Thank you for your comments, Max and John. They inclined me to be quite a bit more favourable to the paper. I still have mixed feelings: while I respect the urge the move a stale conversation on, I don’t think the authors provide new object-level reasons to do so. They do provide a raw (implicit?) appeal for others, as their peers, to update in their direction, but I’m sceptical that’s what philosophy should involve.
while I respect the urge the move a stale conversation on, I don’t think the authors provide new object-level reasons to do so.
If adequate object-level reasons were already provided for something, but a field hasn’t updated on those reasons, then what should a field do?
Two ideas that come to mind:
Summarize and/or signal-boost the existing reasons.
Write a paper speculating about why, psychologically or sociologically, the field hasn’t updated enough, in the hope that this will cause the field to reflect on its mistakes and change.
The Utilitas paper falls in the first category. (It does summarize / signal-boost past psychological accounts of why people have put too much weight on anti-repugnant-conclusion intuitions; but it doesn’t offer new explanations of why people didn’t update on those past psychological accounts and other arguments.)
Regardless of the merits of the second category, I’m not keen on the idea of getting rid of the first category, because I think one of the bigger reasons the world’s institutions are failing today, and one of the bigger reasons science is dysfunctional, is an over-emphasis on advancing-the-frontiers-of-knowledge over summarizing-and-synthesizing-what’s-known within science and academia.
Thank you for your comments, Max and John. They inclined me to be quite a bit more favourable to the paper. I still have mixed feelings: while I respect the urge the move a stale conversation on, I don’t think the authors provide new object-level reasons to do so. They do provide a raw (implicit?) appeal for others, as their peers, to update in their direction, but I’m sceptical that’s what philosophy should involve.
If adequate object-level reasons were already provided for something, but a field hasn’t updated on those reasons, then what should a field do?
Two ideas that come to mind:
Summarize and/or signal-boost the existing reasons.
Write a paper speculating about why, psychologically or sociologically, the field hasn’t updated enough, in the hope that this will cause the field to reflect on its mistakes and change.
The Utilitas paper falls in the first category. (It does summarize / signal-boost past psychological accounts of why people have put too much weight on anti-repugnant-conclusion intuitions; but it doesn’t offer new explanations of why people didn’t update on those past psychological accounts and other arguments.)
Regardless of the merits of the second category, I’m not keen on the idea of getting rid of the first category, because I think one of the bigger reasons the world’s institutions are failing today, and one of the bigger reasons science is dysfunctional, is an over-emphasis on advancing-the-frontiers-of-knowledge over summarizing-and-synthesizing-what’s-known within science and academia.
Cf. Holden Karnofsky’s account of science.