10-26-10
As I once again sit at the computer, hands hovering over the keys of my keyboard, I reflect upon my… most unusual academic career. Having started college back in the fall of 1997 I am just now about to close this chapter of my life. [Understand that I had left school and followed a career for a number of years before the economy collapsed and I found myself in a position to return to school]. I have learned that, at most I have 11 classes left, although my department adviser, Rainbolt, seems to think I have no more than 6 classes until I can graduate. Either way, I will take five classes in the spring and finish whatever is left in the summer.
Having met with my department advisor, and discussing my post graduate plans, I was informed that, in all reality, I was not the type of student that a Philosophy graduate program would want. Surprisingly this didn’t really phase me, and upon reflecting the cause of my unconcern I have, I believe, stumbled upon the root source of my indifference.
As a nontraditional student I am a bit older than the typical undergrad. In point of fact, I am older than most of the grad students. As such, unless I specifically tell people that I’m an undergrad, most students, grads included, assume that I’m in the graduate program. I encourage this line of thought as much as possible so that I don’t have to deal with the insufferable attitude of superiority that I’ve noticed in most of them toward the undergrad students. Understand that the professors of my classes are all aware that I’m a nontraditional, as I’ve met most of the professors in the department at one point or another.
So, what is it that could force someone such as me to reject the idea of furthering my pursuit of Philosophy? The people that are familiar with my character would more than likely state that a field, such as Philosophy, should be quite suited to one such as myself.
Philosophy, to the person standing outside of the realm of academia, or at least outside of the department at Georgia State, seems to be this field of arguments and trying to find the truth. A field where one sits and ponders the meaning of life, and quite possibly come up with said meaning.
When I was simply a land surveyor, my crewmate and I would argue the meaning of life. We would argue the existence of God. We would argue about our moral and ethical obligations to ourselves as well as the community and the world as a whole. I had told myself that, if I were to ever reenter academia, that I would major in Philosophy and follow the questions to the big leagues.
Now, it must be understood up front that I’m very utilitarian in the information that I willingly learn and retain. If you reflect upon the big questions, you will find that the questions and their answers all have their own practical uses. Hell, I’ll go so far as to willingly claim that most of the smaller arguments answers have practical uses.
At Georgia State, Philosophy has no practical use. This culture is seemingly encouraged by a few of the faculty and fervently pursued by the majority of the graduate students. Saying this, I realize that the concept that I’m stating might be a bit vague to grasp, so let me use an actual in-class example.
The class is Ethics, which is a senior level class that is cross-listed with a graduate class. The date is October 25th, 2010. In the discussion in class the question is brought up ‘can a 14 year old computer [master] be a master in ethics’. The author we were discussing, Annas [Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing], said that, no, such a child could not be a master in ethics and would not be a reliable source of knowledge.
This concept seemed more than just a little foreign to the grad students in the class. They sat around, throwing out big words in an attempt to wax eloquent about how such a child could indeed become a master in ethical theory.
Sitting there in class, obviously confused beyond belief as to how someone who has supposedly studied any type of philosophy for any amount of time could even pretend that a simply memorization of a book could render a person a master in any subject I raised my hand to make my coment.
“Look,” I said, “you can study and memorize a set of books regarding geometry, trig and calculus and it still wouldn’t make you a land surveyor.” I later elaborated in a private discussion with another student saying, “just because you know the repair manual to my civic in and out doesn’t make you a mechanic in any sense of the term.”
The grad students looked at me as if I had 3 heads and started to speak to me in that infuriating tone explaining haughtily that a person could, however, become a master of utilitarianism by simple study. Another student spoke up for me, but by that point I had turned off my mind and sat waiting for the class to end as I had realized that the sheer amount of blatant stupidity present in the air was threatening to either make me dumber or piss me off enough to start cussing them out. That of course would accomplish nothing.
A bit later I sat back and reflected upon my initial thoughts regarding the concept of becoming an ethical master and I believe I have an easy enough explanation that even a haughty or egotistical student could understand easily.
You see, the reason that a 14 year old could be a master of computers or programming is that most children today are exposed to a computer well before they even start elementary school. Furthermore, from simple observation one can note that such children try to spend as much time on the computer that they have access to as possible. Thus they end up meeting the required 10,000 hours of practice required for mastery before reaching 14.
This is not the case of ethical theory or even applied ethics. The reason is glaringly obvious once reflected upon. In most philosophy classes, it seems that the class gets hung up on random impossible scenarios. ‘In a twin earth where blah blah blah, what would one think we are morally required to do’ and such. This, of course, does little to prepare a person to practice any type of ethics as most ethical dilemmas are actually a choice between to really crappy situations. ‘Do I keep this promise and make myself horridly miserable, thus more than likely causing my making decisions based off of my misery or do I break the promise and potentially cause someone an absurd amount of grief along with damaging my perceived character?’
True ethical dilemmas rarely have any type of happy ending, and are usually little more than a choice between two evils. As such, no child, or even a ‘vile-adviser’ could be considered any type of master of such a field. This is either because of the sheer lack of amount of any type of ethical situations that the individual would find themselves in or because they haven’t actually practice what they claim to know about [in the case of the vile adviser].
It is in my opinion, a very rare case that any person that is in any way young [below the age of 50 perhaps] that has dealt with enough ethical decisions to be considered a master of such a field. I will go further and claim that even most Ethicists could not actually be considered masters!
With all of this said, there is another angle that has irritated me beyond belief about the constant attitude within the department, a seemingly lack of consistency.
Specifically I wish to state a thought that has been floating around in my head and which, if I were ever become a studied figure in any sense of the word, would hopefully become one of the most quoted.
To say this line, I am required, at least by modern literary conventions to set the stage, so to speak. The philosopher that was being studied at the time was Peter Singer [which I will be focusing on in my end of term paper in ethics]. Peter Singer wrote an article in which the basic take away thought was that we, as a ‘rich society’ are morally obligated to bring ourselves to a point of minimal utility so that we may in turn support charities and NGO’s in ‘third world countries’ to raise the utility of said countries. More specifically, we are obligated to forgo our own monetary comfort so that we may provide food for those who are starving in Africa. That is the general idea.
Within the class, we had an argument in which, people were agreeing wholeheartedly with Singer, and in fact were slightly bothered with my quip of ‘if we’re really worried about peoples base utility level, then we should go and enslave the people who are starving and raise their utility through the practices implied within property ownership’ [that was basically it].
Of course, the moment someone brings up any type of a trampling of human rights, people, philosophers included, go for blood. In this particular case, the statement was met with derision and dismissal. I understand the initial problem that people have about the case presented, so, now that I have laid out the scenario, let me state the line:
The problem with the situation of people starving in third world areas, such as most of Africa, is that people, such as philosophy students, particularly those whom are graduate students, would much rather throw money at the problem and then sit around and discuss the feeling of moral superiority that they get for throwing money at the problem and downgrading a meal here or there. It doesn’t matter to these people that the problem of starvation has persisted regardless of the amount of financial aid that has been provided by such individuals. If people truly cared about the people of Africa they would refrain from throwing money at it and would instead do something to actually help the problem.
This glaring problem of throwing money at an issue stems from a basic lack of give a damn, and what is worse, people in general lie to themselves about it. In truth, most people would likely not even give a damn about the entire continent sinking into the ocean, aside from the economic implications of such an event. Truthfully, if every person on the continent of Africa were to die tomorrow, the likelihood that such a moral ‘superiorist’ would notice, assuming the media kept mum about it, is so disgustingly small, that it’s absurd.
In truth I am quite the same way, the difference between the moral superiorist and myself is that I am quite aware of my indifference. The true difference is that I am consistent, whereas the grad student is not. [The above section is still being rewritten]
With that said, I leave the field of battle for now, though most assuredly I will be back for another battle. It should also be noted that after speaking in depth with my ethics professor, I may be misrepresenting the average grads view on the issue of a young master of ethics, though, as this is not the actual academic piece that I am working on, I really don’t care if I misrepresent them or not.
So I take my leave for now, but there will in fact be a part 2…
-Tank
