One handy definition of intellectuals is that people who expect their opinions taken seriously in field X based on prestige built in an unrelated field Y. A classic example is Einstein writing about socialism based on the prestige he acquired in physics. More general example is writers, people-of-letters, literature and poetry folks engaging in politics. If we would accept it, Hayek and Sowell were not intellectuals, they never wandered too far from the field they actually had expertise in.
But why accept such a quirky definition? They logic behind is: when you are, say, an economist, and pontificate about economics, you are acting actually as an economist. When you are a physicist or writer and pontificate about politics or economics, you are obviously not acting as a writer or physicist but as a Generic Smart Person. Being a good writer or physicist proves you are smart (roughly: true enough), and you expect people to accept your opinion because you are smart. The unspoken assumption is that smartness matters more than expertise in forming correct opinions. Thus people who expect people to accept their opinions about economics because of their expertise are called economists, and people who expect people who accept their opinions about economics (or anything) because they are smart are called intellectuals: people whose defining (social) feature is the intellect, not the expertise.
On a more broader view, ideally, people should expect their opinions to be accepted because they are actually well evidenced and argued, not based on authority. But the "masses" tend to accept views based on authority. So the expert uses the authority of expertise and the intellectual uses the authority of generic smartness (which is proven by success in an unrelated field.)
[CW: This post talks about personal experience of moral dilemmas. I can see how some people might be distressed by thinking about this.]
Have you ever had to decide between pushing a fat person onto some train tracks or letting five other people get hit by a train? Maybe you have a more exciting commute than I do, but for me it's just never come up.
In spite of this, I'm unusually prepared for a trolley problem, in a way I'm not prepared for, say, being offered a high-paying job at an unquantifiably-evil company. Similarly, if a friend asked me to lie to another friend about something important to them, I probably wouldn't carry out a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. It seems that I'm happy to adopt consequentialist policy, but when it comes to personal quandaries where I have to decide for myself, I start asking myself about what sort of person this decision makes me. What's more, I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad heuristic in a social context.
It's also noteworthy (to me, at least) that I rarely experience moral dilemmas. They just don't happen all that often. I like to think I have a reasonably coherent moral framework, but do I really need one? Do I just lead a very morally-inert life? Or have abstruse thought experiments in moral philosophy equipped me with broader principles under which would-be moral dilemmas are resolved before they reach my conscious deliberation?
To make sure I'm not giving too much weight to my own experiences, I thought I'd put a few questions to a wider audience:
- What kind of moral dilemmas do you actually encounter?
- Do you have any thoughts on how much moral judgement you have to exercise in your daily life? Do you think this is a typical amount?
- Do you have any examples of pedestrian moral dilemmas to which you've applied abstract moral reasoning? How did that work out?
- Do you have any examples of personal moral dilemmas on a Trolley Problem scale that nonetheless happened?
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