it has to do with the consequences of transferring resources from one use to another.

And these are extremely strong empirical claims, but underlying all these conclusions. So if you're in the applied ethics, you really can't avoid doing this stuff.

And I think much of the applied ethics literature has unfortunately ignored relevant information.

So when it comes to the well-being consequences of illness and disability for example,

the stuff that people who are themselves ill or disabled will say will very quite dramatically from the things that people like Peter Singer will say.

So when we're talking about the empirical assumptions going into the argument, right, how well off the person is with a certain disability, the people who have the experience of having these disabilities will make radically different claims about the consequences.

So there's a philosopher in the UK called Harvey Carell who's talked about well-being with an illness, about the ways in which you can be ill and well off at the same time.

This is the thing, according to the people who have the experience and who have the philosophical powers to think about this, and to articulate it clearly.

This is a literature on this, and if we're going to do normative ethics or applied ethics that depends on the empirical assumptions as applied ethics will, right, it's irresponsible not to pay attention to the best available information relevant to those claims.

You can't do applied ethics without paying attention to the facts, and there's some information out there generated by scientists that are relevant to the truth of those claims.

All right, what else?

Here's another thing that I find sort of interesting, the most accepted way to adjudicate between philosophical accounts of well-being requires knowing how intelligent people use the word.

So saying before there's a great deal of disagreement about what the correct account of well-being is, like if you ask ten different philosophers, right, as always you get like 11 different answers about what it is.

But given the disagreement about substance, there's a council well-being, there's a remarkable amount of agreement on how we're supposed to go about settling these sorts of questions.

So there's a metaphor of what we'll claim about how we determine which account is better than another that finds a great deal of agreement.

There's no consensus on this, right, but a remarkably large number of texts on well-being will start off by affirming like some version of this claim.

Here's an area of buzzwar in the Rutledge handbook that I showed you earlier. She starts off by saying that we assess our philosophical theories by asking the question,

Does the accounts sufficiently closely match what would mean by a life of happiness or well-being in everyday intelligence, this course, and literature, that is, like how we use this term, how we apply it in everyday intelligence discourse, not like in philosophy seminars, but in everyday conversation.

When seminar is maybe most faithful, most famous for articulating this principle saying he's both well fair happiness and ethics, he wrote that the basic test for any account of well-being, for any theory about the nature of well-being is easy to state, the best theory about the nature of welfare is the one which is most faithful to our ordinary concept in our ordinary experience, much of this has to do with how we apply the word in everyday conversation.

So what's remarkable here is that a number of flows first actually agree not on the correct theory, but on how we are supposed to go about determining which theory is the best theory.

And notice that the story here is based on empirical assumptions, right, about how people use the words, that's a straight-up empirical claim of a sort that we could explore with traditional scientific means, right, linguistic analyses of various ways.

Now what's interesting here is that we have a pretty good estimate of like the number of people who have affirmed the importance of knowing how people use the word and the number of people who then preceded this study in all seriousness scientifically how people use the word and the estimate is exactly zero.

There's not one philosopher who has said this and who's then gone on to study seriously and scientifically how people use the word isn't as remarkable, right, we have this entire philosophical literature that people have contributed to for generations, where people will say things like this without apparently even like one stopping up and asking how people use the word.

Of course what happens is that people interact right and they say things like well how would I use this word and of course what happens there or actually I'll get back to that.

But that might, right, it's interesting. Now maybe somebody will say but but it's not clear how we would study this and that's not true it's totally clear how we would study this and in fact people have studied this.

So here's a paper from 2017 called true happiness the role of morality and the focus of happiness.

And here's a bunch of researchers at Harvard and Yale, Colorado Boulder, who came up with a number of different scenarios.

And there's been yet you know hypothetical scenarios that they presented to like real human beings and they asked like what extent is this person happy.

You can ask these questions in lots of different ways right and I want to get bogged down in the details of the study but it's a serious study published in the various serious journal.

And what they find is that the way that intelligent ordinary people use the word happiness is nothing like the way normal philosophers use the word.

So for one thing the concept the everyday concept is deeply moralized.

So if you're moral human being people are much more likely to say that you are happy than if you're not.

And so if you describe a person who's like in good spirits I can good sheer following helping the ladies cross the street people are much more likely to say that they're happy than a scenario where the person is this person's mental state is described in the same way, but he's happy because he was just torturing kittens or something that he enjoys doing.

So the concept of happiness as normal people use it is nothing like the concept of as philosophers use it and this should not surprise us right.

If you're in a philosophy seminar and it occurs to you to like do empirical studies by asking the other people in the philosophy seminar who really terrible scientist right.

This is one of those cases where diversity of the fashion really matters.

Everybody else is like middle aged white guy you know middle class whatever you know.

Bill asking Bob how Bob feels about this and Bob saying I agree with you Bill these are two people who are drawn from a very narrow subsection of society.

They've also been socialized as philosophers possibly for 30 40 years right.

They don't even I don't even remember what my intuitions were before I started studying philosophy.

I thought that anybody does right we don't know how we felt about this before we were corrupted by philosophical reflection.

And we can't do the signs of this by pulling our friends in the same profession right that's awful awful five.

And yet so many of these philosophers are fully committed to the view that we assess these accounts based on how people use to work.

Now I'm not saying that for every empirical question that pops up in the philosophical literature there's an off the shelf answer to be had in the scientific literature right so that's obviously not true.

But if if that's the case if you're a philosopher and you're really tempted to make some sort of empirical claim there are lots of things you could do you go to the literature and look at the best available evidence.

And you can say hey here's the best available evidence like fine and it supports my view is aiming that it does you could also like team up with some scientists and try to do the study.

And so there are lots of scientists who are looking for things to study and if you have a good hypothesis like philosophical and motivated project you might be able to picture to somebody and collaborate with them on a study that determines whether it's true or not.

But if that's not an option and maybe it won't be at a minimum it seems to me that intellectual honesty requires us to flag the claims that we make without any basis.

And this is not like me telling philosophers to do anything differently right we're already committed to making our premises clear and explicit and trying to defend them to the extent possible.

And if our arguments are going to hinge critically right as in this case on some empirical claim about how people use the word like at the minimum we ought to be honest enough to say here's the empirical claim my entire theories based on this empirical claim and I have zero empirical evidence to believe that it's true right.

That's what we ought to be saying but obviously nobody does okay.

I'm getting worked up here.

Here's another way in which from empirical facts matter.

Another way to educate between philosophical accounts is to ask which one does the work we expected to do in philosophy, science and beyond.

So this is a different view about how we assess philosophical accounts. So one view is as I said you know just check like does this philosophical theory match the way people use the word and everyday discourse that's one way to go about it.

Another way to go about it is to ask what sort of work do we expect this philosophical account to do?

Like what are the things we want this concept for in which these available concepts does the job best.

This is not an unusual view by any stretch of the imagination.

So here's James Griffin and he's book well being which is huge classic on the minute 80s.

Where he says we can just ask that what's the best account of well being as if best could mean most accurate.

Our job is not to describe an idea already and existence independent of our search.

Before we can properly explain well being we have to know the context the wish it is to appear and the work it needs to do there.

One proper ground for choosing between conceptions of well being would be that one lends itself to the liberation that we must do and another one does not.

So here you need to ask yourself like what is the deliberation that we must do what is that?

There are some questions we want to address many of those questions tend to be answered in terms of well being okay.

So that's the domain where we expected the concept of well being to do some work we could we could talk about that right we can explore what sort of work.

Is it supposed to do here what sort of criteria need to be satisfied for a philosophical account to do that sort of work.

And we could use that kind of information to assess which one of these competing accounts is the best one.

It's not even like Griffin was the first to say this I think you get the same idea more or less in Aristotle.

And so Aristotle, the Nicomician ethics has a passage where he's criticizing Plato's theory of forms.

I completely missed his passage until I re-read the book like a few years ago and I was really struck by by this passage where he says it's a puzzle to know what the weaver carpenter will gain for his own craft from knowing this good itself.

Or how anyone will be better as medicine or general ship from having gazed on the idea itself.

This strikes me as a really radical idea.

So he's looking at Plato's theory of forms and he says it's deficient because it doesn't help the carpenter or the weaver gain proficiency at their craft.

It doesn't help you become a better general, it doesn't help you become a better farmer, it doesn't help you become a better cobbler.

And even if Aristotle doesn't consider that knock down argument against the theory of the forms, he certainly considers it relevant to the question.

It seems to matter to Aristotle whether learning this philosophical theory will help you become better at some of these practical, practical tasks.

And that's certainly something we could ask, right?

We could ask questions about well-being. Suppose you study a philosophical theory well-being. Does it help you do anything?

If you're a medical doctor, does it help you make the sort of judgments you have to make?

If you're a palliative care, for example, right? You'll do a lot of judgments of well-being.

Does it philosophical theory help you make those sorts of judgments or not?

Question you could ask, and it has a certain empirical favor, right? Does this account do this work in this context?

Is something that you have to study on location?

Again, it may not be something that people in fact have studied, but it's something that we could study, right?

We could gather information relevant to it.

And if you agree with this general line of thought, then that's certainly interesting.

All right. Here's another thing. Another thing we can do.

We can look at the way in which philosophers of well-being works with examples.

Like, you guys are all familiar with the happy slaves and subjugated housewives, the dispossessed labor or whatever.

In the context of arguments about hedonism, particularly common to operate with these claims about whether slaves can be happy for example.

This is something that Fred Feldman talks about a lot in his book.

He talks about a subjugated housewife, Bertha. So I Google the housewife, Bertha, and of course the first 12 images were like not safe for presentation, but then this picture came up.

Okay, so here's Bertha. She's according to Feldman, according to the thought experiment.

She's unable to recognize that her life is demeaning and dehumanizing.

The question is, is she happy? Well, Feldman is a hedonist. He wants at the end of the day to explain well-being in terms of happiness and happiness in terms of pleasure.

So to him, it's a big problem. Like, if somebody like this who lives a life that we would intuitively judge, not good, right?

If she can be happy, Feldman's theory suggests that she's living a great life and that doesn't seem quite right.

So he takes this example very seriously. It indicates several pages to exploring whether a person like this can be happy or not.

And here are some of the things that he says. He says, the example of Bertha is psychologically implausible.

It's doubtful that the socialization process that she endured could have been so perfectly impainlessly successful.

That's where he says, if her life is so hard, then surely there must be lots of things in which she takes this pleasure.

And further down, it's reasonable to suppose that if she had taken advantage of the freedom to choose her lifestyle, she would have taken pleasure in a much richer variety of interesting things.

So this challenge goes to show that she couldn't possibly be happy if her life was truly as bad as we've been asked to imagine.

But notice what sort of claim this is, right? He's not saying that the notion of a happy housewife is like logically impossible or incoherent or inconceivable or anything like that, right?

That it's psychologically implausible, which I take to mean something like inconsistent with, you know, principles of psychology.

It's doubtful that the socialization process could have been so perfectly impainlessly successful.

Well, is socialization painlessly successful or not?

Well, it's a straight-up empirical claim, right? Sort of thing you can study.

If her life is so hard, surely there must be lots of things in which she takes this pleasure.

Conditional on an account of pleasure, right? We can ask, is a person living this set of sort of life experiencing this pleasure in that sense? And so, understood, it's an empirical claim.

So, Feldman is making like pages and pages with empirical claims about somebody in versus situation.

Is there any evidence? Well, there's exactly zero science cited in any one of these pages.

And he's like three philosophers and this context, like no empirical evidence whatsoever.

Would we get instead of a empirical evidence, like studies of this sort, I showed you, is that a certain shift in the way he introduces these propositions.

So, early on he says, you know, it's reasonable to suppose that p.

And then he goes on talking about this and further down he says, well, so surely p.

And then the top of the next page he says, it is a fact that p.

So, you get this shift from, like, we might be able to suppose to its effect, surely only by introducing the surely operator in the middle, right?

Which is not, um, how we reason.

All right, so here's, um, again, the whole series of empirical claims that Feldman makes in the context of his purely philosophical argument, right?

He's trying to establish a theory of well-being, which I take it everyone will agree is a philosophical project.

And yet in the context of this philosophical project, he cannot not invoke these empirical questions.

And in fact, if you removed all the empirical claims from this passage, there would be no argument left, right?

So these empirical claims are relevant to his case in the sense that they figure as premises in his argument.

And the premises are not, you know, we can't admit them, right?

They're critical in that way.

All right, what else?

I'm going to keep moving off like the meta ladder here, right?

So, um, I talked about, um, philosophical counts of well-being.

Then I talked about meta philosophical principles concerning how to select between philosophical theories.

Now, we're going to talk about meta meta philosophical principles having to do with how you select between meta philosophical principles.

And here, a number of philosophers have argued that the prove is really in the pudding.

You have these meta philosophical principles.

One says that you should assess these theories by comparing the theory to how people use the word.

Somebody else says you should use, you should assess these theories based on, like, whether the concept allows us to do this sort of work.

We wanted to do, and the question that arises, like, how are we to select between these meta philosophical principles?

So there's a philosophical, my bishop, that some of you may have read, it has a really amazing book on the good life,

and he says that the way to assess meta philosophical principles is to look at what the consequences are.

And what he gets at in a slightly different way is that many philosophical debates have roughly this character.

So you're watching this little game here, and you see things happening.

It looks as though somebody has to lead, but then maybe maybe not so much.

And then after a while, you realize that so many of these debates are just going in circles, right, for years and years and years.

And the way he diagnosis this is that he says that people with the Aristotelium, like intuitions, tend to become Aristotelium philosophers of the nurture Aristotelium intuitions, and consequently at the end of the day, they defend Aristotelium theories,

whereas people with consequentialist intuitions tend to become like consequentialists, and they nurture their consequentialist intuitions, and they talk themselves out of the other ones,

and they use their intuitions to confront their theories with.

And what you end up with is that it's polarized profession with different communities of people who don't share intuition,

and don't share theories, and whatever. That's not a very good way to go about settling these differences in success.

The point here is not, you know, to sort of endorse this idea, although I do endorse it, but only to say that there's an empirical claim here too, right,

not be the sort of claim that scientists have studied, but it's nonetheless a claim about what happens in the profession when you adopt the one principle,

versus when you adopt the other ones, right, they have consequences. We can look at those consequences, and we can use information of those consequences,

as premises in our arguments about which metaphilosophical principle is worth endorsing, right.

So at the point here, well, one point or the central point is that philosophers often can't avoid relying on empirical facts.

I'm not saying that every philosophical project requires, you know, some empirical claim or something.

I recognize that there are philosophical projects that you can complete without paying attention to the facts,

but there are many projects that we would, I think, agree on our philosophical projects, such as feldments coming up with an account of well-being,

where the way we do this, the way we play this game requires us to pay attention to empirical facts.

Again, I'm not saying that empirical facts will like logically entail philosophical conclusions,

but I'm saying that the empirical facts are relevant to the conclusions in the sense that they appear as premises in our argument,

and as premises that we cannot eliminate without doing like major damage to our case.

So again, we don't have the choice of not relying on empirical claims. The choice we have, if we're involved in the sort of project,

is either to draw on the best available empirical research or to wing it, right?

We can look at the available evidence and try to make some inferences based on obviously imperfect evidence,

or we can just make something up or ask our friends and they will make something up, right?

That's not, I think, a very good way to go about it.

All right, so what's the, what's the punchline here? Well, the punchline is that there's a certain kind of symmetry, right?

In the way that the scientists use philosophical claims and the way in which philosophers use empirical claims.

So the, the upshot is that science and philosophy stand in a symbiotic and symmetrical relationship with scientists and philosophers engaging in a mutually beneficial exchange of ideas for the advancement of the general knowledge.

So the opposite I guess would be a commensalistic relationship, which is a relationship like that between a tree and the orchid that grows on it, right?

That's the relationship, because the tree isn't harmed by having an orchid growing on it, but the orchid requires a tree to grow on if it is to flourish at all, right?

The other view is that of like philosophy being the, the tree and the science is being the orchid, right?

And that's the view that I'm, I'm rejecting here.

So philosophical arguments sometimes can't help but proceed from empirical premises and the scientific arguments sometimes can't help but proceed from philosophical premises.

By and large, if you're making empirical claims, you ought to be supporting them with empirical evidence.

If you're making philosophical claims, you ought to support them with philosophical argument.

When this is true, you know, it's appropriate for philosophers to support the premises, the empirical premises that they make with the best available scientific evidence, recognizing that the best available evidence might not be conclusive and so on, right?

We're failing that at least to flag that they're making empirical claims that have no evidence supporting them.

And it's also appropriate for the scientists to depend on philosophical claims to rely on the best available philosophical argument, right?

Certainly better and worse arguments out there.

Indeed, I think it would be irresponsible to rely on such premises without making some effort to come from them with systematic scientific evidence in the one case or systematic philosophical argument in the other.

I want to leave you with another quotation from Bungi, where he says, the my ideal will not be attained by preaching philosophical or scientific experiments to the scientists or the philosophers, but by making an effort to understand them, I suggest that philosophers or scientists should become apprentices rather than law givers and participants rather than onlookers.

And this is also my recommendation in light of all this. Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, please.

Chris.

So, thanks so much.

This is also just a very wrong crush question, but I'm curious about the state of the field as you see it.

So, this seems like an area that has a number of different fields, philosophy, as well as the scientific fields that are touching about it.

And if you give us a few different visions, it's fairly clear what you have prepared.

But I'm wondering, like, what your senses of the state of the field isn't that we're going to have the moral sciences returning and we'll have a new scientific perhaps, or is it more like what the economists do quoted at the outset, where there's maybe one area of science that has a moral theory.

That has a more active research agenda, and there's sort of taking over, or, you know, what's the picture of the field and how do you see the philosophers contributing in line with that?

Yeah, so that's a great question. So I should say right away that the quotations I had on the screen were sort of deliberately selected for being extreme, right?

First life is not representative for all the economists, and development is not representative for all the philosophers. There certainly are lots of people who endorse these views, but that's not, that's not universally true.

And so there are lots of scientists who do pay attention to what goes on in neighboring disciplines and who do pay attention to, you know, to the extent that they can, what the philosophers are doing.

So institutions like regular conferences in places where philosophers and scientists yet invited and where people talk to each other, not always, fruitfully, but at least people try, right?

And I want to think that the general trend is in that direction. So there's a lot of interesting interdisciplinary work, and maybe I'm just revealing my own biases here, but it seems to me that the most exciting work in the most interesting conclusions come out of that sort of liminal field between the different

disciplines, people are certainly beginning to see that it matters what happens in the other fields and people are beginning to talk to each other. So that's sort of where I see the trend going.

But it could go faster, and I guess that's what I'm trying to do with with this and

Speaking about institutions, I mean, there are also more and more institutes like this one, right, where philosophers and scientists live relatively happily under the same roof and where students in the one discipline goes off, go off to take courses and the other and whatnot, and all of these are encouraging developments that I think are really shaking up the way we do this.

I think it's one of the, of course, so that you, the scope of the claim that the empirical literature should constrain for a lot of philosophical conclusions.

So the example you've been was that the philosophy should respect the philosophy of being should respect the ordinary usage of what it means.

And then you criticize people from not trying to figure out what that is, but, but it should conform to the ordinary concept of what the idea is.

So that's a, that's a claim about, that should apply to several sample consent of the philosophical literature.

To what degree does that also apply to maybe contrary to consequences that might come from philosophizing about the example comes in.

It is a constraint that it has to conform in some way to ordinary usage in a broader sense, or just at the central concept.

It could be on some content, then if you discover unexpected things.

So I think your question is for a bother more than for me. So I didn't endorse that principle. I just put it up there saying that it's, it's very common even among philosophers to disagree about the nature of well being.

It's a commoner has has an excellent thoughtful discussion about this, where he says that, you know, of course, we're not going to expect like one philosophical count to completely match what everyone's doing.

And so we have to, we have to make some sort of holistic judgment, and then it'll be some claims we make that feel like we make them more confidence and we'll be more concerned with preserving those judgments.

Then we are with preserving some other more peripheral judgments about well being and so on. And so there's an active discussion about this among people who sort of endorse that principle.

I tend to be more with Bishop. I think it's more interesting to look at what sort of work does this concept do and, you know, which one of the philosophical counts serves us better.

So this is a longer story, but I think about the analogy with probability, for example. So if you want to encounter probability, or if you want to figure out what the axioms or probability are, whatever you could go out and ask people.

What they're intuitive judgments or probability are, and you're going to get a massive mess, right, or you could ask yourself, well, what do we want this concept for? Well, we want it for doing statistics, right?

We want it to do accounting, and then you ask yourself, well, what sort of axioms will allow us to do the sort of work we want to do statistics? That seems to me a more helpful way to go about exploring the nature of probability than confronting theories with intuitive on tutor judgments.

And I said this at some point to an experimental philosopher and he called me a fascist for like, you know, thinking we should pay attention to what the elites think more than what like the regular folk thing.

Anyway, so there's an active discussion about this that we can maybe talk about.

Can I ask you a question? Yeah, so I actually wanted to defend something to some degree.

So the quote you gave was, you know, about the ordinary concept and then no attempt to back out.

One of the distinctive things about the book is that it's one of the first books written that actually engages watch of the social research indicators literature, lots of the social scientific literature, and actually tries to work out an account of, well, being according to what just authentic life satisfaction, which kind of matches what lots of people in the literature, the scientific literature of we're doing and also kind of relies lots on literature and things like that.

So it wasn't attempt to think in some ways to kind of move beyond say what you find in Griffin, you know, which was a book written a decade earlier, which we didn't have anything, you know, about the empirical literature, you know,

so I only have a book on a well-being, but didn't have it all the same thing out there.

It's sort of scientific literature and nothing outside of this sort of, you know, what Parford had said, you know, a few years ago, your thing is appendix to the recent persons.

So I kind of thought thinking, sort of, that's one good thing about the scientific book, because it opened up the idea that, you know, philosophers who are working on this should really engage that kind of thing.

But that's just sort of a attempt to kind of...

You know, some of the great, funny, just...so, you know, I think it's a great book, I really enjoyed reading it. It was just so surprising to me to get to this point in chapter 11 or something, where he says that it's all pointless.

And, you know, for philosophical projects, there are here years of loss for having just written like so many chapters about this in exquisite, thousands, sorry, yeah.

In exquisite detail and then at the end, he says, you know, nothing of this matters.

Yeah, that's the reason to endorse the one philosophical fear rather than the other, but anyway, so I didn't want to like dismiss the book.

I think it's a great book, it's just like really interesting how the evidently depends on empirical claims of all sorts of kinds, and, you know, without any evidence.

I have a paper specifically on this, where I do try to look up the evidence and it turns out that the evidence is not support, he's claims.

Or to the best of my ability, right? The evidence suggested you can be perfectly happy even if you're like this, you know, demoralizing in the meeting, which is, of course, a marked yes sense point.

So when he talked about the subjugated housewife in the Indian context based on his experiences of living there and working there, he's point was that it's possible to be a lower cast woman.

They've a life that, you know, we and our average towers would judge demoralizing in the meeting and bad, and nonetheless, you know, have a firm that she's living in great life and she wouldn't change anything and so on.

That's the whole motivation for, for, for, send, right?

Send also doesn't give, like, tournament empirical evidence, but at least he's been on location.

But one just denies that without offering any evidence at all in support of his claim, which is, strikes me as, surprising.

Yeah, I mean, I just want to follow up on the example of the analogy with probability because, I mean, the idea sort of, and I guess this is the way the experimental philosophy tradition works, which I just don't find a lot of appealing.

So I'm going to start with an ordinary language concept, and you focus to the least thing what that is.

But I don't see that there'd be any reason to think that there's a coherent concept of well-being that's underlying the ordinary language.

Just as there's no coherent concept of probability that you can listen to that way.

And so, I mean, that's sort of a negative, I guess, arguments that maybe that's what's persuaded you not to take that sort of metaphilosophical position.

That's a part of it.

And we, in fairness, so some are going to see this, right?

So he, he recognizes, yeah, huge gap between that stringent.

Well, there might be some sort of reflective equilibrium, right?

And we can't just doing by listing assertions and like checking them off, we have to make some sort of judgments about, like, which is a core concept, which one isn't.

So, you know, yeah, there's a procedure for doing this.

I mean, it's not, it's not a silly idea, right?

It's not a silly idea at all.

But I think it's a push a little bit.

Are there specific reasons for thinking that the concept of well-being that you would arrive at by that procedure is in coherent?

Like I can't imagine filling out the argument.

If you try to solicit a concept of probability that you get something that's in coherent, that they're sort of well-known, heuristics that we use.

So, sort of reasoningfully to something that can't digitalize to the way the people need the access to probability.

And so, with well-being, is there something like that research?

Here's reasoning about what being that we know is subject to look from a more formal kind of view or clear fallacies.

So that if you try to use sort of ordinary membership assumptions of well-being, you'll end up running into this.

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting.

So I could see that being true.

I'm fully satisfied that it's going to turn out to be true.

I don't know anyone who's done the serious sort of scientific study about that.

That seems like something you could do.

I mean, what they do find that people have done this is a great deal of disagreement, right?

They certainly don't find people agreeing on all these judgments.

There are differences.

And I imagine that if you look at this, you might find like cultural differences too, right?

There might be systematic ways in which people make different judgments.

All of that would be interesting from a scientific point of view.

And it might also be closely relevant for at least some philosophical projects.

And I guess it's everything that I'm saying.

So how radical are the implications of your argument or the status of moral philosophy?

The reason I don't like, I ask is because it seems like the standard argument in an ethics paper is something like,

there's some thought I experimented.

Here's some intuitions and it's sort of taken for granted that we won't generally have that intuition.

And it seems like you'd be pointing out like, look, that means empirical support, right?

And so that's an empirical claim.

It seems like the status of moral philosophy right now is that the vast majority of arguments in the field are missing something very fundamental for the argument to work.

So that would seem to suggest that there's something really profound and wrong with the way moral philosophy is proceeding right now.

Yeah.

Is that what you want to say here?

Yeah.

Not.

I have a similar thought, specifically related to intuition, intuition, and values, and ethics,

without going out of natural traits.

To say, like, well, it's test to see if anybody has this intuition.

It's other than, like, the small group of philosophers who discuss the movements themselves.

Yeah.

The intuition is very interesting.

Because none of these, like, official views give any weight at all to intuition, right?

Summary doesn't mention intuitions.

And I find that many moral philosophy context people do nothing but confront theories with their own private intuition.

So that's another sort of, you have to be using, so it's the judgements about those things.

But how is that different from just having it?

You need themselves as an indicator of, like, the majority or something that's certainly conceivable.

But maybe I should clarify that, you know, I do intend this to be, like, relatively radical.

I'm not making any claims about, like, institutional organization, right?

So I'm not saying we should shut down philosophy departments and I'll move into the psychology department or the other way around, right?

I'm not talking about that sort of thing at all.

I think it's, I think the philosophy and science are, like, distinct activities.

I'm glad their pursuit is such in universities or whatever.

I do think we should cross these boundaries more often.

Of course, you know, preaching to the choir here, you guys already do, right?

But I think we should do this more often.

And I do think that a large chunk of moral and social and political philosophy really ought to be completely rewritten,

or at least confronted with, like, actual evidence.

I mean, seminar so often where I feel like the entire seminar is about, like, some empirical claim.

But no one is like making the slightest effort to confronted with evidence.

And so to the point where I shut up now, right, because I'm asking the same question and, like, every seminar.

You know, isn't that an empirical question?

Like, is there any evidence about that? Have you looked at this?

And it gets boring to repeat yourself.

But, yeah, I mean, if you take this sort of use here, say, I think, you know,

we really have to do moral philosophy in a quite different way.

Do you know of much testing on maybe really crucial cases and ethics?

I think I've come across some of the, like, drowning talent type cases,

actually not because of the trailing cases were not done.

So kind of cross cultural.

Yes.

The empirical philosophy has been done.

The experimental philosophers have done great work on, on all sorts of thought experiments, right,

where they confront people with thought experiments.

So for, you know, metaphors of cold reasons,

I don't think at the end of the day that that sort of question is as interesting,

as the question of, like, what does this concept do for us?

So I'm more with Aristotle and Griffin here than with Sumner and Bud War.

But to the extent that philosophers are depending on empirical claims about

people's intuitions and how they apply these concepts and whatever.

This beginning to be research out there that you can tap into.

There are methodologists that are perfectly established that you could just borrow off the shelf.

If you want to do the study yourself, and again, at the minimum,

what we should expect from philosophers who are committed to, like,

articulating their assumptions and defending them and so on,

is that people flag the assumptions they're making without any evidence?

This is just a follow-up to the probability thing.

I started thinking about, in the case of developing probability theories,

we know that a big role was playing games of chance and things.

Well, you really had a new job of those supposed to do,

and then you could use the applications to then refine and get a concept that would do those jobs.

Is there any way to hope for something maybe not as mathematically a particular pose that?

But that one, you don't like that from well being.

And what I was thinking of from your talk about library, the caregivers,

and things, there must be a lot of stuff they've worked about details

that make a difference in the right way.

And I'm wondering if, I mean, that's just one sort of thing.

But one sort of thing we might learn for, and again,

the psychology test would just say this, it's good.

That is one thing, but sort of specifics about how to make things better

and our ways we can pick up things from which will those that seem to work

and which ones don't.

That might be something that could do a job.

And nowadays, to what case of chance did from probability.

Yeah, that's great. This is exactly the right question to ask, right?

So you're exactly right. I hadn't thought through this analogy properly,

but in the case of games or channels, there was specific questions.

Like, how many times do you have to do this to get an even chance of winning this price or whatever?

And so they're very clear to think to questions that people were trying to address.

And they developed the theory in order to answer those sorts of questions,

and then there's like some degree of empirical testing you could do to check, right?

Certain of some of those assumptions.

And so the question to ask then is, what are the analogous questions in the context of being?

What are the challenges that we need of philosophical count to address?

It's a philosophical count is completely idle.

Then we can go off and explore it in some other way,

but there are presumably as philosophers where committed,

I think, to the idea that there are real judgments out there that in John,

which is certainly what I've argued, and sort of getting a clear handle on with those questions,

are would be a fantastic first step toward figuring out what sort of criteria the proper account

have to satisfy.

Yeah, great. Thank you.

And that kind of case would be very different from the sort of troll-in problem,

kind of cases, right?

Yeah.

Could you say, well, I mean, it's a kind of rigid context,

and you wouldn't know of the count, right?

And see, you have a concept and you put it in the plug,

and what can you do for you as opposed to using these sort of counter-in terms?

Yeah, so it's a very different project, really.

So, you know, of course, the troll-in case is now being studied for so long,

so there are lots of different wrinkles on it.

But you know, very often the object there is the figure out,

like, under what circumstances people say,

it's okay to pull the trigger and under what circumstances it isn't,

and then you vary all the different details.

You vary the number of people, and you vary the scenario,

and you push in the one scenario, and you pull in the other.

But you get a good hand along the judgments that people make.

And that's a fine research project,

but it's a little different from the one you're suggesting here,

which tracks me as really kind of more promising.

If your question is, like, how are we to assess these alternative,

philosophical accounts of well-being, for example?

So, just a general comment on your project,

the whole approach actually might be worth a point.

You make it yourself this idea, which is the project actually

of confronting intuition with empirical justification.

It might actually, and there's evidence for this.

It might actually have, as a beneficial side effect,

addressing the gender imbalance in philosophy.

Because there's evidence that I'm thinking, like,

researching, lesbian, and, in fact, in medical sciences and

association who has done studies, that the people who tend to continue

for us, we have the ones that share, come dominant to issues.

And it just turns out that young men are more likely to share

a dominant intuition than young women.

And so there's a way, which challenging the authority to intuition

might actually be a direct source of that, and make it a bit busy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. In the sciences, I mean, over the course of the 20th century,

something in the trend was definitely a way from

intuitions. We started off with like introspective psychology and just

noticeable differences, whatever. We completely abandoned that and went to

like empirical testing and whatever. And I guess what I'm what I'm

advocating in a way is the same sort of procedure and philosophy where we

move away from lions on the dominant intuitions. And yet to the extent that

moving away from them will also make the discipline more welcoming for

wider population. That would certainly be a massive, unexpected,

positive benefit. And there would be this feedback loop because I was

talking about how like this is one of those cases where the lack of diversity

and the professions are real problem, right? If everyone's the same, everyone's

going to have more or less the same intuition. It's going to look as though

everyone agrees. The case in point is the experience machine where

you know, those exist something like surely you wouldn't plug in, right?

And I don't know how many seminars and classes I attended where somebody says,

you know, I wouldn't put it plug in. Would you plug in? I don't think so,

right? And everyone around the table agrees. But then at some point fully

put a regard who was on a grad student at UNC came up the idea of like

polling people and poll these PhD students. Or undergrad, sorry,

and what he found was that Nosek wasn't at all right. Lots of people are willing

to plug in. So you get younger people. Anyway, this is not surprising, right?

Young people have been known to like do drugs and things that alter

experiences young people play a computer game that are increasingly

vivid. But the other thing that he found was that the responses are very strongly

responsive to the framing effects. So how you ask the question has a huge effect

on what people's responses are. And that's also relevant, right? If you're in the

philosophy of setting, you always frame the question the same way the way Nosek did it

back in 1970, he was at young three. You know, you've only tested one framing, right?

And you can't know one of the basis of your intuitions that things would be different if

the question had been asked differently. But now we know because the regard did this study, right?

And that told us a lot about intuitions or responses to this sort of scenario. And it's

certainly relevant. Again, those sort of empirical studies don't logically entail

any false, of course, series. But because claims about intuitions, figure, importantly,

and also some arguments, the truth of those claims are certainly relevant to, you know,

that self-nuts of the argument. So I'm curious to know whether you've convinced any

economists with these arguments, because it made a difference to the ways my concerns about this

or thinking about it. Two big questions. So I'm thinking about maybe everybody knows this,

but like the logical positivist when they met had like a list of propositions that we're going to

discuss. And then they took a vote before the discussion and a vote again afterwards and each individual

was color coded. And so in the little minutes, they're like dots representing each individual,

you can track. We can track now, hundred years later, in real time, like one kind of change

is mind on some particular proposition. You know, I guess that I should have done something like that

when I started with this, right? Yeah, I don't really know. It's also there, yes,

no, and you can just divide it into propositions and as any sense.

Yeah, exactly. No, in some sense, right. And then there's this general phenomenon where people will say,

no, no, and then they'll switch, and I'll say, but of course, that's what I've always said.

And so you have to be very careful if you want to track how people changes. Just about the

economists, you didn't ask about philosophers. You want to know what philosophers? Oh, yeah, I

don't know if I've changed minds of any philosophers. I have some empirical evidence, but the paradox

courses that if you don't pay attention to empirical evidence, then empirical evidence works

sway you in persuading you into taking empirical evidence.

Could you speak up just a little bit? I just wish you were very interested in some of the points that

you made last night at his other lecture, and I'm most of you were there, but of course, today

it was very different. And still, the two things I related, the science of all being in science

of happiness, both science of happiness, definitely more empirical. So,

can you just be some of your points again? So, to bring things up for people to ponder on, not just

to focus too much on what you're saying today and not and forget some of the stuff that you

have mentioned. The empirical findings from the psychology of happiness, that sort of stuff.

So, some one thing that's relevant actually is sort of these findings. So, one of the things

that I talked about yesterday for those of you weren't there were the empirical findings that

cohere with like pre-existing expectations, right? And empirical findings that don't. And one of the

things that surprises people are these findings on health, where whether health and happiness

are correlated depends on how you understand health and how you measure it. If you look at

people's subjective conceptions of how healthy they are, there is a strong relationship between

how health they are, say they are and how happy they are. But if you look at how many diagnoses

they have, there are no effects. So, he many studies. So, we're remarkably weak effect

between like the objectively assessed health state and happiness. And that's interesting.

Right? If you're a philosophical project involves defending an account of well-being,

where well-being is constituted by happiness. And you're doing this on the basis that you think

people use the word happiness in this way. What you're finding is that the concept as the

psychologist uses it anyway, gets applied very differently from the way the ordinary people,

or you know, and philosophers would use that term. Those sorts of things seem relevant to whole

number of philosophical projects. So, that's really a part of it. So, yesterday I focused mainly

on the ways in which the philosophy mattered to the, to the sciences, and I fleshed it out in

some detail. And what I was trying to do here was also turn the case over as if we're

making a case on the other direction. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's what.

So, sorry if I'm interesting again. So, how consider you to abandon the idea that there's a

single unitary concept. So, I know in life a literature on emotions. So, Parker, for example,

that's taken the line. Look, there's just not a natural kind. The correspondence to emotions.

There's several different things that scientists study, which we sort of routinely call

emotions, nor an ordinary or an ordinary language. You can distinguish or different types of things

that fall under this different level. But there's no single thing that captures all of the things

that are ordinary language concepts applies to. So, for happiness is this similar kind of

move the sort of a multi-dimensional concept or there's several different aspects of it. And then

when you try to measure what will be in your strength, measure all of them, combine them in

some way. Yeah. There's a similar trend in positive psychology, where I can, the early

days, 100 years ago, people imagine that happiness and satisfaction were the same thing for

example. And so, they use these terms interchangeably. And then at some point in the 60s,

people started looking seriously at responses with these different questions. And what they found

was that the correlations were not as high as they had expected. And they drew the conclusion

then that happiness and satisfaction are really two different things that correlate some,

but not perfectly. In the case of health, when you look at correlations like the ones we were just

talking about and you get like very different correlations based on whether you're measuring it

in the one way or the other way, the temptation there is to say that there are really two different

concepts of health. That we need to distinguish between. And so, their general trend is for concepts

like multiply into into many. And that's good. When it comes to well-being, of course,

like one kind of job, we want the concept of well-being to do, is in the context of ethics.

Right? So if you are up a utilitarian, for example, if you're committed to the idea

that there is that unitary thing of well-being that you have, then that's comparable across people,

such that you could average across individuals or like add it up and maximize it in some way.

And so this is where I like the job you want the concept to do is kind of, you know,

have exactly as kind of forced certain kinds of concepts and how this is going to play out,

you know, I have no real idea. But at this stage, the most important thing is that it

be clear on what's related to what and what's relevant to what, you know, that's certainly a first step.

Yeah, thanks.

Okay, I think we're actually a very, two, three.

Okay, so before we talk, we'll do the fact of swagger, swagger, swagger,

tag.

Thank you for your speaker.

Thank you.