It's hard to get that deep in a couple paragraphs. But there is a longer version here:
Suppose that my mother has Alzheimer's disease, and that I find the prospect of caring for her inconvenient, undesirable, and/or expensive. Do I have a responsibility to care for her anyway?
It is "useful" because it could potentially describe a real-life situation in which one might have to make a decision. Analyzing this quickly leads one to a general discussion of ethics.
As you point out, definitions are imprecise. What does it mean to say I have a "responsibility", or that I "ought" to do something? Logic and observation can get one to "If I do nothing, then my mother will suffer and/or die", but this is not the heart of the matter.
I think there is no hope of a "solution", in the same way, say, that Fermat's Last Theorem was proved. But does that mean that studying ethics, and what the usual lineup of dead white males had to say about it, isn't worthwhile?
The amount of philosophy needed is not too significant. One needs to know enough logic to show that inability to find a justification doesn't mean a justification doesn't exist.
So if someone is using Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation to persecute meat eaters and you want to do something about it, general skill at persuasion is more important than philosophy.
Also: most disciplines require "general skill at persuasion," philosophy being no exception.
The practical skill Philsophy teaches is critical thinking and logical reasoning. But you don't need philosophy to learn either of those.
"general skill at persuasion" sounds more like sophistry/rhetoric...
Persuasive techniques can be used deceptively but that's hardly necessary. It's important to accept that people are emotional and simply proving them wrong is usually not sufficient to change their mind about something they've already decided.
To the contrary, almost every vegetarianism argument on the Internet has comments like "plants are living things which you slaughter for food", and they just get ignored.
I suspect because if you seriously believed killing living things for food is wrong, it would be suicide, so the only conceivable answer is to reason in such a way that it comes out with the answer you want - draw your arbitrary cutoff between important-living-things and not-important-living-things somewhere above plants and bacteria while staying comfortably below humans.
Then let the argument rage as if there was a real substantive difference between drawing the line above cow or below cow, or just diverting it around milk, or only around milk sourced in a particular way.
On the other hand, you can look at the vast similarities between our nervous systems and those of other vertebrates as well as their behavior under pain (squealing and so on) to reasonably conclude that these animals feel pain like we do.
We don't have as much evidence and the evidence we do have isn't as visceral or widely discussed. That doesn't mean there is no evidence.
By focusing on pain and suffering you are implicitly drawing the line I mentioned about important/non-important living things there, and calling other views 'absurd'. But you aren't objectively right.
I don't believe that killing living things for food is wrong. Of course you could be using the generic "you," in which case your point is irrelevant to the conversation.
so the only conceivable answer is to reason in such a way that it comes out with the answer you want
I don't disagree. If you find flaws in the reasoning by all means point them out.
- draw your arbitrary cutoff between important-living-things and not-important-living-things somewhere above plants and bacteria while staying comfortably below humans.
My cutoff isn't arbitrary (again I presume you are addressing me), and this is a mistaken presumption. If you endeavor to minimize suffering among things in the world capable of suffering, eliminating animal suffering is a net plus.
If you want to argue that since all living things suffer and therefore all of our food sources suffer and therefore any attempt to delimit an ethical food source is arbitrary, good luck. I eagerly await your finding that vegetables feel pain.
I will not be surprised when it happens. Plants have nervous systems and sophisticated sensory capabilities. They don't have voices and their body language moves too slowly for humans to make sense of it without looking for it deliberately (such as with time-lapse photography). Plants display a variety of defensive behaviors.
http://www.ted.com/talks/stefano_mancuso_the_roots_of_plant_...
Although technically, vegetables probably don't feel pain in the same sense that meat doesn't feel pain.
All of the above are arguable - why not argue that humans and cattle are inedible, but question where the line between insects and small mammal suffering is? Why not question whether stupid non-suffering cows are OK to kill? Or whether non-suffering humans are OK to kill and eat?
Even if you continue with your line, there are other ways you could argue it - if suffering is bad, then that doesn't mean eating animals is bad, you could tranquillise before killing and it would be OK. Or if you want to minimise suffering then wild animals aren't OK, and all animals should have a human managed lifespan from sedated birth to anaesthetised death followed by being eaten, and not-eating-animals but leaving them to die "naturally" is worse.
And there's room to step back and say suffering is a behaviour and thought pattern that's only of interest to the creature connected to that nervous system - otherwise of no interest, so why go for 'minimise suffering' at all? You could argue about methane emissions or water/other resource use, for why it's unethical to prioritise farming animals for food, or you could look at it as a social signalling - wanting to signal that we understand suffering and choose to avoid it or as a personal suffering (guilt) reduction aside from the animal suffering, or you could believe in a deity which punishes you after death for animal suffering you caused.
But however you look at it, you come back to: humans have to eat, so plants or animals have to be ethically OK to eat, and we don't want hurt selves or relatives and friends, so cannibalism can't be OK, but within that, whether extending compassion to animals is "right" or not, it's not objective - refusing to eat farm animals because the calculation on their methane emissions leading to global warming effects and future human suffering would be, but where the ethical line in farming living creatures for food is, is not. It's just arguable back and forth.
I eagerly await your finding that vegetables feel pain.
Even if they don't feel pain, they have a natural life, lifespan, life processes and reproduction which eating them stops. There is room for an ethos where doing that is wrong, you just dismissed it as daft.
The problem with ethics is that you can't show systematically that meat, closed source software, homosexuality, infanticide, government, self-defense, or torture are justified or unjustified. You have to have some type of basis for logic, and even if you come up with some sort of foundational principle, there's nothing special about foundational principles that makes one any more or less likely to reject them than the conclusions you reach from them. The history of ethics is a history of people working out logically consistent ethical systems only to discover that they justified things like kidnapping strangers and killing them for their organs, and based on the "moral intuition" that it's wrong to kidnap strangers and kill them for their organs, the logically consistent ethical system was amended. The history of philosophy is filled with this kind of thing, but let's think about what we're doing here! What do we need ethics for if all we're going to do is change them when they end up having unintuitive results?
Not that he offers solutions per se, but he starts from a similar view of the subject.
I think philosophy should have a function/use. But does it? I think its functional importance is in asking questions in such a way they can be answered by experiment.
So in the philosophy of mind, the functional role of philosophy is to refine concepts so there is a conceptual difference that makes a difference in experiment.
The problem is, there is no way to tell if you are doing useful philosophy if we define its function as creating the conditions for experiment to take over. We can only tell if philosophy is useful in retrospect, by the impact a work has. Philosophy is not like science, where we know we are 'doing science' by performing experiments. But it also is like science, in that we judge it's use retrospectively.
A good example of philosophy being useful is the case of Bertrand Russell's work on 'Russell's Paradox'. Russell's work in the Principia Mathematica was partially about formulating definitions that would free us of this paradox.
PG says "Outside of math there's a limit to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings."
Surely there is use in forming these precise meanings in the first place. Some (not all) of that work is philosophy.
Russell's work was outside of math, or at a minimum it was 'Meta-math'. Russell was attempting to crystallize new logical definitions that could form precise definitions, and hence become mathematics. He was trying to create mathematics from philosophy.
Did it work? No. The Principia Mathematica was a failure. But the way it failed, it failed as a piece of mathematics, at the hands of Kurt Godel. Here is a case of philosophy becoming mathematics. In short, Godel's work leads to the work of Church and Turing, which leads to the computer.
So we can at least point to the concrete usefulness of some philosophy, retrospectively. This work was useful, even if its only effect was to shift around the conceptual landscape so non-philosophers could do 'serious work'.
And here's the yc discussion about it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404707.
From what I recall, these critiques of philosophy are well-known in philosophy, especially reactions to Aristotle. A inexperienced reader would get the impression that Aristotle and the mistakes he engendered went unchecked for a couple thousand years, until brought to bay by the sterling efforts of Bertrand Russell and Paul Graham.
From someone proposing a new approach to philosophy (!):
1. I would expect to see a little more on some of the less peculiar empiricists - Berkeley, in my dim memories, was the most obscure of that little grouping.
2. A less Cliff's Notes discussion of what's happened in analytic philosophy that strays beyond the brand names (Russell, Wittgenstein) wouldn't go astray either. Claiming it's all about 'language games' is a sophomoric 'out' to having to engage with any of the rest of analytic philosophy.
(Also, would you mind being civil? I'm doing it; you can too.)
Civility is a difficult, but simple, art, necessitating primarily that one should wish to get along with another: onan does not seem to be going out of his to make himself agreeable to pg or anyone else in this exchange.
Perhaps you would prefer people use more phrases like "I think", "I feel like", or pose sentences as questions. I suppose that works well enough for me without destroying conversation efficiency too much.
The word "accusation" has a broad spectrum of emotion, but perhaps a very narrow emotive connotation when heard by the accused.
If I've said something false, I'd honestly like to know what it is. I wrote that essay, like most essays I write, to figure out things for myself. So if I've made a mistake I want to know what it is.
For me there is one (very excusable) "blind" point in pg's position, it's Eastern classic philosophy (hear Confucianism and a bit of Taoism). For some, it will not even be considered philosophy, because it do not ask questions about questions. It is closer to politics, because it tries to answer the one important question (in Eastern eyes), how to have human beings living together without too much blood. Answers are complex, and rely on ethics, self-cultivation, etc. Studying these Classics is not just for statisfying one's curiosity about past things, it will help understand the world, and what to be in the world, all of that without any "magic trick" (hear God, promise of the paradise).
I don't think the ommissions you are talking about are on these lines, so it would be nice to see where these ommission make pg's essay unfair.
So no King Solomon, no Vedas and probably no Confucius either, as secular as he tended to be.
You mentioned at the end of the article that"...philosophy was hopelessly intermingled with religion. It didn't shake itself free till a couple hundred years ago..." I'd have to counter that philosophy without religion is generally new, hollow and unworthy of much study -- which in some ways I think is your point.
I'm genuinely curious: Why (or if) you think that this decoupling is a good thing? So few other disciplines (only Religious Studies, and perhaps The Arts) ever touch upon the idea of spirit at all -- which I think is at the core of Philosophy -- the nexus of Sapience and Sentience. If one is not a fan of religion on principle (its over-adherence to both dogma, and dominance are two criticisms that I have), then certainly this is a strength of Philosophy -- the decoupling of religion from matters of the spirit/soul. Spinoza's The Ethics; and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil are two interesting books for students of Philosophy to consider.
Edit: reduce strength of statement.