I've been thinking about virtue epistemology, and more broadly, if it's possible to put knowledge within an ethical framework.
Greg Caruso discusses Free Will and Punishment on Philosophy Bites. In this excellent interview, he says we should treat people who are a threat to public safety in a way that is similar to how we treat people who are a threat to public health. Caruso is a determinist, or at least a free will skeptic, but that doesn't mean we just let people do what they are going to do. Retributive punishment does not make sense in a deterministic universe. Some sort of forwarding looking consequentialism could solve this problem in that punishment could deter personal and wider societal crime.
Caruso's Public Health Quarantine Model posits the quarantining of criminals on the same moral grounds that we quarantine people who have ebola. The person with ebola hasn't done anything that deserves to have their freedom restricted, but for public safety reasons we quarantine them from society. We protect others from harm by limiting that person's freedom. Like Spock said, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one." We don't quarantine people for having a common cold because the cold has a limited negative societal effect. We also have a responsibility to the quarantined person to treat their disease. Likewise, we have a responsibility to treat people we put in jail.
On a broader scale, we have a responsibility to try to keep ebola and other diseases out of the public sphere by trying to eradicate the sources of those diseases. In similar fashion we have a public responsibility to try to eradicate the sources that give rise to criminal behavior. If we could reduce or eliminate the cause we would then reduce the number of people needing to be jailed and rehabilitated.
To me, the implicit message of meme's like the one above is that maybe if we spent more money on our children we would save money spent in the prison system. We have an ethical duty to spend more money on education, just like we have an ethical duty to vaccinate our children.
But I also think we might be able to put epistemology within this larger public health model. Knowledge isn't something you suddenly discover in some college philosophy classroom. As Wittgenstein points out, the way we see the world, the way we use our words, the way we believe, and the way we know, is part of our upbringing. Look at the way we train a child to use words and look at the way we train a child to investigate and come to know the world.
It occurs to me that quarantining people for bad thinking is definitely not something I want to do. It's been tried before. Think of the Chinese who try to re-educate dissidents through labor camps. What I'm thinking of is prevention and addressing systemic causes of poor thinking. There's a social justice element to the thinking of a society. Public health intervenes in a child's life to promote future health and we work on the environments the child encounters.
Creative thinking, thinking for oneself, reasoning skills, developing a love of learning, lateral thinking, these are ways and skills and habits we desire for our children. But we cannot do it alone. We need to think of these things in terms of public goods like public health.
Speaking of Thinking For Oneself. Did you know Arthur Schopenhauer wrote an essay on it?
Greg Caruso discusses Free Will and Punishment on Philosophy Bites. In this excellent interview, he says we should treat people who are a threat to public safety in a way that is similar to how we treat people who are a threat to public health. Caruso is a determinist, or at least a free will skeptic, but that doesn't mean we just let people do what they are going to do. Retributive punishment does not make sense in a deterministic universe. Some sort of forwarding looking consequentialism could solve this problem in that punishment could deter personal and wider societal crime.
Caruso's Public Health Quarantine Model posits the quarantining of criminals on the same moral grounds that we quarantine people who have ebola. The person with ebola hasn't done anything that deserves to have their freedom restricted, but for public safety reasons we quarantine them from society. We protect others from harm by limiting that person's freedom. Like Spock said, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one." We don't quarantine people for having a common cold because the cold has a limited negative societal effect. We also have a responsibility to the quarantined person to treat their disease. Likewise, we have a responsibility to treat people we put in jail.
On a broader scale, we have a responsibility to try to keep ebola and other diseases out of the public sphere by trying to eradicate the sources of those diseases. In similar fashion we have a public responsibility to try to eradicate the sources that give rise to criminal behavior. If we could reduce or eliminate the cause we would then reduce the number of people needing to be jailed and rehabilitated.
To me, the implicit message of meme's like the one above is that maybe if we spent more money on our children we would save money spent in the prison system. We have an ethical duty to spend more money on education, just like we have an ethical duty to vaccinate our children.
But I also think we might be able to put epistemology within this larger public health model. Knowledge isn't something you suddenly discover in some college philosophy classroom. As Wittgenstein points out, the way we see the world, the way we use our words, the way we believe, and the way we know, is part of our upbringing. Look at the way we train a child to use words and look at the way we train a child to investigate and come to know the world.
It occurs to me that quarantining people for bad thinking is definitely not something I want to do. It's been tried before. Think of the Chinese who try to re-educate dissidents through labor camps. What I'm thinking of is prevention and addressing systemic causes of poor thinking. There's a social justice element to the thinking of a society. Public health intervenes in a child's life to promote future health and we work on the environments the child encounters.
Creative thinking, thinking for oneself, reasoning skills, developing a love of learning, lateral thinking, these are ways and skills and habits we desire for our children. But we cannot do it alone. We need to think of these things in terms of public goods like public health.
Speaking of Thinking For Oneself. Did you know Arthur Schopenhauer wrote an essay on it?
