One of the hardest things in philosophy is to get readers to update their preconceptions about a view (especially if they are unsympathetic to begin with). Any academic will have horror stories about journal referees whose comments address a straw man while completely ignoring the section of your paper where you explicitly pre-empt their objection (or even assert the opposite of the claim that they are attributing to you). And referees are among the tiny minority of colleagues who (at least attempt to) read your work at all! Most will just assimilate your view, based on broad labels, to the nearest stereotype already present in their mind. This is understandable, of course: we have limited time and cognitive resources, so economizing via philosophical stereotypes and pattern-matching may lead to better approximating more people’s views than would suspending judgment on all but the few philosophers for whom we’re willing to do a “deep dive” into their work. But it can be frustrating, nonetheless.
This leads me to think that more philosophical communication should lead with counter-stereotyping details: “Here is how my view is different from what you might expect.” I’ve tried to do this in posts like ‘The Utilitarian Tradition is Conceptually Stunted’, ‘How Intention Matters’, and—especially—‘Bleeding-Heart Consequentialism’:
The standard caricature portrays utilitarians as “cold and calculating” moral robots, motivated solely by extremely abstract considerations like simplicity, who insist that we should maximize happiness (perhaps by throwing people into experience machines against their will) since at least that’s an end that we can quantify and measure.
Sounds pretty awful! It’s also nothing remotely like how I think about ethics, despite the fact that I self-identify as a utilitarian(-ish) philosopher. I think there’s a striking disconnect between how people commonly think of utilitarianism and what (the best version of) the view actually looks like.
To help remedy these common misconceptions, here’s a rough summary of my preferred brand of (utilitarian-flavoured) consequentialism…
At least consequentialism is a sufficiently mainstream view that people are willing to discuss it. Helen faces an even steeper uphill climb, defending epiphenomenalism and seriously considering idealism—two of the most maligned (almost taboo) views in the discipline! As I wrote about the latter:
My sense is that older philosophers, at least, may have a bit of a stereotyped conception of what a book on idealism must look like. They seem to imagine something like:
Implausible ambitions to try to show that rival materialist views are inconceivable (perhaps paired with hopelessly fallacious arguments involving unconceived trees).
Scholastic metaphysical orientation: formal, theistic, impenetrably abstract, etc.
An insular approach, offering little engagement with contemporary science or other areas of philosophy.
Stodgy prose, and no theme song.
The View from Everywhere is, thankfully, the opposite of this in every respect…
I hope folks read the book. While I’m not much inclined towards idealism myself, I think it’s very plausibly the most underrated view in all of contemporary analytic philosophy, considering the ratio of (average) actual : warranted credence. The View from Everywhere makes a clear and compelling case for taking the view seriously (assigning it non-trivial credence). Since almost nobody currently does take idealism seriously, the book could plausibly inspire more radical epistemic updates than almost any other philosophical work. (It’s rare to have an opportunity to update your credences by three orders of magnitude, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some readers went from <0.01% prior credence in idealism to ~10% after reading the book.)
Sticky Objections
A related phenomenon is that once an objection to (or expression of) a view becomes widely regarded as “canonical”, it becomes very difficult to update the discipline’s conventional wisdom. A couple of years ago, I offered an opinionated survey of the persisting disciplinary myths that bother me the most:
Philosophical Myth-busting
Long ago, I suggested a dozen “examples of solved philosophy”: things that many non-philosophers assume, but that philosophers had since refuted. But it’s also interesting to consider what mistakes philosophers commonly make, perhaps based on an outdated sense of the philosophical literature. Vanishingly few papers have been read by most philosophers, a…
I especially wish that (i) people convinced that the “paradox of phenomenal judgments” is a devastating problem for epiphenomenalists would address Helen’s paper on the topic, and (ii) anyone tempted to claim that utilitarianism treats individuals as fungible (neglecting the “separateness of persons”) would seriously engage with my arguments to the contrary in ‘Value Receptacles’.
I suspect that many philosophers, skeptical of philosophical progress, implicitly assume that a canonical objection could not be decisively addressed or refuted. Once canonical, it must (they assume) continue to carry force. Or, even after reading a refutation, it may not fully sink in—the original claim may still feel true to them. And while it may be fine on an individual level to sometimes be a bit dogmatic or otherwise limit the role of reason, we cannot make collective philosophical progress unless defenders of the conventional wisdom feel some pressure to actually engage with novel challenges (at least those that pass the obvious hurdles for quality control, say by securing publication in top journals). It would be a shame to miss out on this, because I think there’s lots of philosophical progress to be made: some views really do have a lot more going for them than others, and some arguments and objections are demonstrably confused and subject to decisive refutation. But it isn’t worth much, in practice, if people aren’t willing to actually consider the arguments.
So I think it’s a bit of a problem for academic philosophy that canonical objections are treated as “sticky” in just one direction: they cling to their original targets, while undercutting counterarguments are allowed to “bounce off” and be widely ignored. (I guess this involves some mix of vibe bias and social prestige influencing who in the discipline is seen as most “central” and worth engaging with.)
I wish we had better institutional mechanisms for tracking the current state of the dialectic, and incentivizing further engagement at the cutting edge. I’d welcome others’ thoughts on how to make this happen. (‘Philosophy’s Digital Future’ set out an optimistic vision of how we might do better in future, with AI-powered literature maps.) In the meantime, I can offer… erm… imploring blog posts1 with a standing invitation for more cross-camp engagement, for whatever that’s worth.
Over to the commentariat: What do you see as the most significant persisting misconceptions about your views (or views to which you are sympathetic)? What “sticky” objections lumber on, like the ghosts in Sixth Sense, unaware that they’ve been dead for years? (Don’t forget to share a link to the murder weapon…)
Plus kudos to Daniel Muñoz for engaging (in the comments) with my polemic against Kamm’s “inviolability” view. Occasionally I’ll see a philosopher on Facebook share one of my posts with a disclaimer like, “I disagree with almost everything else Richard writes, but quite liked this post.” I appreciate the approving share, naturally. But I also wonder why they never try pursuing any of their disagreements! I’m always up for a civil argument—objections are very welcome.
Probably the most well-known philosophical argument that has a completely decisive refutation, but for which the refutation is not that well known is the Laplace's Demon argument. Specifically, the argument that determinism entails that it is in principle possible to know in advance what actions you will take by calculating them from the physical laws and initial conditions, and that having this knowledge in advance means you can't choose freely. The refutation I know of comes from a paper by Richard Holton called "From Determinism to Resignation, and How to Stop It," though it's possible someone else has made a similar refutation before this.
Basically, it turns out that the first premise that determinism entails the possibility of foreknowledge of your own actions is just false. The problem is that, although determinism does entail that any of your actions could in principle be calculated from the initial conditions and physical laws (well, assuming that the laws of physics are computable anyway), it does not entail that it's possible for that calculation to be done and for its result to be revealed to you before you perform the action, and this latter possibility is what's required for the argument against free will to go through. In fact, even in fairly simple deterministic systems that we can build in real life, this assumption is demonstrably false. Holton gives the example of a machine consisting a light bulb connected to a light sensor, which will turn the bulb off at noon if it detects light before then and on if it doesn't. Your goal is to predict whether the light bulb will be turned on or off at noon in advance, and reveal your prediction to the machine by presenting it with your own light if you predict it will turn its bulb on, and no light if you predict it will turn its bulb off. Since the machine always does the opposite of what you predict, it does not matter how much computing power you have or how precise your knowledge is of the initial conditions and laws of nature - you will never be able to predict what the machine will do and reveal the prediction to the machine beforehand, even though everything in the scenario is deterministic. This is because the revelation itself has an effect on the machine, and determinism does not stop it from acting as a prediction fruatrator that will always just do the opposite of what anyone predicts it will do (after all, being a prediction frustrator is a perfectly deterministic process).
Of course, the same is true of human actions - predictions of what we will do can affect what we end up doing, and we sometimes decide to do the opposite of whatever is predicted of us. Determinism does not magically make this impossible. It turns out that what's actually impossible is to perform the calculation and reveal the result to someone determined to frustrate your prediction - the mechanistic reason is that, in order to predict a frustrator's actions, you would need to first calculate all the things that causally affect their actions, but one of those is the outcome of the prediction itself, so any attempt to perform the calculation is going to get stuck in an infinite loop.
So based on the above, I consider Laplace's Demon to be a "zombie argument" against compatibilism in the way you used the phrase here. There's also a misconception that compatibilism is redefining free will when in fact most compatibilists hold themselves to be talking about the same concept as incompatibilists, and that incompatibilists are just wrong when they say this concept is incompatible with determinism. So any argument that treats compatibilism as if it's just a redefinition rather than a substantive thesis is similarly a zombie argument.
Misconceptions about utilitarianism are a big pet peeve for me as well, though of course, you already mentioned those. In particular, the idea that utilitarians value the abstract utility function itself, rather than concrete individuals and instances of wellbeing, and the idea that utilitarians treat individuals as "mere means" when the entire theory is based on the idea that everyone should be treated as an equally important end in themselves. I think both of these should be considered philosophical myths, since they're based on misunderstandings of the view, and yet they persist as prominent objections. I would also add epistemic arguments against utilitarianism here, since they tend to completely ignore the concept of expected value and decision theory, making them dead on arrival despite being constantly brought up.
The good news is, there are some arguments that really have been decisively refuted in a way that philosophers have become aware of and agree on, so it's not inevitable that historically important arguments will always continue to amble on despite refutation. Arguments for fatalism that rely on the modal fallacy are the case that comes to mind for me.
Arguments against various forms of reductionism that conflate, "X can be fully described in terms of Ys," with, "X is just Y," where the latter is meant to imply a lack of the higher-level properties associated with X, are a borderline case: You still hear such arguments all the time, but it seems they're generally recognized by philosophers as being fallacious.
Just seconding that “Value Receptacles” is criminally underrated. It’s one of my very favorite papers in value theory from the last 25 years!