Philosophy in Practice
A Virtual Issue of Analysis
Edited by Ben Colburn, University of Glasgow
The journal Analysis plays a distinctive role in the Anglophone philosophical ecosystem, largely because of its distinctive insistence on publishing only very short articles. Some have been very short indeed, like ‘A note on Mr [Jonathan] Bennett’ by Elizabeth Anscombe (Analysis 26 (1966): 208), which I reproduce in its entirety:
THE nerve of Mr. Bennett’s argument is that if A results from your not doing B, then A results from whatever you do instead of doing B. While there may be much to be said for this view, still it does not seem right on the face of it.
Anscombe’s pithiness is extreme but not out of character for Analysis. It exemplifies norms – of brevity and precision – that have been central to the journal ever since its establishment in 1933. Anscombe says everything she needs to say, and then stops. Why waste time?
Introduction
Ben Colburn
On Punishment
Anthony Quinton
Analysis, Vol. 14
Mill, Punishment and the Self-regarding Failings
Gabriele Taylor and Sybil Wolfram
Analysis, Vol. 28
Implicit Racism
Sarah Ann Ketchum and Christine Pierce
Analysis, Vol. 36
Civil Disobedience
Eugene Schlossberger
Analysis, Vol. 49
Paternalism Defined
David Archard
Analysis, Vol. 50
The Choice-Based Right to Bequeath
Cecile Fabre
Analysis, Vol. 61
Just go ahead and lie
Jennifer Saul
Analysis, Vol. 72
The puzzle of virtual theft
Nathan Wildman and Neil McDonnell
Analysis, Vol. 80
Introduction
By Ben Colburn, University of Glasgow
These norms of brevity and precision part-explain the character of the philosophy typically published in Analysis. The journal is notable for rapid-fire exchanges in which authors spar over a series of published issues. For example, Adam Elga’s 2000 paper ‘Self-Locating Belief and the Sleeping Beauty Problem’ (Analysis 60: 143-147), on a puzzle in decision theory, provoked a long and branching series of discussions in the journal, with a total of nineteen replies appearing between then and 2015.
This back-and-forth style is more suited to some parts of philosophy than others. It lends itself especially to areas where the questions are settled, where there is consensus about how to answer them, and where those answers don’t depend too much on what lies outwith the boundaries of philosophical argumentation itself. It is less hospitable where the philosophy is messier and more entangled with other disciplines. Perhaps this is what explains the comparative scarcity of political and applied philosophy in Analysis. The first article in this area to be published was Anthony Quinton’s 1954 ‘On Punishment’ (Analysis 14: 133-142), when the journal was already over twenty years old. A rough survey suggests that only about a hundred and fifty have been published in the sixty-seven years since. In the context of a journal published at least quarterly, usually with at least ten articles per issue, that’s not very many.
Nevertheless, some authors have used the distinctive Analysis format to tackle what we might call ‘philosophy in practice’, addressing conceptual issues in law, politics and topical social questions. The purpose of this special issue is to showcase some of those articles, from across the history of the journal.
Sometimes, these contributions have followed the same pattern as the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ literature I described above. This was especially so in the early days: until the early 1970s about half the articles in this area were people going toe-to-toe over the retributivist conception of punishment which is the topic of Quinton’s seminal article. More recently, Hillel Steiner and Jonathan Wolff’s 2003 article ‘A general framework for resolving disputed land claims’ (Analysis 63: 188-189) prompted a similarly brisk debate with Brian Weatherson, Paul Bou-Habib and Serena Olsaretti. These debates are exciting, and I recommend exploring them: each paper is only a few pages long! For this collection, however, I have concentrated on articles with more of a stand-alone quality. In each case the authors have taken the Analysis norms of brevity and precision and put them to work on arguments with significant practical implications. In what follows, I briefly introduce each piece.
Quinton’s 1954 article is the first. In ‘On Punishment’ he addresses the ‘prevailing antinomy’ between retributive and deterrence (or ‘utilitarian’) theories of punishment, and seeks to resolve it by arguing that the former is just a ‘logical doctrine’ that reveals what we mean by the word ‘punishment’, and the latter is a moral theory which tells us when and why punishment (so understood) is allowed or required.
Our second article also concerns punishment. In ‘Mill, Punishment and the Self-Regarding Failings’ (Analysis 28 (1968): 168-172), Gabriele Taylor and Sybil Wolfram examine the distinction John Stuart Mill drew in On Liberty between self-regarding and other-regarding qualities. They criticise Mill’s distinction as ‘At first sight … not only incorrect but confused and, when the confusions are ironed out, beside the point’; but show that we can reconstruct a roughly coextensive distinction if we focus on how different regimes of punishment will or won’t be effective, both at preventing harmful actions, and at teaching citizens so that punishment ultimately becomes unnecessary.
Sara Ann Ketchum and Christine Pierce, in ‘Implicit Racism’ (Analysis 36 (1976): 91-95) explore the different justificatory burdens borne by anti-sexist and anti-racist arguments. They focus on a class of arguments purporting to defend sexist practices on the grounds that they are ‘for the benefit of women’. Ketchum and Pierce show that these arguments, if applied to the context of racial discrimination, imply abhorrent racist conclusions that would be rightly rejected out of hand. The question is, then, why people don’t have an equally strong reaction in the sexual case? Ketchum and Pierce’s conclusion (all the more powerful for being left implicit) is that we should, and should therefore be troubled by the discrepancy.
‘Civil Disobedience’ by Eugene Schlossberger (Analysis 49 (1976): 91-95) asks when civil disobedience is permissible. Existing answers tend to be internalist (permissibility tracks the dissident’s beliefs, whether or not they are true), or formalist (permissibility tracks legal questions like ‘are rights involved?’ rather than substantive moral questions). Using as a stalking horse Ronald Dworkin’s theory, which is both internalist and formalist, Schlossberger argues that an adequate account should be neither: the permissibility of civil disobedience is exhausted neither by what the agent believes not by what the law prescribes, but also on the substantive social morality of the case.
David Archard’s paper ‘Paternalism Defined’ (Analysis 50 (1990): 36-42) sets out a new definition of paternalism, refining our quotidian understanding of it as ‘the usurpation of one person’s choice of their own good by another person’. Archard emphasises (a) the aim to deny or diminish the target’s choice, (b) the belief that this promotes the target’s good, and (c) the discounting of the target’s dissenting from that belief. His paper explains and defends each of these components of paternalism, and in doing so sheds light on a surprisingly wide variety of practical cases.
In ‘The Choice-Based Right to Bequeath’ (Analysis 61 (2001): 60-65), Cécile Fabre considers whether we should grant people ‘the right to affect what happens once they are dead, and in particular the right to bequeath their property’. This right is widely accepted and, in rules about inheritance, enshrined in the law. Fabre offers some powerful reasons to reject it, by unravelling the analogies between bequeathing and promising/contracting which are at the root of most arguments that we have a choice-based right to bequeath.
The articles considered so far are all drawn from what we might call ‘practical philosophy’: political philosophy, social philosophy, applied ethics, and jurisprudence. Our seventh and eighth articles, by contrast, reflect the increasing use of the tools of theoretical philosophy to address topical issues.
In ‘Just go ahead and lie’ (Analysis 72 (2012): 3-9) Jennifer Saul turns the tools of philosophy of language to address the common assumption that ‘lying is worse than merely misleading’. She explores various lines of reasoning that might support that assumption, analysing both their formal and their moral features, and concludes that they all fail. There are some instances of lying that are worse than instances of misleading, but there is no general reason to think lying always worse. So,
[If] you are faced with a need to deceive … You should simply go ahead and lie. Or if you do choose to merely mislead, you shouldn’t do so in the comforting belief that you are thereby doing something better.
Finally, Nathan Wildman and Neil McDonnell explore a legal conundrum posed by rapidly evolving technology. In ‘The puzzle of virtual theft’ (Analysis 80 (2020): 493-499) they explore a recent case from the Netherlands in which two boys were convicted for stealing virtual items within a multiplayer computer game. Wildman and McDonnell draw on state-of-the-art metaphysics and aesthetics to vindicate the court’s judgment, albeit that the philosophy is – inevitably! – more complex than the practice would suggest. That last point is perhaps a moral of all the papers in this collection, along with the optimistic thought that this complexity doesn’t preclude our philosophical being put to genuinely practical work.
Of course, there’s further exciting applied philosophy in Analysis beyond these eight articles! I hope this collection whets the reader’s appetite for more. I also hope that it encourages people working in these areas to imagine their own philosophy in these pages: that is, to see how they might themselves be liberated by the Analysis norms of brevity and precision. Elsewhere we face burdensome expectations about exhaustive citation, lengthy scene-setting, and the need to anticipate endless objections (even before anyone has made them). It is exciting to have a place where, like Anscombe, we say only everything we need to, and then stop.
