I really appreciate your work, Richard, and over the last few years, I’ve loved the opportunity to work on some foundational problems myself. Increasingly, though, I’d like to see more philosophers ignore foundational issues and focus on what I think of as “translational philosophy.” Is anyone going to give a new argument for utilitarianism that significantly changes the credences of key decision-makers (in whatever context)? No, probably not. But there are a million hard questions about how to make existing policies and decision-making tools more sensitive to the requirements of impartial beneficence. I think the model should be projects like Chimpanzee Rightsvs., say, the kinds of things that are likely to be published in top philosophy journals.
I don’t have the bandwidth to organize it myself right now, but I’d love there to be something like a “Society for Translational Philosophy” that brings like-minded philosophers together to work on more practical problems. There’s a ton of volunteer labor in philosophy that could be marshaled toward good ends; instead, it’s mostly frittered away on passion projects (which I say as someone who has frittered an enormous amount of time away on passion projects; my CV is chaos). A society like that could be a very high-leverage opportunity for a funder, as a small amount spent on infrastructure could produce a lot of value in terms of applicable research.
I really appreciate your work, Richard, and over the last few years, I’ve loved the opportunity to work on some foundational problems myself. Increasingly, though, I’d like to see more philosophers ignore foundational issues and focus on what I think of as “translational philosophy.” Is anyone going to give a new argument for utilitarianism that significantly changes the credences of key decision-makers (in whatever context)? No, probably not. But there are a million hard questions about how to make existing policies and decision-making tools more sensitive to the requirements of impartial beneficence. I think the model should be projects like Chimpanzee Rights vs., say, the kinds of things that are likely to be published in top philosophy journals.
I don’t have the bandwidth to organize it myself right now, but I’d love there to be something like a “Society for Translational Philosophy” that brings like-minded philosophers together to work on more practical problems. There’s a ton of volunteer labor in philosophy that could be marshaled toward good ends; instead, it’s mostly frittered away on passion projects (which I say as someone who has frittered an enormous amount of time away on passion projects; my CV is chaos). A society like that could be a very high-leverage opportunity for a funder, as a small amount spent on infrastructure could produce a lot of value in terms of applicable research.