Hollow allegiances
I often hear people in online debate communities say things like:
"I'm a rule utilitarian"
"I'm a deontologist"
...in other words, they endorse specific normative moral theories. I'm happy to grant that this probably does play a role in how some people think about moral issues. However, I suspect if you examined people with reportedly disparate normative moral theories that they subscribe to, you'd find very little difference in their actions, attitudes, or thought processes was caused by a commitment to one or another normative moral theory. Instead, I suspect these are generally largely:
(a) post hoc
(b) inaccurate
(c) play little or no role in how they actually think about anything
A lot of it strikes me as aspirational, or almost like a kind of intellectual LARPing. I just don't think commitments to philosophical theories typically have much of a practical influence on how people think or do anything...at least in a great many cases, even if very likely not all of them.
What I'm hoping is that people won't go pointing to examples of someone saying they're a utilitarian then doing some utilitarian-ish thing. I'm not saying normative moral theories don't influence behavior. I'm saying I think a lot of the time they don't.
I think this is even more true of more abstract and less applied philosophical positions. People will say they're an idealist or a scientific antirealist or a whatever, but their thoughts and actions are almost entirely indistinguishable from other people and such commitments seem to have little to do with what they do and how they think. A lot of these purported commitments seem shallow...little more than words on a page, a bit like a nominally religious person saying they believe in some obscure religious doctrine that has nothing to do with what they say or do.
In short: I think a lot of professed philosophical positions are mostly or even entirely practically inert. They don't *do* anything for their proponents.
That's not entirely true, though: I think professing a commitment to them serves *social* functions in philosophical and adjacent communities. I suspect one's allegiances are much closer, quite literally, to calling oneself Slytherin or Gryffindor. It's like picking a team or being a fan, and serves mostly social functions.
I don't know if any philosophers or other researchers have studied the "sociology of philosophy" and put forward hypotheses like this, but I do suspect something like this is going on. These suspicions are part of my broader skepticism about the value of contemporary analytic philosophy. I suspect, if I'm right about this, that such hollow allegiances are a symptom of the vacuousness and lack of practical value characteristic of so much academic philosophy.
Maybe this points to a more general tendency within human populations: In the absence of substantive practical differences between picking one "side" or "team" over another, hollow allegiances manifest and entrench themselves like sports teams, serving to distinguish people, facilitate competition, foster affiliation and a sense of belonging, and more generally achieve various standard social desires people have: to be parts of communities, to be accepted, to be high status, and so on. In other words, I suspect labels, terms, and categories used to distinguish oneself as a member of one group or another within a broader community may spontaneously emerge and sustain themselves over time regardless of their practical functions so long as they serve people's basic social needs.
The argument of this article feels rather strange to me. I take the primary purpose of moral philosophy to be descriptive, it is in the business of describing what morality is. If you’re a utilitarian, you think that all morality really is at bottom is an attempt at people to maximize utility. For the utilitarian, this is what everybody is doing when they are engaging in morality, whether they realize it or not.
A utilitarian might argue that people go to the hospital because actions promoting health are considered to maximize their expected utility over time. A non-utilitarian might counter that if utility was all people cared about, then most people would agree that it would be okay for a doctor to kill and steal five organs from one person to save five people, but most don’t in fact agree that this is moral. The utilitarian might well respond that actually when you weigh the long-term costs of such an action, like the institutional reputational harm accrued to the hospital (no sane person would ever again visit such a hospital if they knew there was a risk of getting their organs stolen), then it’s clear that stealing organs to save people doesn’t maximize expected utility, and is therefore wrong, in accordance with people’s beliefs.
In short, philosophers are in the business of judging whether moral theories are accurate. That is, whether they accurately describe people’s general moral intuitions, beliefs, and actions. Of course it’s possible to deny whether there’s even something like a general moral intuition or behavior to begin with, rendering the whole discipline of moral philosophy moot. But that’s the goal of moral philosophy as I see it, and as I think most philosophers see it. Just as it would be silly to wonder why historians don’t adopt one religion over another whenever they argue for particular theories relating to the history of religion (e.g. historicity of Jesus), it’s equally not at all strange that moral theorists don’t modify their moral behavior as a result of their beliefs. They are two entirely different things!
Of course this is not to say that there’s no connection, in the same way as we might imagine a Christian historian might be tempted to drop their belief provided they concluded that the evidence for the historicity of Jesus was thin or something.
I suspect you may be largely correct.