Author: William Payne

In ethical theory, we can understand pluralism as the view that there is a plurality of fundamentally good things. Traditionally, ethicists have tried to analyze right and wrong action in terms of a single fundamental underlying kind of value. We can call this kind of approach ethical monism. For utilitarians that single value is happiness, for Kantian respect for persons theorists, it is the value of the person. Ethical Pluralism allows that there may be multiple kinds of fundamental and irreducible value in the world. Happiness and respect for persons might be among these, but there may be others yet. But it doesn’t take morality to be a matter of picking or choosing among basic moral values.

Let’s think a bit about how ethical pluralism differs from moral relativism. According to Moral Relativism, what makes something right relative to a group is just that it is deemed to be right by that group. Views that take morality to be matter of authority, whether of the individual, a culture or God, all suffer the same basic defect. They render right and wrong entirely arbitrary. If someone or some group gets to decide what’s right and wrong, then anything can be right or wrong. According to Cultural Moral Relativism, whatever a culture deems to be morally right is right relative to it. So, if our culture says that homophobia, sexism, and racism are fine, then they are what is right relative to our culture and that’s the end of it. If some people don’t like it, that’s just too bad. Moral Relativism denies them any objective standpoint from which to complain or any possibility of providing reasons for changing things. Complaints about the oppressiveness of the dominant group amount to nothing more than the whining of losers. The group that dominates is perfectly well within its rights to dominate on relativist thinking. This hardly sounds like a plausible account of social justice. But it is straightforwardly entailed by Moral Relativism and that’s one reason why Moral Relativism is an awful ethical theory.

This much is just a bit of review of problems for relativism and other views that make morality a matter of say so. But notice how Ethical Pluralism avoids this defect. According to Ethical Pluralism, fundamental ethical values are real. The importance of happiness comes with the existence of pleasure and pain. The value of respect for persons comes with the existence of persons. This doesn’t depend on the whim or say-so of any authority.

Suppose morality doesn’t depend on the say-so of cultures, God, or any other individual or group. On this view goodness is “out there” in the realm of things to be discovered. It needn’t be “way out there,” like goodness in some cosmic sense or goodness for the universe at large. We’re just interested in goodness for human beings and this might have lots to do with the human condition. So, let’s set aside the relativist’s claim that goodness is decided by us and ask what else goodness for humans might be. In doing so, we take goodness to be an appropriate object for inquiry, not merely a matter of custom, something somebody gets to decide, or a tool for tyranny. We have some evidence to guide us in this inquiry and it includes all of our varying perspectives on what is good (the more the better). But just as in the sciences, our evidence is fallible and needs to be tested, both against other evidence and the explanatory power of theory.

From the 17^th through the 19^th centuries, the Holy Grail in ethical theorizing was to find a single, rationally defensible criterion of right action. This quest was dominated by utilitarians like Bentham and Mill, and respect for persons theorists like Kant. Both theoretical approaches are value monist, that is, they take there to be just one thing that has value fundamentally. For the utilitarian it is happiness that matters and the goal is to formulate a single law of morally right action that aims at maximizing happiness. For Kant it is the good will, or the dignity of the person that matters, and the goal is to establish a single moral law that properly captures what it means to respect the value of the person.

The utilitarian might start with the idea that an action is right if it produces the greatest amount of happiness of any available action. But this clearly conflicts with respect for persons as we can see I cases like this one: Suppose Bob goes to his doctor for a check up and his doctor finds him in perfect health. The doctor also notices that Bob is a rare perfect match for several other patients of his who are in desperate need of organ transplants. It is clear to Bob’s doctor, a utilitarian, that he can dramatically increase the overall happiness in the world if he quietly kills Bob with an undetectable heart attack inducing drug and then harvest his organs to save his other patients.

There are various moves a utilitarian might make to try to address this case, but there are more subtle cases yet where Utilitarianism seems to conflict with respect for persons. So, it looks like we can’t coherently sign on to both a utilitarian and a Kantian criterion of right action as true since they will conflict in interesting ways. Utilitarian standards of right action tend to be logically incompatible with standards like Kant’s Categorical Imperative. If what we are looking for is a single criterion of right action that is based on a single kind of ultimate ethical value, it looks like we have to pick a single winner among competing monist ethical theories. But perhaps this sets the wrong kind of goal for ethical theory.

To moral pluralist thinks there are multiple kind of fundamental moral value. We can competing monist theories like utilitarianism and respect-for-persons to be literally true (since they are logically inconsistent). But there is nothing logically incoherent about taking happiness and respect for persons to both be good in fundamental ways. And there may be other plausible candidates for fundamental goodness. Happiness and respect were just the ones that got most of the attention in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Since then, feminist philosophers have argued that we should recognize a fundamental kind of value in caring relationships. Environmental ethicists have argued that we should recognize a fundamental kind of value in the natural world. Hindus and Buddhists have long suggested that there is a kind of fundamental value in consciousness.

Perhaps this short list is long enough. Or perhaps it is already too long. A moral value is only fundamental if it can’t be explained and supported in terms of some other fundamental value. So, if caring relationships matter just because they bring happiness to human lives, then we already have this kind of value covered when we recognize happiness as a kind of fundamental value. But it is not at all clear that happiness fully explains the value of caring relationships. There are issues to explore here. In any case, kinds of fundamental value might be rare, but still plural.

So, what should ethical theory say about cultures that differ in the fundamental values that shape their customs and codes? Monist approaches to ethical theory would insist that we pick winners in this kind of situation. But should we? Certainly, in some cases we should. The fundamental values of Nazi culture were racist through and through. Good ethical theory should not be accommodating this kind of cultural diversity at all. Recall that our most compelling argument against Moral Relativism was that it is committed to accepting that racism is right relative to racist societies and our condemnation of racism has no more moral force than their endorsement of it.

But what about cases like Confucian cultures that give kinship relationships a higher priority than respect for persons? The more individualistic cultures of the West would favor respect for persons. Must we pick a winner here? Monist ethical theories would insist. But pluralism about ethical value offers us a few other options. The ethical pluralist can say that both cultures are structured around worthy fundamental values and neither unjustly favors one kind of fundamental value at the expense of another. Or a pluralist might allow that some ways of prioritizing worthy fundamental ethical values really are better than others, but hold that there is no strict rational formula for working out which is best. Because we have a plurality of worthy fundamental ethical values and these are not reducible to each other or anything more basic, rational methods of inquiry might not be up to settling the matter and the best we can hope for is good judgment. But however we settle these issues, pluralism about fundamental ethical value opens some new avenues for explaining a broader range of cultural diversity without legitimizing the sorts of obvious injustice moral relativism would condone.

So why is oneness so special? Why would philosophers like Kant and Mill think it so important to have just one kind of fundamental ethical value? One powerful appeal of oneness is that is allows for a high degree of precision and rigor. Bentham even hoped that we would one day have a calculus of utility that would allow us to rigorously prove which actions will maximize utility and therefore be right. The powerful appeal of oneness here is that it allows us to completely replace human judgment with rational calculation. We have yet to outgrow this intellectual lust for reduction. Many of us still want to see the sciences as in some way reducible to just one, physics. But philosophers of science have been raising a steady stream of questions about our reductionistic inclinations over the past few decades. And even physics itself appears to be stuck with a kind of force pluralism. The fundamental forces, according to our best theory, include nuclear, gravitational, and electrical forces. We have specific theories that explain the behavior of things if we abstract away from other forces and focus only on gravity. And we have specific theories that explain the electrical behavior of things, but only when we ignore other forces that might be at play. Similarly, some version of Utilitarianism might give us the ethical truth about the value of happiness at least when no other important ethical values are relevant. And some interpretation of Kant might give us ethical principles that get at the truth so long as we abstract away from ethical values other than the moral dignity of persons. Plurality in both ethics and physics denies us the satisfaction of a single specific formula that accounts for absolutely everything. But that shouldn’t bother us too much. I rather doubt that this kind of intellectual satisfaction is really worthy of human beings.

This paper is on the program for the 2026 Northwest Philosophy Conference in Portland Oregon.

There is a line of thinking that seems to lead some faculty on campus to think that philosophers, well perhaps mainly myself, are pushing a “philosophy centric” view of critical thinking in our efforts to build a new program of institutional learning. The complaint is based on something like this:

Philosophy has just one among many equally good ways of understanding and teaching critical thinking.

Something close to this opinion has been the source of some pushback to the articulation and definition of critical thinking crafted over the past year or so by the critical thinking ILO working group. Most recently, this was the main objection raised in a CAC meeting on 5/20, where the minutes record committee members as concerned that the current draft “feels philosophy-centric.”

What I have yet to hear is any clear explanation or argument in support of this opinion. So, I want to consider what it would take to reasonably support this opinion. I’m looking for a sympathetic interpretation and argument for this concern, so do let me know if I miss that mark. A few pertinent questions stand out:

• How do philosophers understand critical thinking?
• What are the alternative ways of understanding critical thinking (in some detail)?
• How do these various conceptions compete? (or do they complement each other?)
• Are these alleged conceptions equally good (as a foundation for a campus wide ILO)?

Clarification and support for the “feels philosophy-centric” complaint will require answers to each of these questions. We aren’t in a position to take up the second two questions until we have decent answers to the first two. But I struggle with both of these.

I’m not really sure philosophy has a discipline specific perspective on critical thinking. Philosophers do have discipline specific methods, but these are not the subject matter of courses in critical thinking. Critical thinking as it is understood and taught in critical thinking courses like PHIL&115 is focused on general reasoning skills. There is a well-developed curriculum for courses like this and a whole genre of textbooks taking various approaches. But while these courses are usually taught in philosophy programs, philosophy is not part of the critical thinking curriculum.

A quick survey of the exercises used to instill various critical thinking skills and qualities of mind in standard Critical Thinking texts will reveal lots of different everyday reasoning scenarios. So, being well acquainted with the curriculum taught in critical thinking courses, I struggle with the notion that this curriculum represents a specifically philosophical way of understanding critical thinking. This notion just doesn’t hold up to the evidence that can be readily examined in any critical thinking textbook. And so, I worry that the “feels philosophy centric” complaint betrays a lack of familiarity with well-developed critical thinking curriculum.

Next, what are the alternative conceptions of critical thinking utilized in disciplines other than philosophy? The Critical Thinking ILO group started out by collecting lots of data from faculty across campus about this. By and large we got brief discussion of discipline specific applications of some of the critical thinking skills that are already part of the broader curriculum taught in critical thinking classes. Where the supposed alternative ways of conceptualizing critical thinking turn out to be just special focus on some specific skills rather than others, we aren’t looking at competing conceptions of critical thinking. The relation is rather one of part to whole. In various disciplines faculty often adopt narrower conceptions of critical thinking that focus on the specific problems and methods of their discipline. What gets left out is the broader whole, the full range of reasoning skills that are applicable across many disciplines, careers, and aspects of leading a becoming life. A more developed critical thinking curriculum, as we teach on PHIL&115, introduces students to an integrated suite of general reasoning skills, rather than an approach specific to philosophy or any other discipline.

So, are there alternative conceptions of critical thinking that aren’t already part of standard critical thinking curriculum? I would be eager to learn about these. I have yet to hear much about any. But clarifying how any alternative ways of understanding critical thinking are really in competition with established critical thinking curriculum would require a good understanding of the existing critical thinking curriculum. I haven’t seen much inclination to develop this on the part of those who complain that our current Critical Thinking ILO draft feels philosophy centric.

Of course, we can’t offer a fully developed critical thinking curriculum in context of a campus wide ILO. We need to try to distill the broader curriculum down to some vital core that does apply broadly across disciplines. Even at that, it may take some effort for people unfamiliar with that broader critical thinking curriculum to see how that vital core applies in their own discipline. Along the way we will continue to deliberate about just how we should frame that vital core for a campus wide outcome. But it would really help if we would all get familiar with the broader more comprehensive understanding of critical thinking that constitutes standard developed curriculum in critical thinking.

So, if this is on the right track, then the argument for pushing back on pesky philosophers who are always advocating for their approach to critical thinking is misguided and based on a certain prejudice. Namely that there is some “philosophy centric” way of understanding critical thinking that is in some sort of tension with other ways of understanding critical thinking. Perhaps “prejudice” seems a loaded term in this context since this word is often associated with weighty matters of social justice. But the term does have a literal meaning which is illuminating across many other contexts. Prejudice is literally pre-judging, which in the context of critical thinking means judging some idea or argument prior to fully understanding it. This, of course, often spills over into judging people in the absence of understanding.

A basic principle of critical thinking is that we aren’t in a position to reasonably evaluate a view until we understand it (please note how this is embodied in the SEE model). I hope this helps us see how critical thinking is opposed to prejudice generally. Of course, beyond understanding we also want to make sure that we are applying appropriate standards in order to evaluate ideas and arguments on their own merits. Inquiry into what these are and how to apply them is a substantial part of the critical thinking curriculum. Understood literally, “Critical thinking” means thinking according to criteria. Familiarity with the critical thinking curriculum should make it clear that the criteria for thinking critically are things people have figured out through inquiry, not things that anyone just gets to decide on.

I think there is a powerful tendency on this campus (and probably many others) to sidestep the kind of critical thinking-based inquiry I’m trying to engage us in here and treat the matter how to understand critical thinking as simply one of “who gets to decide.” When we do this, we close down space for inquiry in favor of a power struggle. Our arguments no longer serve as arrangements of ideas we can learn from but instead are transformed into mere rhetorical bludgeons.

On the power struggle path, we can expect faculty to vie for ways of understanding critical thinking that fit their established practice. The conversation about critical thinking has taken this track on a few occasions, most recently at the above-mentioned meeting of the CAC. Personally, I find the power struggle path to be very stressful and unproductive. But aside from this personal complaint, the “who gets to decide” approach is ultimately a faculty centered approach. A student-centered approach would take a different path, first inquiring into what critical thinking skills students can benefit from the most and then thinking about how we can teach these effectively across the curriculum, ultimately building our program of institutional learning around this.

I suspect there are many issues on campus where less power struggle and more inquiry would be helpful to us all. I really hope that we engage in some inquiry into critical thinking in developing our critical thinking ILO. And I hope we will incorporate some of our improved understanding of critical thinking into how we treat each other. This could be a big step towards replacing some of the discord that pervades our lives both on campus and beyond with more productive and humanizing discourse.

Lies are untruths told with the intention to deceive. Lies are bad. Kant is well known for his moral argument against lying. Deception blocks us from acting on our own autonomous will. If I am deceived about the terms of a business deal, for instance, I will wind up doing something I really don’t want to do. This is why we prosecute fraud. Lying amounts to coercing a person through their own mind and coercion is a paradigm example of failing to respect a person.

According to Harry Frankfurt, bullshit is worse than lying. The difference between lying and bullshit is that the liar at least has enough regard for the truth to try to make his lies plausible and to hide his deviation from the truth if he can. Bullshit is untruth without the slightest regard for the truth. What makes bullshit worse, according to Frankfurt is that it undermines regard for the truth generally, both by example and practically. A liar, when caught, is ashamed of his deception precisely because he has regard for the truth in spite of his cheat. The bullshitter is shameless. Truth just doesn’t matter to the bullshitter. Truthfulness at large suffers as a result.

Perhaps there are contexts where we play at bullshitting, temporarily setting aside regard for the truth in favor of some idle amusement. Perhaps we should excuse a good deal of barstool bullshitting as relatively innocuous messing around. But then a bullshitters disregard for what is true can be deployed in quite pernicious ways.

Take, for example, the bullshit response of several Federal Administration officials, including our president, in the immediate aftermath of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Preeti in Minneapolis. Absent any credible evidence, these two were slandered as domestic terrorists posing threats to federal law enforcement agents, thus justifying their killing. Not only was evidence lacking, cell phone video pretty clearly refutes these allegations by high-ranking government officials.

This is bullshit with a point. The point of the blatant falsehoods pronounced by Greg Bovino, Kristy Noem, Steven Miller and Donald Trump in the face of clear evidence to the contrary is to assert the priority of the Trump Administration’s power over the truth. Demonstrating shameless disregard for truth is the point.

This assault on the truth is also an assault on our rights, liberty and democracy. Here’s the argument:

• Having rights, liberty and democracy requires the rule of law
• The rule of law requires a healthy regard for the truth
• So, having rights, liberty and democracy requires a healthy regard for the truth

This simple argument is logically valid, that is, it’s conclusion must be true if both of its premises are true. But we haven’t established the truth of the conclusion until we’ve explained why the premises are true.

The alternative to the rule of law is the rule of man. This amounts to one form of authoritarianism or another. Chaos might sound like a further alternative, but chaos, being inherently unstable, can only last until some strongman takes charge and then we are back to authoritarianism. As the rule of man, authoritarianism is not bound by any of the guarantees of rights and liberties embodied in the law, starting with the constitution. This explains why our first premise is true.

Next, there is no rule of law without a healthy regard for the truth. Any competent lawyer will tell you the law is administered on the basis of facts and law. Remove the facts, the truths, from this formula and there is no basis for applying the law in any effort to uphold our basic rights and liberties. The rule of law cannot survive the death of truth. Whatever the law happens to say, an artful bullshitter can present unlawfulness as though it were lawful. When the facts no longer matter, neither does the law. This is why our second premise is true.

So, it looks like our argument is both valid and sound. Now we have one clear reason to thinking that a healthy regard for the truth is essential to a free and open society where we can hope to enjoy rights and liberties.

The argument above is not the only strong conceptual link between basic regard for truthfulness and having a free and open society. It is just the one that is most relevant and clearly illustrated by the Trump administrations assault on Minneapolis. And, of course, healthy regard for the truth, while necessary, is not a sufficient condition for having a free an open society. It’s just the necessary condition for a free and open society that is being put under extreme pressure by the sort of bullshit we’ve seen from federal government officials recently.

In the din of social media rhetorical warfare, it is too easy to dismiss charges of authoritarianism in Trump’s governing style as mere politically motivated name calling. But this amounts to ignoring the reasons leading many to fear an authoritarian take over in the USA. And this is why it’s important to examine those reasons in detail. I’d love for the argument I’ve offering here to be flawed in some way. I’d sleep better if I could shake off the fear that my home, a land of the free, is sliding towards authoritarianism. I invite Donald Trump’s defenders to explain how my concern is irrational. Absent that, expect resistance.

This will not be a post about the meditative aspects of constructing proofs in symbolic logic (doing proofs is probably not the sort of meditative activity Zen masters will recommend). I’m rather interested in the Buddhist notion of non-attachment and how it applies to critical thinking.

Buddhism maintains that the cause of all suffering is attachment. This is the Second Noble Truth of Buddhism (the First Noble Truth is just the observation that there is suffering). I think this applies to belief and opinion as well as other kinds of attachment. When we are attached to a belief, we are likely to feel threatened when it gets questioned by someone who thinks differently. Now ego is involved, and the conflict is not so much between ideas as between believers.

We see attachment in the sometimes-lauded attitude of being “true to your beliefs.” On the face of it this sounds like an endorsement of dogmatism. This is not a good thing. Dogmatic attachment can present an insurmountable obstacle to liberation from a false view. This can be a significant source of suffering in itself. Of course, attachment to a false belief can lead us to do irrational things. But even when no untoward practical consequences follow, dogmatic attachment to a belief breeds defensiveness and hostility towards those who think differently. This is its own form of suffering. So, as critical thinkers, we should not be “true to our beliefs.” We should instead be committed to following the better reasons where they lead.

The Third Noble Truth of Buddhism holds that the way to cease suffering is to relinquish attachment. And the Fourth Noble Truth recommends an Eightfold Path for achieving this. The first step on the Eightfold Path is Right Understanding, or right vision. Here Buddhism is directly concerned with developing a clear understanding of reality. ‘a knowledge and vision of things as they really are’ (S.III,59). The Buddhist sutras go on to promulgate a number of more specific theses as parts of a true understanding of reality. These include recognizing the transitoriness of all things, the unity of self and world, and so forth. Critical thinkers may question the specific metaphysical principles that typify Buddhist world views, but Right Understanding endorses some clear critical thinking advice on the way to building a Buddhist understanding, including questioning assumptions and recognizing appearance as a fallible guide to truth. So, Buddhism incorporates a good deal of critical thinking.

It’s one thing for Buddhism to support critical thinking. The more ambitious suggestion I’d like to advance is that critical thinking itself can be understood as a kind of intellectual Buddhist practice. Intellectually, non-attachment means being open-minded and thinking critically. We may still wind up holding beliefs when the evidence and reasons warrant this. But there is a difference between holding a belief and being attached to it. we can hold a belief and remain prepared to modify our assessment of it when we encounter new evidence or argument. It’s just the clinging part that leads to suffering.

We are critical thinkers to the degree that we are committed to following the better reason. When I engage another’s argument with the singular aim of evaluating it on its own merits, I am practicing non-attachment. It may be difficult for a person to stay in this space. I suspect many skilled critical thinkers may follow through on their commitment to evaluate an argument fairly and yet feel a pang of grief when they find an argument against a view the like compelling. Or just as likely, an advanced critical thinker may still feel some anxiety over how to defend the preferred position. And yet, I have seen mature professional philosophers accept the complete demolition of their argument with grace and equanimity. That’s pretty Zen.

Personally, I have often found myself amused at discovering I’ve held some false philosophical opinion. A new philosophical insight can slap me with the sort of humorous incongruity people appreciate in a Dave Chappelle joke. This is why I’ve prefaced this note with an image of Budai, the laughing Buddha of the Chinese Chan tradition, from which Japanese Zen Buddhism developed. The intellectual enlightenment facilitated by Buddhist intellectual non-attachment is fun. That’s pretty much why I like doing philosophy.

People understand “getting comfortable with ambiguity” in different ways. That is, the phrase is ambiguous. And I’m not entirely comfortable with that, since on some readings of the phrase “getting comfortable with ambiguity” it isn’t always a good thing. For instance, sometimes what people mean by getting comfortable with ambiguity is just accepting that people understand things in different ways and being OK with that. Of course, people do understand things differently. This much is an inevitable consequence of people having their own minds. This much is fine. But in order to understand each other, we often have to disambiguate ambiguous language by clarifying and tracking our various usages. We don’t want to get too comfortable here, since tracking the various senses of ambiguous language is real work.

Simply being comfortable with ambiguity doesn’t move the needle on the sometimes-challenging project of clarifying and sharing our various ways of understanding words or phrases. So, there is a sense of “being comfortable with ambiguity” that can be a barrier to understanding others. If you and I understand expression in differing ways, I don’t understand you until I’ve inquired into how you understand that expression and tried to get clear on how my own understanding differs. So, ambiguity calls for inquisitive sharing.

Here we can see a sense of “getting comfortable with ambiguity” that is intellectually healthy and plays an integral part in shared inquiry. The way to get comfortable with ambiguity is to develop some skill at disambiguation. But the process of getting comfortable with ambiguity in this sense is not all that comfortable. It’s rather a hard-earned achievement that involves a fair amount of skill. We need to get in the habit of recognizing ambiguities that can be easily glossed over. Then we need to engage in some analysis of the different meanings that might be expressed by a word or a phrase. And then we need to track these in context.

For example, critical thinking students often struggle with the word “valid.” In everyday language, we often use this word to mean something like true. But even this is not so clear. If we are debating the fate of Palestinians in Gaza and your friend remarks out of the blue that the weather is beautiful today, it would be sarcastic to reply that he has a valid point. This reveals that everyday usage also carries some implication of relevance. But then we probably mean something different when we assure our upset friend that his feelings are valid. Feelings themselves aren’t true or false since they aren’t representations of the world one way or another. Here, “valid” means something more like appropriate. And then in critical thinking, we use the term “valid” to refer to a specific property of arguments. An argument is valid when its conclusion would have to be true if its premises are true. It’s often a bit of work to get a clear understanding of this definition of “valid.” One of the obstacles students often face is just tracking this usage and bearing in mind that “valid” in the context of logic and critical thinking has its own specific definition that isn’t the same as “valid” in everyday language.

Similar effort goes into achieving conceptual clarity throughout philosophical inquiry. We are often aiming for a better understanding of concepts we loosely appeal to in everyday life. Concepts like belief, rational, good, person, love, meaning, knowledge, justice, agency, free will. . . . The list is long. Philosophers become very adept at tracking clear analytic definitions of terms, understanding that many different definitions of the same word may be considered, tested, rejected, amended, or endorsed even in a single article. This is how conceptual analysis often goes. We try out, clarify, reject or revise many proposed definitions along the way to developing a clearer understanding of an interesting concept. Getting comfortable with ambiguity in ways that facilitate this process takes a good deal of critical thinking skill and attention.

Fortunately, it isn’t always important that we understand each other in precise detail. Everyday language carries lots of vagueness and ambiguity for a reason. A dash of vagueness and ambiguity lubricates many social interactions. In everyday life we require just enough clarity and precision to solve everyday problems, signal our objectives, and come to agreement about what to do. Seeking more clarity than needed for these purposes would be tedious. We are generally complacently comfortable with ambiguity when it doesn’t matter so much. However, it is also worth learning how to get comfortable with ambiguity through disambiguation and clarification when greater precision does matter. This is important for inquiry, including the sort of inquiry that leads to better understanding our friends and loved ones.

1.

We used to practice slavery, and many people thought this was OK. Doesn’t this case tell us that people can get morality wrong? If so, then morality is not subjective. 

Of course, our moral opinions are influenced by culture and societal norms. This is part of the explanation for what people think about morality.

People can, and often do, get things wrong. This is basic human fallibility. We recognize this clearly in cases like where everybody used to think the earth was flat, or cases we can recall in our own personal history where we just had a false belief about something (where you left your keys, etc.) So why would we make a special carve out for morality and take morality to be determined by opinion and people to be infallible? Why do we rush to abandon fallibilism in the case of morality?

Something being objective doesn’t mean that everyone will agree about it. Consider whether the Earth is flat, whether vaccines cause autism, or whether burning fossil fuels is causing climate change. There are objective answers to each of these questions and yet people do not agree. People used to disagree about slavery, that didn’t make this moral matter subjective. It just indicated that some people had a bit to learn. As soon as we take morality to be subjective, we give up on the idea of moral growth or having something yet to learn about what is right or wrong. I’d hope we’d begin to see by now that when this happens, it’s a holiday for bullies.

2.

Peoples’ moral beliefs and opinions are subjective. This much is just sociology. That’s not what is at issue in ethics. Ethics is about what moral opinions are most reasonable. Our beliefs and opinions about all sorts of things can get things wrong. We started the course with some observations about basic human fallibility. I still find it strange how quickly this is forgotten by many when the topic turns to morality. The view that morality is subjective makes every moral opinion as reasonable as the next. People may be attracted to this view for fear of being judged. But when fear of being judge drives our thinking, we ultimately undermine our own capacity for moral discernment. Inquiry can’t survive in this environment of fear. Critical thinking about morality gets muffled by the fear driven imperative to conform.

3.

It isn’t hard to find examples of where moral opinions seem to get morality wrong. Slavery is a stock example. Our government currently seems to think it is morally acceptable to blow up fishermen on the mere suspicion that they might be carrying drugs. These both look like clear cases of moral beliefs getting morality wrong. But for this to be possible there has to be some standard of what is and isn’t moral that isn’t subjective, just read off of people’s moral opinions.

There being objective moral truths doesn’t mean that everyone can (or even should) have the same view. This isn’t how inquiry works in any other realm. We hold diverse views about all sorts of things that are objective matters of fact. By sharing these views and taking critical feedback seriously we can often come to better views that get us closer to the truth. This is how science has worked, and it used to be how moral progressed worked as well. MLK was no moral relativist, he asked us to think critically and inquire into what is just and fair. When we stop doing this, everybody just agrees with themselves, and moral growth comes to a halt, or even backslides. I’d argue that we are witnessing this before our eyes. The white supremacists among us are perfectly happy with the idea that morality is subjective, so long as it works to empower them. And it’s doing just that.

If morality is objective, then it is possible for people’s subjective opinions to get morality wrong. If people disagree about what is moral, and they think there is some objective fact of the matter, this should lead them to think critically and learn from each other and from their mistakes. It is just the dogmatic view that morality is objectively what I think it is that leads people towards conflict and violence. This isn’t moral realism so much as dogmatism. We do see plenty of this kind of failure of critical thinking. But people being averse to thinking critically about morality doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. To the contrary, I think it is the morally right thing to do. Choosing conflict over critical thinking is a commonplace way of failing to respect people, and as Kant suggests, respect for persons is probably central to the moral truths we can discover. 

4.

I’m not sure how something can be both objective and subjective. The fact that people disagree doesn’t give us evidence that something is subjective. Is it even possible to disagree about something that is subjective (do we disagree about whether chocolate is better than vanilla? I think we all recognize that this is just a matter of taste). Generally, disagreement indicates that this issue is objective and someone just has the wrong view. It is only when we allow for this possibility that we stand a chance of learning from our mistakes.

5.

Lots of what is different among cultures isn’t really moral disagreement. For instance, I don’t think morality cuts one way or the other on the matter of burkas or bikinis. But then morality will indicate that women, like all people, should be treated with respect (and I’d submit that this remains a problem in both bikini cultures and burka cultures). But the more general point is that lots of cultural values are just that, cultural values. Sometimes these are connected in interesting ways to moral values (often underlying moral values that are broadly shared across cultures), but then sometimes not.

6.

Something being objective doesn’t mean that everyone will agree about it. Consider whether the Earth is flat, whether vaccines cause autism, when burning fossil fuels is causing climate change. There are objective answers to each of these questions and yet people do not agree. People used to disagree about slavery, that didn’t make this moral matter subjective. It just indicated that some people had a bit to learn. As soon as we take morality to be subjective, we give up on the idea of moral growth or having something yet to learn about what is right or wrong. I’d hope we’d begin to see by now that when this happens, it’s a holiday for bullies.

7.

That we use the words “right” and “wrong” not to refer to external realities or moral laws doesn’t mean that we are just creating moral values. A possibility you are overlooking here is that moral values are things we discover through reflecting on the kinds of being we are. This opens the door to a kind of moral realism where we can account for moral error and inquiry into morality and values. 

Subjectivism about morality leaves no room for taking the murderer’s values to be less reasonable than your own. I don’t think we are in such a desperate situation with morality. That the murderer extinguishes the life of a person and causes a great deal of suffering are factors that most of us take to be morally relevant. And not just because we have created anti-murder values for ourselves. Rather, I think most of us recognize our own moral worth and are keenly aware of the moral badness of causing suffering from our own experience as subjects. Moral values don’t have to be out there floating around in the universe for us to be able to discover (rather than create) them. We discover moral value within, as part of our nature as persons, and recognize moral obligations towards others in accordance with this.

Of course we form our own moral opinions. I’m not clear on how this amounts to forming moral values (any more than believing a wild-eyed conspiracy theory amounts to creating the facts that theory alleges, though I also worry lots of folks are losing track of the difference here as well).

This is one of my favorite bikes (I have 8 and they are all my favorites). This is the one I ride to places like this where I like to camp out in the woods. I can move freely around on this bike, but only because its mechanisms turn freely. This bike is a fully deterministic system. The wheels are determined to turn efficiently when I pedal them, but only because the drive train of the bike is clean, well lubricated and well adjusted. It is much harder for this bike to move around in the world if the gears are poorly adjusted, or if the bearings are worn out, the chain is dirty or rusty, the wheels aren’t true, etc. etc. This bike rolling freely and taking me where I want to go depends on several functional modules working well and being well integrated with each other. Whether the bike’s mechanisms function freely doesn’t depend on violating deterministic laws of motion. Nor would the bike function more freely if it could behave other than it is caused to behave. To the contrary, the bike rolling freely depends on it functioning in accordance with laws of nature. In particular, its functioning freely depends on causal inputs it receives when I do regular maintenance and repair.

A mechanism like this bike affords a helpful analogy for understanding how compatibilist and incompabilist conceptions of free will differ. Incompatibilists take having free will to be incompatible with causal determinism, the view that every event is causally determined in accordance with laws of nature given the prior state of the world. Every event includes our own actions. So according to causal determinism, when we make a choice and formulate a will to act in a particular way, we could not have made a different choice or acted differently. Our traditional western way of thinking about free will takes acting of our own free will to mean we could have chosen to act differently. This is known as the “libertarian” conception of free will (not to be confused with the political philosophy of the same name).

The libertarian view of free will takes the will to function independent of the broader causal fabric of the world. The will is conceived to be determined only by us as agents. This requires some philosophical understanding of how agents like us could be uncaused causes of our will and action. No viable theory of “agency causation” has emerged. Meanwhile, biology and neuroscience now provide a decent understanding of how causal biological processes do shape our will and action. So, the libertarian view of free will, as appealing as it is to our self-aggrandizing egos, is pretty-much dead in the water.

However, as far back as Hume, philosophers have proposed compatibilist conceptions of free will, ways of understanding what it means to have free will that are compatible with causal determinism.

On various compatibilist conceptions of free will, having free will is more like having (or perhaps being) a well-maintained bicycle, one that functions freely (which in turn allows you to ride far, efficiently and joyfully). So, what does this look like in more detail. We will need to build a picture of how the mind functions in formulating our will and motivating our choices and actions. Here’s a simplified model. We make our choices and formulate our will through the operation and interaction of a couple of mental modules. One generates representations of how things are in the world. Another generates motivating desires based on our tastes, values, and the things we care about. We then reflect on what matters to us most and how best to achieve that given what we believe. Through this deliberation process we formulate a will to act. 

What we’ve just described is basic belief/desire “folk psychology.” It should seem pretty familiar since we ordinarily explain peoples’ choices and actions in terms of what they believe and what they desire (hence “folk” psychology). There are three mental modules involved in this picture of will formation, the representational module (responsible for belief formation), the motivational module (responsible for desire formation based on the things you care about) and the deliberation module (responsible for integrating the other two in determining how to maximize desire satisfaction based on beliefs). For your mind to be functioning freely (like my favorite bicycles), is for each of these modules to be functioning well and interacting well with the others. Critical thinking is about tuning up your representational module (forming beliefs on the basis of the best reasons and evidence). Your desire generating module functions best when you critically reflect on what you care about, get clear on your values (ethical and otherwise), and generate desires in line with these (see Harry Frankfurt for more on this). You deliberate well when you formulate your will in line with beliefs that are the product of critical thinking and well considered desires that align with your values and the things that you care about. For our will to be free is just for our mind to be functioning well in each of these modes.

So, there you go. Free will, according to a compatibilist conception, isn’t about how you could have done otherwise, but rather it’s more like riding a bike. And what more joyful freedom could a person ask for!

I’m sure you see the limits of my analogy. My bike camping bike still requires a rider with a will. So, of course, you aren’t just like that bike. Your mind is more like an autonomous self-riding bike. We could frame the analogy in terms of more autonomously functioning mechanisms like weathervanes, but I like bikes.

The important point of the analogy still holds. Free will, on compatibilist conceptions, can’t be taken for granted as a built-in part of human nature (if there even is such a thing). Rather, free will, as an aspect of a freely functioning mind, is something we can attain to greater or lesser degrees depending how it is cultivated and nourished. Whether your mind functions freely, whether you have free will, has a great deal to do with the care it receives. The care and maintenance of the freely functioning mind includes lots of things like education, friends and family, community, health care, spiritual nourishment, economic opportunity (the ability to participate in the reciprocal “taking care of” that happens in healthy communities) and probably a good deal more. A society that doesn’t help to maintain all these things in good working order for its citizens will be a society of less freely functioning people with less free wills. At this point, the philosophy of free will leads us to broader issues of ethics, epistemology, moral psychology and political philosophy.

There is research on Critical Thinking, notably on how it can be taught effectively. Several key findings are reported in Jonathan Haber’s Critical Thinking (published by the MIT Press, several copies are available to check out in our Faculty Commons). In 1989 Robert Ennis outlined 4 possible approaches to teaching critical thinking as follows:

• The general approach, where Critical Thinking is taught as a set of general reasoning skills and dispositions in a dedicated course.
• Infusion, where Critical Thinking is taught across disciplines and Critical Thinking principles, skills and dispositions are made explicit.
• Immersion, where students are immersed in Critical Thinking through subject matter across disciplines but where Critical Thinking Principles, skills and dispositions are not made explicit.
• A mixed approach which includes dedicated instruction as in the general approach plus infusion or immersion across disciplines.

Two and a half decades later, a team of researchers led by Philip Abrami conducted a meta-analysis of subsequent research utilizing. This analysis of the substantial body of research conducted in the intervening two and a half decades produced some clear findings concerning how to most effectively teach critical thinking. Not surprisingly, the mixed approach, combining dedicated instruction in Critical Thinking as a set of general skills and dispositions is the most effective of improving student’s critical thinking. And the immersion approach is least effective.

While we have always thought of our approach to critical thinking in our legacy General Education program as the infusion approach, the lack of collaboration and professional development around critical thinking strongly suggests that what we have in fact been doing is closer to the immersion approach. No doubt this varies from instructor to instructor. But while the concept of infusion appears to presuppose that there is something that gets infused, we have never paid much attention to Ennis’ distinction between infusion and immersion. Given this lack of coordination, I suspect we have by and large defaulted to the later.

Our current effort at building a new program of Institutional Learning has aimed to bring us more in alignment with what Ennis calls an infusion approach. This is still not the most effective way to teach critical thinking skills, but it seems to be the best we are capable of given the remoteness of the prospect of adopting a Critical Thinking course requirement at the institutional level. While well short of ideal in terms of critical thinking education, adopting a well-developed infusion model would be a big step for us in terms of making critical thinking a meaningful part of a BC education.

A further unsurprising finding of the meta-analysis led by Abrami is that student mastery of critical thinking skills is substantially enhanced when faculty engage in significant professional and curriculum development focused on Critical Thinking. From the report,

When instructors receive special advanced training in preparation for teaching CT skill, or when extensive observations on course administration and instructor’s CT teaching practices were reported, the impacts of the interventions were greatest. By contrast, the impacts of CT were smallest when the intention to improve students’ CT was only listed among course objectives and there were no efforts at professional development or elaboration of course design and implementation.

Abrami et al. quoted in Haber

As we reimagine our approach to teaching Critical Thinking across the college, I hope we will develop more deliberate and collaborative efforts at professional and curriculum development in Critical Thinking. It would be great to see the occasional Campus Community Day feature some outside expertise on Critical Thinking in a keynote role (Professional development efforts like this, by the way, would help to address our accreditation recommendation concerning resource allocation based on the results of assessment).

I should say something about how Abrami et al. understand critical thinking. While critical thinking experts and educators do employ a variety of definitions of critical thinking, these typically don’t so much embody points of dispute as differences in detail and emphasis. The definition employed in the meta-analysis led by Abrami is the widely cited definition produced by the Delphi panel (organized by the American Philosophical Association):

We Understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self-regulatory judgement which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based. . . . The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgements, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeing results which are as precise as thee subject and the circumstances of inquiry permit.

Delphi Report

This very involved definition lists a robust range of Critical Thinking skills and dispositions involved in inquiry. Of course, there is little hope of expecting students to recall all of this or for faculty to address all of this in the context of our program of Institutional Learning.

The Critical thinking Working group here at BC has opted for something a bit more manageable and memorable:

Critical Thinking is the careful assessment of any position by clarifying and evaluating reasons for and against the position.

A careful reading of the articulation we have offered for our Critical Thinking ILO will reveal that much of the Delphi Report’s definition is invoked in the critical clarification, analysis, and evaluation of reasoning. More here:

Articulating Critical Thinking: – General Education Reform at BC