That's why the replacement for intuitionist moral philosophy isn't just moral psychology, it's "moral psychology, decision theory, and game theory." You seem to be reading more into Luke's suggestions than is there.
I addressed decision theory in my original comment. "And replacing ethics with decision theory would be sidestepping the metaethical question about the legitimacy of consequentialism."
I think that the replacement would implicitly make a few ethical and metaethical assumptions that are a matter of legitimate debate within academic philosophy.
Or that Luke has chosen not to bring up this aspect of philosophy so as to avoid bringing up politics? Probably the latter. ... political theory seems irrelevant
Ah, I see. While I think I understand Luke's adherence to LW's norms and interests, I think it would be very narrow-minded to think that the interests of society as a whole or the academic system in particular share the focus of LW.
As long as Luke is addressing what he sees as problems with the curriculum of philosophy departments (which is itself a rather political issue, really), wouldn't it be irrational to ignore the real context in which philosophy occurs (a sociopolitical one)?
I don't see what the latter has to do with the former. As you say, the latter point of view doesn't seem well-suited to understanding society at large.
I agree. I was just indicating a common association.
That has nothing to do with the validity of the former point of view (which I assume is being held in opposition to worldviews that allow epiphenomena).
The validity of the former point of view tends to be challenged by those with either phenomenological or social constructivist orientations. (I am not sure whether these positions 'allow epiphenomena' or not; I expect that when taken to their logical conclusion, they don't, but that they are coreducible with the cognitivist naturalist view)
I don't see why this isn't reducible to a naturalized cognitivist worldview. Instead of one mind you study a collection of minds.
I fundamentally agree. However, though I think that these can in principle be reduced to a naturalized cognitivist view (or, we could say, ontology), that doesn't mean that this can be done easily, or that that reduction will necessarily get us farther or faster than a different level of analysis.
Because of the difficulty of that reduction and the possible intractability of the social theories in their reduced form, it makes sense to continue inquiry on a social or political level. This level of analysis often evokes philosophical concepts that are not in Luke's curriculum.
Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
I've complained before that philosophy is a diseased discipline which spends far too much of its time debating definitions, ignoring relevant scientific results, and endlessly re-interpreting old dead guys who didn't know the slightest bit of 20th century science. Is that still the case?
You bet. There's some good philosophy out there, but much of it is bad enough to make CMU philosopher Clark Glymour suggest that on tight university budgets, philosophy departments could be defunded unless their work is useful to (cited by) scientists and engineers — just as his own work on causal Bayes nets is now widely used in artificial intelligence and other fields.
How did philosophy get this way? Russell's hypothesis is not too shabby. Check the syllabi of the undergraduate "intro to philosophy" classes at the world's top 5 U.S. philosophy departments — NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, Michigan Ann Arbor, and Harvard — and you'll find that they spend a lot of time with (1) old dead guys who were wrong about almost everything because they knew nothing of modern logic, probability theory, or science, and with (2) 20th century philosophers who were way too enamored with cogsci-ignorant armchair philosophy. (I say more about the reasons for philosophy's degenerate state here.)
As the CEO of a philosophy/math/compsci research institute, I think many philosophical problems are important. But the field of philosophy doesn't seem to be very good at answering them. What can we do?
Why, come up with better philosophical methods, of course!
Scientific methods have improved over time, and so can philosophical methods. Here is the first of my recommendations...
More Pearl and Kahneman, less Plato and Kant
Philosophical training should begin with the latest and greatest formal methods ("Pearl" for the probabilistic graphical models made famous in Pearl 1988), and the latest and greatest science ("Kahneman" for the science of human reasoning reviewed in Kahneman 2011). Beginning with Plato and Kant (and company), as most universities do today, both (1) filters for inexact thinkers, as Russell suggested, and (2) teaches people to have too much respect for failed philosophical methods that are out of touch with 20th century breakthroughs in math and science.
So, I recommend we teach young philosophy students:
(In other words: train philosophy students like they do at CMU, but even "more so.")
So, my own "intro to philosophy" mega-course might be guided by the following core readings:
(There are many prerequisites to these, of course. I think philosophy should be a Highly Advanced subject of study that requires lots of prior training in maths and the sciences, like string theory but hopefully more productive.)
Once students are equipped with some of the latest math and science, then let them tackle The Big Questions. I bet they'd get farther than those raised on Plato and Kant instead.
You might also let them read 20th century analytic philosophy at that point — hopefully their training will have inoculated them from picking up bad thinking habits.
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