Interview with a Philosopher

In which we learn what philosophers actually do, and some reasons Bob shouldn't kill Ted.

Hi Substack, I’ve missed you. I’ve had Things to Deal With recently and haven’t been able to post, so I very much look forward to sharing this conversation with you.

Below you’ll find an interview with Noah Jones, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. Noah is from Edmond, Oklahoma, and studied philosophy and mathematics at Oklahoma Baptist University before beginning graduate work at OU. He’s married to Natalie and has a cat named Mochi. He also happens to be my very own brother.

Thing 1 and Thing 2

Thing 3

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Let’s start out with some backstory: what sparked your interest in philosophy? How did you get to where you are now?

I tell a slightly different story every time someone asks me this question. Here’s the best version:

In early high school, I thought I’d become an engineer. The more I explored that field at a vo-tech school, the more I felt I wasn’t suited for the group projects and high prospective salary. Meanwhile, several sources had conspired to turn me toward an alternative to STEM. My house had good books lying around, C. S. Lewis’s prominent among them. My mom even read Mere Christianity aloud to us, initiating a lifelong influence. My home church always had a theological emphasis, and that was reinforced by a ministry called Credo House, which encouraged thoughtful and tradition-rooted Christian beliefs. 

When I went to college, I considered studying theology or apologetics, but since I wasn’t drawn to ministry, I chose philosophy. I never had to wonder whether that was a feasible path, because I had a certain trailblazing older sister. As I progressed through my bachelor’s degree, I gained confidence that I wanted to teach, so I went for grad school. I did change my area of focus since I started, but the ultimate goal of professorship has stuck around.

What area(s) in philosophy have you become most interested in? Explain that to the common folk. Why that?

Few topics in philosophy are not interesting to me, but I’m most into the branch philosophers call ethics. I specifically focus on the history of ethical theories. Ethical theories, or moral theories, are claims about what is at the core of morality—its fundamental principle, its heart. Is being moral ultimately about rule-following? Or is it about accomplishing the greater good for your community? Or living a happy life? 

An ethical theorist wants a theory that fits together a bunch of their specific moral beliefs, like 

“Bob shouldn’t kill Ted,” 

“Caring for children is good,” and 

“Lying is only okay sometimes.”

A moral theory is supposed to tell us why those sentences are true (if in fact they are). It’s also supposed to help us solve tricky moral questions, like what circumstances might make lying okay. Importantly, moral theories usually try to answer a couple of other questions along the way: (a) Where does the content of morality come from—Nature? Reason? God? And (b) why should we be moral—for a better life? For a better afterlife? Just for morality’s own sake? I’m especially interested in this question about moral motivation.

The discipline that philosophers call “ethical theory” is often explained as a competition between three dominant “theories” of morality: utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue theory. 

The first is probably the most accessible, since sometimes the word “utilitarian” gets used in ordinary, non-philosophical contexts. Sometimes a person is called “utilitarian” if they prioritize efficiency. A utilitarian wants results, and is willing to do what is necessary to get them. “Utilitarian” is also sometimes used to describe some thing, like an office that emphasizes practical function over aesthetics. While these uses don’t map perfectly onto what philosophers mean by “utilitarianism”, they’re a good place to start.

Utilitarianism makes the claim that the morally right thing to do is whatever results in the most well-being for humans (though animals might count too). In the philosopher’s sense, a utilitarian is someone who thinks we should always choose actions that maximize the overall happiness of everybody. Utilitarianism developed primarily during the 19th century; its most famous defenders are the British philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

Deontology, despite its less intuitive name, is just the idea that morality is fundamentally a matter of doing your duty. “Duty” usually means following certain principles or rules that command certain actions and prohibit others. These rules might be communicated by God, understood through pure reason, or simply agreed on by a social group. Deontologists often emphasize that moral rules should be followed at all times, regardless of what good stuff we think we could accomplish by breaking them. This puts them at odds with utilitarians, who tend to think of moral rules as rules-of-thumb, which usually have the best results, but exceptions are quite possible. Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century German philosopher, is the philosopher most often identified with deontology, though religious forms of deontology were around way before Kant.

According to the third ethical theory, called virtue ethics, morality is fundamentally a matter of character. It helps to notice that deontology and utilitarianism give conflicting answers to the same question: which actions are right? But virtue ethics answers a different question altogether: what is a good person or a good life? Naturally, virtue ethicists are interested in virtues, personality traits that are good, desirable, or admirable. They also study the psychology of virtue, human motivation, and well-being.

Virtue ethics is both older and newer than utilitarianism and deontology. From the founding of Greek philosophy until the spread of Christianity, most philosophers held some version of virtue ethics. And many Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosophers in the medieval period used Greek virtue ethics (usually Plato’s or Aristotle’s) as a framework to understand their religion’s moral claims.

But both religion and Aristotle fell on hard times during the Reformation and Enlightenment, and so deontology and utilitarianism were devised as replacements. For some time, the academic study of ethics was basically a dispute between these newer views (or ethics was cut out of philosophy altogether). But virtue ethics got back in the game in the 1960s when some philosophers began to express discontentment with the reigning paradigm. Usually, these philosophers looked back to Aristotle, but Stoic versions of virtue ethics have also been revived. 

Most of my study is trying to understand this three-part division and its history.

You’re on the doorstep of your Ph.D., currently writing a thesis. Tell us about your thesis. Why’d you choose that?

My working title for my dissertation is “Practical Rationality and Ethics in the Aristotelian and Utilitarian Traditions”. I’m open to (begging for) any alternative suggestions.

I have a sense that I stumble into much of my life, and my research topic is a good example. During my first year at OU, a professor named Steve who eventually became my advisor was chatting with someone in the department lounge. I wasn’t part of the conversation, but I overheard him say something about some kind of convergence between Aristotelianism and “sophisticated versions of consequentialism.” Leaving the long words aside, this hinted that that competing trio of ethical theories may not have to be a zero-sum game, as it’s often understood. Utilitarianism and virtue theory are usually pictured as dire enemies, and their proponents often are. But Steve was suggesting that the theories might have key similarities that make it possible for certain versions of them to be mutually consistent. I’ll say more about that in a moment.

A couple years later, Steve and I did an independent study on Alasdair MacIntyre, an important contemporary thinker we both like. MacIntyre is a Marxist-turned-Aristotelian-turned-Catholic, who’s most famous for defending Aristotle’s ethics against utilitarianism and deontology. Like I said before, both theories were devised during the Enlightenment to replace Aristotelianism, and MacIntyre says this project was doomed. During one of our conversations about MacIntyre, I asked Steve about that “convergence” remark he’d made in the lounge, since MacIntyre loves Aristotle and hates utilitarianism. I, for my part, loved MacIntyre, but I was intrigued by Steve’s claim. That conversation initiated a vague project: to better understand the relationship between two apparently conflicting moral traditions, while appreciating MacIntyre’s admittedly partisan insights. MacIntyre is both the most helpful and the most ironic choice to guide my investigation of utilitarianism.

Since I was first presented with the trichotomy of moral theories, I’ve favored Aristotle’s virtue ethics against Kant’s and Mill’s theories. My recent years of study have only solidified the Aristotle commitment, but they’ve also softened the “against” Kant and Mill part. My dissertation project is a critical analysis of the history of utilitarianism. I want to show how its very serious flaws result from mistaken ideas about (1) what human well-being is, and (2) what motivates human actions. Philosophers like MacIntyre have identified these flaws and concluded that utilitarianism is a hopeless tradition. I want to see whether there’s a core of the tradition that can be salvaged if it’s supplemented with better ideas about well-being and motivation. 

By “better ideas”, I usually mean ideas that are more like Aristotle’s. For example, Jeremy Bentham defined well-being as pleasure, and thought that humans are exclusively motivated by their own desire for pleasure and aversion to pain. This combination of views makes it hard for Bentham to explain how people can be motivated to promote the good of the majority and not just their own good. For Aristotle, there are different kinds of pleasure that come from different activities, and these activities can be good or bad in themselves, apart from whether they’re enjoyed. The virtuous person finds good actions pleasant and bad actions painful. The virtuous person also knows that their own good is linked in crucial ways with the good of their family and city—unlike Bentham’s egoistic individual. And despite Bentham, the general structure of utilitarianism can accommodate the richer concepts of well-being and motivation that Aristotle proposed. This is just a brief sketch of how I hope to “fill in the gaps” of utilitarianism with Aristotelian psychology.

I always feel the need to state clearly that utilitarianism can have serious defects as a theory and frightening consequences if adopted naively in practice. But even its errors teach us something about morality, and its core insights are worth preserving in, as Steve suggested, a more “sophisticated” form.

I’ll conclude with a heresy, as far as you’re probably concerned: I suspect that I also have a lot to learn from Kant (gasp).

I’ll let the Kant comment slide since I haven’t had to read him recently and my animosity is cooled.

You also teach basic philosophy courses at OU, like Business Ethics and Introduction to Philosophy. When you teach a course, what do you hope your students leave with? What’s the telos of taking a philosophy class in college?

I think my classes at OU don’t have a telos, at least not a single one. An intro class at a public school accomplishes a different good for different people.

My minimal goal, the one that appears on my syllabi, is to make students better at thinking. More specifically, I want them to put their own views about morality, God, free will, knowledge, etc. into question, and learn a reasonable, non-arbitrary way to form beliefs to make sense of things. In addition to that internal goal, I want them to learn how to communicate these ideas and work through them with others, both in conversation and writing. I generally de-emphasize technical terminology and names and dates. I take a historical approach to philosophy and try to show the very practical connections between what people think, say, and do today, and what a bunch of dead people said many years ago.

It’s common for school admin to promote philosophy courses for the development of soft skills like written and spoken argument and reading comprehension, which are useful across all or most career fields. That’s a worthwhile goal, and if it gets people into my class, that’s great. But my more substantive goal is that students get stuck with philosophy, and can’t help but do the same kind of questioning and reasoning about the rest of their lives. Frankly, I’m pessimistic about how many of my students transcend the “career skills” understanding of education, especially the Business Ethics students. Even if I win them over, most of them probably revert back to the finance-first status quo by the time they graduate. But I hope and suspect it’s not all of them. It’s presumptuous to try to get people to “the Truth” in 45 hours of class time, but I think it is possible to make people better at seeking truth than they were. And learning how to seek truth makes your life better. That’s my version of a “soft skill”.

What’s been your favorite text to teach?

This is an especially tough question because every semester so far I’ve virtually reinvented my class, including texts, assignments, and classroom time. With that said, one text that has been an unexpected favorite was Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will. We didn’t go through it cover to cover, but the long selections we read generated a ton of interest from the students. Maybe it was Augustine’s choice of a dialogue format, or universal interest in the nature of evil, or my passionate digressions trying to figure out why Adam and Eve ate that stupid fruit. Either way, I never thought Augustine would have curb appeal to freshmen at a public university, but experience proved otherwise.

I’ve also been on a project to prove that reading Aristotle isn’t as nearly as hard as many people say–his Nicomachean Ethics in particular connects very practically to everyday concerns like friendship, anger, self-discipline, and more. Some passages have been easier to work through than others, but I just recently got my students excited talking about Aristotle’s comments on finding a middle ground between being a “boor” and a “vulgar buffoon”. If the translation is smooth enough and I give students a heads up on technical terms and unusual phrasing, teaching it is a blast. (Readers—go for Irwin’s 3rd edition).

My last post included some questions I ask my Intro students who are brand new to philosophy. I chose a couple of them to ask you, now that you probably know all the answers. 

My advisor always points out that experts in philosophy are trying to answer the same questions we ask beginners—the idea is that we just learn to give better answers. I hope that’s true and that it’s not just longer, more pretentious answers.

What do you think is the relationship between philosophy and religion? Can they be friends?

I’ll start with the second question, to which I have several answers. They seem contradictory, but they nevertheless coexist in my mind. 

1. Obviously, they can be friends. They have been for thousands of years! Anyone who’d think otherwise must not have read much about the history of theology. Consider:

• Origen and Augustine, early Greek and Latin Christian thinkers, both loved Plato.

• Thomas Aquinas, Moses Maimonides, and Averroes, the greatest medieval philosophers from Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all loved Aristotle.

• The most influential philosophers in the early modern period (except for David Hume) in Europe accepted some version of Christianity.

• Some of the most influential living philosophers are also brilliant and devoted Christians.

So you’d only answer “no” to the question if you doubt the philosophical greatness of these thinkers (only the most secularized would) or you doubt the sincerity of their religion (only the most radically Reformed would).

2. Well, they can be friends, but not besties. They’re the kind of friends with a complicated history (insert something about unburied hatchets and blood that isn’t good). Anyone who’d think otherwise must not have read much about the history of theology. For example:

• That same Origen’s Platonism arguably led him to heretical Christology.

• Al-Ghazali, another brilliant Muslim thinker, literally wrote a book called The Incoherence of the Philosophers.

• The Paris Condemnation of 1277 outlines in detail where Christian philosophers of the time had allegedly gone too far in integrating Aristotle’s thought.

• Martin Luther, in his early years, considered Aristotle an agent of Satan responsible for all the church’s errors.

• Early modern philosophers often held theories that were theologically quirky at best, and heretical at worst.

• Professional philosophy after the early modern period has been increasingly hostile to religious thought.

So you’d only answer “yes” to this question if you accept some cheap kind of relativism or pluralism, according to which all this conflict resulted from a big misunderstanding, since both sides can be right in their own way, or philosophy and religion have separate “truths”.

I’ll spare you my commentary on all the history and simply note that there does seem to be some fundamental tension between the rational, philosophical project of making sense of the world, and the religious project of a pre-rational or a-rational commitment to a concrete person or text.

(This one’s the kicker.)

3. There’s no such thing as “religion” or “philosophy”. 

A history lesson: We ask questions like this today because of a long and complicated history of people and the stuff that they did. The most relevant part of this story is the first few centuries AD when Christianity, a Hebrew religion, spread through Greek and Roman cultures. In those cultures, there were people called lovers of wisdom—philosophers—who tried to understand the world and live in it successfully. Actually, everyone-everywhere-always does that same thing, but certain people in Greece, and later Rome, become known for doing it. Citizens would identify themselves with this or that thinker, live together in communities, and study key writings and teachings together. These ways of life, or philosophies, competed with each other through arguments to show that they were correct and the others were mistaken.

As Christianity grew in this culture, its followers often described their way of life as the true philosophy—the best way of understanding the world and living well in it. At this stage, asking whether Christianity could fit with “philosophy” would be like asking whether it could fit with “religion”. Obviously, Christianity is a religion, one that competes with all other forms of worship, like Greek and Roman paganism. Likewise, Christianity is a philosophy, competing with Stoicism and Skepticism and all the rest. 

I really like those answers. But one person I bring up to my students who appears to muddy the waters is Monica, mother of Augustine. He clearly venerates her as a holy and pious woman dedicated to her religion, but she expresses her faith in prayers and acts of mercy and worship, not from what we know through seeking wisdom. She certainly isn’t doing what Augustine or Plato or even Ambrose are doing. Is she a counter-example to point 3?

I think that she isn’t, but explaining why requires just a bit more history. When the later Reformation controversies turned violent and looked unresolvable, philosophers felt the need to develop theories that would cut across the religious divides by appealing only to pure reason or universal human experience. This implied a sharp contrast between philosophy, which became defined as what can be known by all people through natural reason, and religion, which was whatever else was specially revealed by God. 

So back to Monica. What I want to say is that she’s a counterexample to any extreme contrast between religion and philosophy. Her religion is her philosophy or vice versa, and even though it's a less conceptual and more devotional way of life, it's still a way of life that I don't mind calling philosophy. To call her devotion “religion" and not “philosophy” expresses the Enlightenment attitude that such a way of life and thought is somehow less pure or rational than a “philosophical” one because it’s not scientific or naturalistic. But that attitude is mistaken. Even secular philosophers today are coming around to better appreciate the importance of immediate, personal, and social forms of knowing, which were thought of as secondary or deficient during the Enlightenment.

Aha. So that newfangled distinction serves to rend the formerly unified project of those who would have just been “lovers of wisdom,” wisdom being sought with one’s whole life and practice, in ancient times. Quite an example of philosophy and history’s interwovenness. Neglect not your Liberal Arts degree requirements, reader.

On to the next, a question I believe I stole from you in the first place. Do you think philosophy is more like art or science?

I think I can handle this one a bit more succinctly than the last: I lean 60/40 toward saying it’s more like art. Philosophy is similar to science in its commitment to finding out how things really are. Even philosophers like Nietzsche who talk about being anti-truth don’t mean that literally, in the sense of truth that I have in mind. There’s a kind of detachment and attempt at objectivity in the scientific pursuit of truth that should go for philosophy as well. We don’t want to make sense of the world as we want it to be, but as it really is.

But there’s a form of that detached scientific objectivity that isn’t appropriate for philosophy, because studying philosophy isn’t the same as doing philosophy. If “making sense of the world” is separated from “living well in the world”, your study will be impractical, but it will probably also be false.

Philosophy is more like art in the sense that art isn’t usually understood to have a finite endpoint, as if someone could make a sculpture so good that the whole activity of sculpture-making was just “done”. (Sciences, on the other hand, are usually pursuing some perfect complete theory.) Making and experiencing art is an ongoing and evolving part of human life, that makes life good. Likewise, we have to keep doing philosophy as the world around us changes and as we change.

Well put. I think that that, perhaps above other things, makes teaching philosophy dynamic and interesting and meaningful beyond what either the students or I usually expected entering the classroom.

Anything else you’d like to tell us?

What comes to mind in light of a lot of these questions, and my experience teaching recently, is that everyone needs to study history more—obviously the history of philosophy, but just as importantly plain old history—of art, economics, politics, literature, religion, science. It’s all one story; there are just a lot of subplots. But I’m very convinced that making sense of the world is mostly a matter of making sense of its history, and placing your culture, subcultures, and self in it. Maybe that’s obvious to some people, but it’s seemed especially important to me lately.

Thanks so much for giving me a chance to share this stuff; I’m definitely not the kind of grad student that gets bored of thinking or talking about my research. It’s also healthy for me to try to answer some of these basic but hard questions instead of shrugging and thinking “it’s complicated”, which I tend to do a lot.

And thank you for the time and effort you put into sharing it. Your students are privileged to study with you, and I’m delighted to introduce your work to my readers. We all wait on the edge of our seats to devour your dissertation in the coming months and write congratulatory emails to Dr. Jones.