In this interview, John Doris, Peter L. Dyson Professor of Ethics in Organizations and Life at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and Professor in the Sage School of Philosophy, at Cornell University, talks about growing up a faculty brat, the Grateful Dead, working at the Ithaca Journal, buckets of Rolling Rock ponies, a couple years at Hobart before returning to Cornell, working with Terry Irwin and Gail Fine, the end of the Cold War and the fear of nuclear Armageddon, University of Michigan, Sturgeon, Boyd, faith in philosophical progress, Harman, Stich, Railton, interdisciplinary naturalism, grad student assessment, working with Darwall, Gibbard, and the psychologist Richard Nisbett on his dissertation which would later become Lack of Character, Okinawan Karate, alt-country, his first job at UC Santa Cruz, redwoods, Dave Chalmers, coyotes, Alva Noë, working with eco-warrior Doug Peacock, the Moral Psychology Research Group, leaving Santa Cruz for the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at WashU, the laws of graduate education, returning to Cornell, the Walking Dead, the Trump phenomenon, the pandemic, a priorists, marriage, why he stands during talks, and his last meal…
[3/11/2021]
So, where did you grow up? What did your parents do for a living?
I was born and raised in Ithaca NY, a Cornell faculty brat: my father, John, was a developmental psychologist in the School of Human Ecology, and my mother, Marjorie, was a pediatrician in Cornell’s Student Health Services. My mother was one of only four women in her class at University of Nebraska medical school, and trained as a pediatric cardiologist at Yale, so she was really very special, but she wasn’t able to make her career all she’d hoped for, working in general practice at Student Health Services. I could tell it really hurt. Juggling her professional aspirations while raising five kids was an incredible achievement, but I know it wasn’t easy. Watching my four older sisters deal with some of the same stuff has made this a really important issue for me, and I’m always especially impressed with the professional successes of women in philosophy and science.
What do your sisters do?
All four of my sisters have doctoral degrees; Divinity, Education, Art History, Social Work. All four have been variously employed as knowledge workers: writers, professors, and the like.
As a kid, what did you do for fun?
We lived near the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, and I ran around in the woods a lot in my early years. Later it was fishing in the area’s many creeks and gorges, and stuff like jumping off high cliffs into the reservoirs. I was a bit reckless, which is funny, because I’m very safety conscious now, and my mother, who was a worrier, used to say, “If he makes it to 25, we’ve got a chance.” I also played lots of basketball, though it was a big disappointment to me that not much came of it. I played a lot, and have wonderful memories of summers on the playgrounds, but even at 6’8”, it wasn’t going to be my career.
Good relationship with your parents, then?
I was very fortunate to have had good relationships with my parents. They were truly decent folks, very bright and funny, who overcame a lot, and did a lot for others.
Religious household?
My mother was a Presbyterian from the tiny town of Seward, Nebraska. My dad was Irish Catholic from the Bronx. It was a Christian home I suppose, but we almost never went to church, except for weddings. Maybe this relaxed approach to religion contributed to my subsequent atheism.
As a teen, favorite books?
Ah, that’s a ways back! Although my dad was a scientist, he was also a scholar of the old school, and read everything – stuff like the New Testament in French, to keep up with the language. So the house was overstuffed with books, and I read a ton. I remember a lot of sports books – fair enough, for a nerdy jock wannabe. Leo Durocher’s Nice Guys Finish Last made a big impression on me. I also read a lot of natural history. I was, and still am, very into critters. The animal collector turned conservationist Gerald Durrell (brother of novelist Lawrence), was a prolific and hilarious author, and I read everything he wrote, usually several times. A favorite was My Family and Other Animals, about growing up on the island of Corfu surrounded by animals and his delightfully loopy family – who can’t relate to a book about a loopy family?
Music?
Our house was filled with music. Some of us played – my sister Ellie is very musical, one of those people who can pick up most any instrument. I don’t have a musical bone in my body, alas, but music is the most moving art form for me, and there’s always music on in the house, whether I’m playing or working. Growing up there was some classical, but also folk – since my dad was Irish Catholic, a lot of Clancy brothers. Folk, or folk-inspired, still dominates my listening. The Grateful Dead were big – I’d even catch my mother dancing around to “Ripple,” as she did housework. I went through a phase of collecting concert bootlegs and seeing shows -- pretty wild times.
Were you a good high school student?
Despite my background as a “legacy” academic, I wasn’t much of a student growing up. My elementary school thought I had learning disabilities, perhaps because I was unusually tall, and didn’t fit very well in crowded classrooms designed for smaller children, and was terrible at coloring within the lines. My father, given his profession, had other ideas, and he taught me to read. I can still see us lying on my bed, reading Dr. Seuss together when he came home from work. So I was an avid reader, but not a great student; I eventually graduated high school with a C average.
I also didn't do so great in school. As graduation approached, did you start think about what you wanted to do for a living?
Not really. I thought about hanging with my friends, playing basketball, going fishing, and swimming in the reservoirs around Ithaca. The future was, well, the future – something else entirely.
Did you consider not going to college? Were you worried you would disappoint your parents, or that you wouldn't get in anywhere?
It was assumed that I would go to college, but I hardly thought about it, and only applied to a few places. I wasn’t especially popular, but I had good friends, and sort of imagined high school would go on forever. I wasn’t worried about disappointing my parents, but my mom, in particular, was worried that I would. She was full of dire predictions about me “busting out” of college, since I was such a shitty student; report cards (the ones I was not able to intercept) were not happy events.
Where did you end up going to school? I imagine you started doing better, academically?
I spent my first two years at Hobart College, a really nice small liberal arts college just up the road from Ithaca, in Geneva, New York. My folks hoped I might not flunk out in a smaller, more nurturing environment, and I wanted to play basketball, and I was decidedly not major college sports material. I did reasonably well my frosh year – I think I squeaked onto the Dean’s List. I took the year off for what would have been my sophomore year – my best friends had flunked out, and I was pretty sad and lonely. The economy was slow, and I ended up working in the pressroom of the Ithaca Journal, feeding the machine that inserts grocery flyers into the paper. Almost a caricature of horrible, mechanized labor; some nice coworkers, but a miserable experience. (Payday buckets of Rolling Rock ponies at Pete’s Cayuga Bar around the corner from the pressroom were a rare bright spot.) With that dismal experience as a motivator, I became a very serious student, and never looked back.
Least favorite classes?
I liked most of my classes. Undergrad is way more fun than grad school, at least in that it is less specialized, and you get to study a wide variety of subjects without beating any of them to death. I wasn’t crazy about my economics class, though, where lectures always seemed to be, “here’s an absurdly complex theory that’s impossible to understand and doesn’t apply to actual economic behavior, anyway.” There might be some affinities with philosophy here, I guess. The Prof made some amusing jokes about Laffer Curves, so that was a highlight. But the class was a nine o’clock; I’m very much a morning person now, but wasn’t then, and my attendance suffered.
Inspirational teachers? When did you realize you wanted to study philosophy? Did you consider in majoring in anything else?
Sophomore year at Hobart, I got “stuck” in a philosophy class when it was the only elective that fit my schedule – despite my miserable experience in intro, I was still planning to major and Econ and go to law school. The teacher was Ben Daise, who had a grim reputation with many students: he was incredibly demanding, and would actually – perish the thought – give many students in his intro classes Cs, which, as with a lot of schools, was really not done at Hobart. I remember once, when someone asked Daise what he was looking for on exams, he said, “native wit.” Yikes. But he was a fabulous teacher, and absolute master of “Socratic,” discussion-based, teaching. I hope I teach like him. After about five seconds in his class, I thought “this is what I do,” and I never again considered majoring in anything other than philosophy.
You left Hobart before you finished up, yeah?
After sophomore year, I transferred to Cornell. I’d quit the Hobart basketball team – the coach was a bozo – and I figured I could help my folks out by taking advantage of what was then an excellent faculty brat tuition program. This was in the mid-eighties, and “Cornell Realism” was a Very Big Thing in philosophy, and the atmosphere, if you were an aspiring philosophy wonk, was just electric. From my naïf perspective, it really seemed like solutions to the Big Philosophical Problems were just around the corner. (The vibe at my graduate program, Michigan, was much more philosophically cynical, and this was a painful adjustment for me.)
How were your classes at Cornell?
Terry Irwin was my undergraduate advisor, and I took several graduate courses with him, which were amazing. Irwin’s just luminously bright – a ton of “crackle” – and a pleasure to be around intellectually. It might surprise people, given the kind of work I do now, but I just fell in love with the ancients, and also got to study with Gail Fine. Nick Sturgeon was another great teacher, and an extremely shrewd philosopher. He was very supportive of me, and his kind of naturalism is still evident in how I approach philosophy. I was also profoundly influenced by Norman Kretzmann -- he was a deeply impressive man, serious, but kind – a real philosopher. I was even a theist for a while. Not how I think about things now, but I wish more of Kretzmann’s thoughtfulness and intellectual humility rubbed off on me.
Why’d you bail on theism?
Good question. Drifting that way was contemporaneous with me taking an increasingly naturalistic approach to philosophy, but I’d be surprised if it got decided by arguments. Just started to feel it less I guess, and maybe at those moments I needed it to work, it didn’t.
Did you...party?
Are you trying to get me in trouble?
I am! So, I went to Ithaca College. Cool town. Very political. Were you into politics?
For a year or two around my senior year at Cornell, I was very involved with anti-nuclear activism. It wasn’t so much altruism, I think, as self-defense: it really seemed to me that, at the end of the cold war, the world was gonna get blown up. I was always looking up nervously at the sky, waiting for the big one. Turned out Cornell had a pretty successful group, the November 11th Committee, I think named for some armistice or another, and I started going to all the meetings. Pretty atypical, for what I think of as academic activism today; mostly scientists, and very pragmatic and buttoned down, very little in the way of front or posture. The group was good at fund raising, and for a lefty group, had some bucks. So, with the group’s approval I started taking out big ads in the Cornell Daily Sun whenever a big military contractor recruited on campus, with headings like “Choosing a High Technology Career?: Choose a Career You Can Live With.” Then, there’d be some text about what the company did, and a number you could call for alternative career counseling. I thought this was a great idea, but nobody ever called, except for one angry pro-defense guy who berated the career counselor (an applied physics postdoc who was a member of the group). Then an engineer in the group came to a meeting and dressed me down because he thought the ads were demeaning to engineers. That was the end of that. When I started grad school in Ann Arbor, I began working with the peace group there, but it was a total mess. Finally, one of the senior members of the group showed up drunk and went on this horrible sexist and anti-Semitic tirade, and I moved on.
Speaking of Ann Arbor, when did you realize you wanted to go to grad school?
I decided I wanted to be a philosopher pretty quickly after starting classes at Cornell. As I say, I was blown away by Terry Irwin. My dad, who was a pretty applied academic, and worked on programs for the prevention of child maltreatment, wanted me to go to law school – he was worried (not unreasonably!) that philosophy was too often “just words.” He arranged for me to sit in on some law school classes with a friend of his, but it didn’t have the hoped-for effect – what went on there just didn’t seem as “smart” to me as what was going on in Irwin’s seminars. I kind of regret this now, since I wish, probably like a lot of academics, that what I do has more direct positive impact on the world. Maybe a career in law would have been more fulfilling in this regard.
Probably! What’re you gonna do? Who helped you navigate the process of applying to grad school?
Irwin was an excellent advisor, and helped me through it. But I think things were a lot less complex in those days. My friend Brian Leiter hadn’t started doing his thing yet, and I was not a very informed consumer. Irwin gave me a list of about nine places, and after doing an application or two, I came back to him and asked if we could shorten the list, since I was finding doing the applications really dreary. We cut it to six, and those were the places I applied. I put in more thought than I did for undergrad applications, but nothing like the sort of informed ruminations that go on today.
So, you ended up going to University of Michigan. You mentioned that the atmosphere was a bit more cynical. Could you explain? What was trending at Michigan at the time, philosophically?
As I said, I was at Cornell for the heyday of Cornell Realism, and work being done there in ethics was attracting at lot of attention. At least when viewed through my undergraduate eyes, it seemed like there was a lot of faith in philosophical progress in the air – a couple of more papers by Sturgeon and Boyd and we’ll get this whole objectivity of morality thing sorted out. (David Brink was finishing there as a graduate student, and sat in on some classes I took.) Boyd’s assertion that most moral disagreement is reducible to factual disagreement, and therefore at least partially tractable, is an example of the kind of thing I’m thinking of. Cornell also had a distinctly historical perspective; since many of the Greats are of the opinion that they were getting things solved (I didn’t read “continentals” like Nietzsche until grad school), an impressionable undergraduate without much in the way of a long view perspective could end a bit bullish on the prospects of philosophical progress, and I certainly did.
When I got to Michigan, I was ready to get it all figured out, and was kind of shocked that people there were much more irreverent. Faculty would say things like, “Well, at least that’s what I think today, ha-ha,” and I was kind of appalled. Michigan was very well-stocked with Princeton PhD’s in those days, and I wonder if that somehow helps accounts for the difference in tenor from Cornell (who certainly had their share of Princeton PhDs). For instance, Gil Harman, a mainstay of the Princeton department for 50 years, until just recently, does philosophy beautifully, but also, I think, pretty irreverently, which was definitely not the Cornell Realism vibe.
Turns out, I ended more of a Michigan type than a Cornell type; I contracted Sturgeon’s naturalism, but not his realism – though I don’t have well worked out metaethical views, or even strong metaethical opinions. Whether this is due the reduced aspirations of age, or the effect of graduate education, I can’t say – though Peter Railton, who together with my post-degree mentor Steve Stich, is the biggest influence on how I think about philosophical methodology, is a moral realist. Steve and I are regular collaborators and very close friends, and I’ve come to share what I think of his pragmatism.
I’m a fan.
Realism vs. anti-realism was big at Michigan too: there was a lot of discussion of “who gets to count as a realist” in different areas. I thought about that a lot then, but now I think “who counts as what?” debates tend not to be especially interesting. I also seem to recall a lot of talk about supervenience, but I didn’t do much with that either. What everyone seemed to be talking about is normativity, and I did think a lot about that: when people say my kind of interdisciplinary naturalism “distorts the normative character of evaluative discourse” or the like, I have to laugh – you couldn’t have better instruction on those issues than I did, and however you come out in the end, there’s certainly quite viable naturalistic accounts of normativity.
Who did you work with at Michigan? What did you do your dissertation on?
I had a fabulous dissertation committee. Allan Gibbard was my director, and he is fabulously bright -- the most obvious comparison to me is David Lewis, from those occasions I was lucky enough to see Lewis in action. Allan is also very kind, and he would take two-hour meetings with me whenever I wanted. This wasn’t all that often, because it would take me days to digest them, and then I’d say things like, “Damn, Allan saw the real issue in the first 30 seconds.” Allan was a very non-directive director, but doing philosophy with him over extended periods would make anyone better at philosophy.
Steve Darwall was also on my committee, and he had a lot to do with my professional development: I learned a lot about scholarship, writing, and effective tone from him; he was a wonderful mentor, and deserves a lot of the credit for whatever professional success I’ve had. He was also a delight to talk philosophy with: curious, insightful, and fair; everyone should have a philosophical temperament like his. He also does philosophy with a sense of humor, another tendency that should be in higher supply.
Jim Joyce was the other philosophy member of my committee: very smart, and technically acute, but unlike some people with those enviable attributes, very philosophically sensible and accessible. Jim was junior faculty then, and he really helped me navigate the process; I recommend that every PhD student have a junior faculty member on the committee – they have a more vivid appreciation of the predicament than do those for whom it was longer ago.
Richard Nisbett, the great social psychologist, was my outside reader, and he was much more impactful on my dissertation – and career -- than outside members, in my experience, typically are. I’m proud of the fact that my dissertation work was pretty independent – I wasn’t a Gibbard student working on a “Gibbard topic” or a Darwall student working on a “Darwall topic” – but I was sort of Nisbett student working on a “Nisbett topic,” since my dissertation, which eventually developed into my book Lack of Character, applies some lessons of social psychology to philosophical ethics. Dick’s support was invaluable, since the “character skepticism” I espoused itself met with considerable skepticism – as it continues to do. As one faculty member said to me, “I don’t know what you could say to convince me of this. ” So having Dick’s support was really important, particularly as it helped people to see that I actually had some grasp of the psychology. I still remember the first time I met with Dick, and asked him if he thought his stuff had connections to ethics. He said, “I’ve been waiting years for somebody to come through the door and ask me that.”
Amazing! Any other influences?
Two people who were not on my committee also influenced me a lot. Peter Railton was away while I finished my dissertation, so he did not end on my committee, but I think my work is as close to him as any of my teachers. Gideon Rosen was briefly at Michigan, and briefly on my committee, and we talked a lot, as we try to do when I’m in Princeton, and he’s a remarkably acute interlocutor – the best philosophical conversationalist I’ve met.
The Michigan faculty was extraordinary then, and I learned a lot from a lot of people. Louis Loeb was the biggest influence on my teaching style. I learned a lot about philosophy of science from Larry Sklar, and I regularly attended Ken Walton’s aesthetics reading group, which David Hills also attended. David, who has since left for Stanford, is really special; he’s a model of erudition and philosophical generosity, and I expect his name appears in the acknowledgements of most philosophy dissertations written at Ann Arbor during that period, as it did in mine. I didn’t work formally with Liz Anderson, but I’ve always found her way of connecting philosophy to the world an admirable model. There were also lots of outstanding faculty passing through Ann Arbor who were not in my area, like Steve Yablo and Sally Haslanger; in general, lots of great stuff in the air.
Who did you hang with? Was it a competitive environment?
The old saw is that you learn most in graduate school from fellow graduate students, and I expect it’s at least as sharp as most old saws. I originally went to graduate school to do ancient philosophy, and although Michigan had a faculty presence in Nick White (and for a brief time Alan Code), as well as other talented historians like Ed Curley and Louis Loeb, the graduate student culture in ancient was non-existent, while in ethics it was amazing. Among the “value-types” I overlapped with were Justin D’Arms, Connie Rosati, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Nadeem Hussain, Dan Jacobson, Heidi Feldman, Mike Weber, Manyul Im, Steve Angle, Andrea Westlund, Dave Sobel, Brian Leiter, and Don Loeb. Everybody had read the same classic papers, everybody “spoke the same language,” and the level of discussion was really high; I remember some of those people were in a seminar taught by Don Regan of the Law School – the best seminar I took. The non-ethics folks were also very good: people like Karen Bennett, Krista Lawlor, and Laura Schroeder.
I was pretty intimidated by the faculty – much more so than many graduate students I encounter seem to be. The grad student space used to be at the end of the hall occupied by classics, at the opposite end from philosophy, and you could slink in and out without going through philosophy. Many of us availed ourselves of that option! But when Steve Darwall was chair, he put our mailboxes with the faculty boxes. This forced more interaction between graduate students and faculty, and really helped the climate. A classic “situationist” social psychology example of a small change making a big difference – maybe Steve had been reading my dissertation chapters!
Wasn’t there a graduate student ranking system?
I think Michigan, despite grad students doing philosophy together, was pretty competitive; lots of speculating and stressing about who the faculty “liked.” One thing that might have contributed to this was that the department used to give job candidates a numerical ranking: 1000 meant you could apply anywhere with departmental blessing, 990 meant that you could apply anywhere but the top ten research programs, and so on. I thought, and still think, that this practice is, to put it as politely as I know how, extremely unfortunate. Oddly, some of the Michigan faculty who found the Philosophical Gourmet Report ranking programs objectionable didn’t seem to think there was something amiss about ranking people.
Ha!
I heard they discontinued the practice. I certainly hope so. I think hiring programs should be allowed to decide who’s appropriate for them anyway, and I doubt that the department rankings were neatly associated with subsequent success, since such prognostication is notoriously difficult: today’s 1000 might be tomorrow’s failed tenure case.
Aside from that, I think the competition was pretty healthy. That said, the ethos of philosophical conversation, as was then pretty typical, was decidedly pugilistic, and a lot of unpleasantness resulted. I remember some graduate students, and even some speakers, being brought close to tears by questioners -- one job candidate asked that Q&A for their talk be ended early. As senior faculty, I’m of course situated differently than I was then, but I think this is one area where the field is doing better, even if we have a long way to go. There seems to be much less tolerance of nastiness, and with some exceptions, I see a lot of constructive interactions at seminars and talks.
What did you do for fun?
A lot of my life in Ann Arbor was lived outside the department. I was pretty alienated for a while, took some time off, and seriously considered leaving philosophy. It took me a while to get used to the change from beautiful Ithaca to pretty un-beautiful Ann Arbor, but I came to love it pretty quickly, and it was really formative time for me. In fact, when I took the New York times “dialect quiz” recently, it placed me in the upper Midwest, much closer to Ann Arbor than Ithaca. I must call sneakers “tennis shoes” or something.
Obstacles?
Like for many of people, grad school was an intense time for me; a lot of life happens in that stretch. My mother died suddenly at the beginning of my second year; we were close, and I was truly stricken.
I’m sorry to hear that.
Don Loeb, a senior graduate student then, was really supportive during this period, kept bugging me to check out the martial arts school he’d been training at, the Asian Martial Arts Studio, and finally I did. One of the most important moments of my life. Karl Scott Sensei, who ran and continues to run the school, is a martial arts genius, with a profound understanding of movement, minds and bodies; his teaching deeply impacted my life. The studio, or dojo, became the center of my life; I spent 20-30 hours a week there, and my fellow “dojo rats” became, and remain, among my closest friends. I pretty regularly visit Ann Arbor, to hang out and train with Scott Sensei and the crew. I’ve now been studying Okinawan Karate, which is my main training emphasis, for more than 30 years, and I’ve been teaching since I left Ann Arbor. Hopefully, I’ve managed to do a tiny fraction of the good for people Sensei Scott has done.
All this time at the dojo was time not spent around the department, of course. I also worked various jobs: construction, bouncer, group home worker, and I managed the small apartment complex I lived in. Money still felt pretty tight, and I felt pretty out of the department. Justin D’Arms was for a good stretch of this period my closest connection to philosophy and the department, and I doubt I would have finished if not for him. D’Arms, I, and Dan Jacobson developed strong interests in food and wine, the latter led by D’Arms, who came from a “wine family.” We had lots of amazing dinner parties, and all got pretty handy in the kitchen; cooking remains a considerable part of my life. I don’t do the elaborate stuff as often as I did, but I’m a much better everyday cook.
You said earlier you dig music. How’d you get your fix in Ann Arbor?
I worked the door (aka, bouncing) at the Blind Pig rock club in Ann Arbor, and the legendary alt country band Uncle Tupelo showed up, playing to a nearly empty house. Me and my friends (fellow bouncers who I met at my martial arts school) were blown away, like “Finally, some motherf—kers are playing our song.” There wasn’t really stuff like that then, but Uncle T. inspired a lot of great bands, like Two Cow Garage, out of Columbus, Ohio. My listening is still dominated by alt country, Americana, or as the say in Carolina, y’allternative. It’s mellowed a bit, with a lot of singer songwriter types, like Amelia Curran, Shannon McNally, Hayes Carll, and the band Po’ Girl. Since I’m not very musical, and am very verbal, lyrics matter a lot to me, though I do listen to 50’s-60s jazz, like Coltrane and Davis, as well as some less famous types, like the piano player Red Garland, and saxophonist Hank Mobley. I’ve a special fondness for Art Pepper, who I think is scandalously underappreciated. Everyone should have his “Modern Art.” I care about sound quality, and noodle with my stereo a bit. My friend and Washington University colleague Casey O’Callaghan is a philosopher of perception who is an expert on sound, so we have fun together with our kit.
What was the market like when you finished? Get any good advice? Any disastrous experiences? Where'd you land your first gig?
D’Arms and Jacobson finished well before I did, so I had a bit less philosophy collegiality on the home stretch, but I eventually got a dissertation fellowship at Michigan’s institute for the Humanities, which boosted my confidence a lot, and got me back to being fully engaged in academic life. The Institute was then in the Rackham Building, probably the most beautiful building on campus, and I shared an office with a couple of other grads. There were very supportive faculty fellows there too: notably for me, the psychologist Phoebe Ellsworth, the political theorist Don Herzog, and the scholar-provocateur Bill Miller.
It was a wonderful year at the Institute, and I finally finished. The job market, while maybe not as bad as it is now, was plenty bad, and it took me 2 years to land a permanent job that made sense, fit-wise. In those days, convention interviews were still the norm, and I endured my share of unpleasantness. Since my character skepticism was not to everybody’s taste, folks got pretty testy, and some of my interviews consisted of me being lectured by aggrieved a priorists and moralists. And of course there was the awfulness not associated with philosophical: interviewers falling asleep as I tried to answer questions, being interviewed in a hotel bedroom while the department chair lay on the bed in his stocking feet, etc.
I take considerable satisfaction in the fact that long time critics of the system, like myself and Jamie Dreier, ended up on the right side of history, and convention interviews seem now to be pretty much dead (at least for the moment). Admittedly, this probably has more to do with the emergence of Skype than any of the (good) arguments the critics made, but I’ll take it. I still think short Skype (or Zoom!) interviews are of little projective value, but since they don’t impose economic burdens on already economically vulnerable graduate students, I’m OK with that. Still lots of wickedness on campus visits, but the death of convention interviews, it seems to me, is a way in which our little world has improved.
Anyway, I survived, and ended up in paradise for my first job, at the surpassingly beautiful UC Santa Cruz.
Santa Cruz seems like a magical place. Please describe for people who have never been. What did you do in your spare time at Santa Cruz? With whom did you discuss philosophy most while at Santa Cruz?
As one of my teachers, Walter Todd Sensei, said to me, Santa Cruz is like living in a postcard. We used to joke that if Santa Cruz is home, it’s hard to figure out where to vacation, because there aren’t many places nicer. The University is set in the redwood forests overlooking the town itself, which sits on the north edge of Monterey Bay, and the result is absolutely stunning.
While, I’ve been shamefully politically inert, since leaving Santa Cruz, back then I did quite a bit of what I call “activist teaching” in a course I used to teach regularly on “Wilderness Studies.” I invited the great eco-warrior/naturalist Doug Peacock to give some lectures at Santa Cruz when I taught there, and we became friends, and he’s been a big influence on me, and I started try to help with environmental issues in the best way I knew how, by teaching. Doug’s an actual living American Hero, incredibly fierce, but also deeply compassionate and caring. I should be more like him. We all should.
When I moved from Santa Cruz to St. Louis, the battle for the environment seemed much less immediate, and the enrollments for Wilderness Studies was a tenth of what they had been out West. I also began to find it harder and harder to be hopeful – the prognosis is really dispiriting. Finally, a very wise student wrote in their evaluation, “I’m not sure what is was, but Doris seemed burned out on this stuff.” I’ve not taught it since. Maybe I’ll be able to return to it, if I can rekindle the fire. Not the best choice of words, it strikes me, with climate change incinerating the West Coast as I write this.
I spent as much time as I could outside, hiking or trail running, a good bit of it on my own, and had a lot of really incredible, joyous experiences. I remember running down a huge sloping meadow overlooking the ocean at sunset, and having a long conversation with a group of coyotes. I doubt they found my attempts at imitating their vocalizations very convincing, but they were quite happy to socialize. Lots of other amazing wildlife: I was regularly in close proximity to bobcats, and the sky was thick with all manner of raptors. On the water, marine mammals like seals and sea lions, the occasional dolphin, and squadrons of pelicans patrolling the waves. It was years before I didn’t get a sick feeling in my stomach when I thought of leaving all that.
Philosophers at Santa Cruz?
When I got to Santa Cruz, the philosophy was for a short time pretty amazing, since Dave Chalmers and Alva Noë were both there. It was a formative period for Dave’s work on consciousness, Alva’s work on perception, and mine in moral psychology. So a good place to talk about the mind, and we certainly did. Dave moved on pretty quickly, alas, as did Alva. I’m not in touch with them as much as I’d wish to be, but we are still friendly.
Among the senior faculty, there was Ric Otte, a really smart epistemologist and philosopher of science, and Jerry Neu, another really smart philosopher who works on Freud. They’re both retired now, but I learned a ton from them both, and we are still in touch. I also talked a lot with Dan Guevara, about both moral philosophy and the environment.
Were you happy with the reception of Lack of Character? Were any of the critics right? The biggest problem with your view of character, in your estimation?
Well, I was happy that people thought Lack of Character worth discussing – although the response was in many cases less than wildly enthusiastic! Being a stubborn sort, I interpreted this as me touching a nerve, which (further) convinced me I was onto something.
Nancy Snow and Darcia Narvaez went so far, in their Templeton grant, to say one of their purposes was to “counter” the influence of me and my colleagues in the Moral Psychology Research Group. It’s not clear what there is to oppose, since the group has a lot of healthy disagreement amongst ourselves, but I assumed it had something to do with my views on character, since Snow and Narvaez are both committed character theorists. I checked around, and my psychology colleagues assured me that ad hominem grants are not the norm, so I interpreted this as a singular honor. If it takes millions of dollars in grant money to counter your research program, your program must be generating some movement.
BOOM! But do you think your views have been misconstrued?
Philosophers tend to think that their views are misconstrued, and I’m no different. Too many people interpreted me of saying that traits “don’t exist” (whatever that means), something I have explicitly denied in numerous venues, so that particular line of response did nothing to further discussion.
The serious question is how to characterize traits. My own account of “local traits” issuing in similar behavior across highly similar situations has never struck me as especially theoretically interesting, though it does have the advantage of fitting the facts. My favorite response to the kind of character skepticism I espouse is Maria Merritt’s notion of “socially sustained,” virtues, where the idea is that human beings can manifest the sort of behavioral reliability associated with virtue when they have the right sort of social support (Phillip Pettit takes a similar line). I think Merritt’s treatment of sociality is deeply suggestive, and I pursued the role of sociality for agency in my second book, Talking to Our Selves.
Have your views changed?
In broad outline, I haven’t changed my views. I’m still a character skeptic, and I still think philosophers -- and most likely, “ordinary folks” -- seriously overstate the importance of character to both psychology and ethics, and that this misdirection of attention hamstrings ethical thought. Character isn’t destiny, it’s at best a small fragment of destiny – but that doesn’t make for a very ringing phrase.
There was a crucial issue I handled badly in the book, one that I’m still trying to figure out how to manage correctly. Although I didn’t usually put things this way, one piece of my complaint about personality and character psychology – like the situationists in psychology before me – was that effect sizes in personality psychology tend to be pretty small: often of a size that isn’t detectable by “the naked eye” without “statistical magnification.” What I didn’t attend to closely enough is that this is true for a great deal of psychology, including the social psychology I pitted against character theory.
Then the difficulty I pointed to is not unique to personality/character psychology, but is endemic to much psychological research: as it’s sometimes said, “all prediction is small prediction” (the same is true for much medical research, by the way). This doesn’t mean that my critique of character psychology was off the mark; I’d still argue, as I did then, that character is less robust, and behavior less reliable, than many philosophers, and many lay people, appear to believe. I’m guessing – I don’t go back and look at Lack of Character much -- that there would be some differences in how I cast things, knowing what I now know about effect sizes. Or rather, with me knowing that I don’t know nearly enough about how to think about effect sizes. In my defense, the issues are really hard, and amenable to a wide range of interpretation.
At what point did you think, empirically informed research in philosophy is not going away?
The character wars began in a pretty remarkable circumstance: people were making important claims that were obviously empirically assessable, and ignoring empirical work that is obviously relevant to assessing those claims. Of course, on that way of putting things, my comments on the circumstance must be glaringly obvious too, so maybe I should find another construal! The heat of the pushback suggests that there’s more going on than that, I guess. I’m pretty stubborn, and a bit of a true believer, and since I didn’t have any plans to go away, I always had a lot of faith in the idea of interdisciplinary, empirically informed moral philosophy.
Not to say it wasn’t a seriously uphill fight. We certainly met with resistance. But pretty early on, things started to stick. Steve Stich, Gil Harman, and the great social psychologist John Darley taught a seminar on empirically informed ethics at Rutgers in 2000, where a lot of the soon-to-be usual suspects, like Josh Greene and Shaun Nichols, became friends. I was visiting the Values Center at Princeton, which was a critically formative experience in my career, and was able to attend. In 2003, Steve organized the founding meeting of the Moral Psychology Research Group, and in 2004, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong organized a big conference at Dartmouth, which was sort of a coming out party for us. By the time the group published the Moral Psychology Handbook in 2010, it definitely felt like we were here to stay.
Becoming more established isn’t cost free. It’s not just the question of whether the revolutionaries can govern (even just a few districts of philosophy and psychology) but more importantly, the question of from where the inspiration comes. I suspect many of us lived by the feud, and miss it a bit. We worked so hard to establish the methodology, now what? The dog has talked – will it say anything interesting?
I’m optimistic though, because so many excellent younger folks, in both psychology and philosophy, continue to join the field, and so many special people are contributing, from graduate students to the most senior folks. So there’s a lot of reason to think the good times will continue to roll.
Might we one day live in a world free of a priorism?
I’m a methodological pluralist, so I’m happy for a thousand methodologies to bloom, including those growing in pre-empirical soil. For many philosophical problems (the nature of grounding, say) a priorism may be what there is to work with. And famously, evaluative questions can’t be decided by empirical means alone.
I am concerned, though, when people forward empirical claims without substantiation (the occasional difficulty of determining when a claim is empirical noted). Sometimes there won’t be relevant evidence, in which case one should be forthright that they are engaging in empirical speculation. But it’s troubling when there exists germane empirical evidence that is totally overlooked. This happens less than it used to, but it still happens – sometimes when the evidence is both well-known and glaringly relevant.
Also concerning is the tendency for philosophers to opine, sometimes confidently and vehemently, on difficult empirical literatures with which they have little more than passing familiarity. This seems especially likely to happen when scientific issues get taken up in the popular press, as has happened lately regarding issues like replication and implicit bias.
That said, I’m very happy to let a priorists be a priorists! But if you’re going to venture into the empirical, cover your posteriori and make every effort to get the facts right.
Ha!
Happily, the study of character has shown wonderful progress in this regard; it’s arguably the most robustly interdisciplinary area of philosophy, and a lot of the work done is really interesting. Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology, edited by Miller, Furr, Knobel, and Fleeson, gives a nice sense of this. Despite the sometimes heated reception by people in virtue ethics, empirically motivated character skepticism has been really good for the field. Christian Miller has drawn in people from all over the academy, and he, and his many written contributions, have done as much to advance things as anybody.
I wonder whether experimentalists will end up aligning themselves with psychology departments…
Some have! Josh Greene is the most dramatic example – a David Lewis student appointed in the Harvard psychology department! My amateur impression is that most philosophers don’t have the empirical skills to be appointed in psychology departments, but that is changing – my students are way better at the science than I am. That’s a pretty low bar, I fear, but increasing numbers of philosophy PHDs are at home with the nits and grits of making psychological science.
Disciplinary boundaries are pretty arbitrary, and longer term may be pretty fluid, despite the prominence of border guards armed with “But is it philosophy?” cudgels in our discipline, and things could look quite different down the road. Cognitive science, where Cornell is starting a major, is one example of a field with porous boundaries. We’re also launching an interdisciplinary moral psychology minor at Cornell, which hopefully will grow to a major. The Dyson School, the business school I’m housed in now, is really methodologically pluralistic, and that’s been refreshing.
I have this positivistic worry that all substantive questions can be answered empirically…
Not me! Despite caricatures of us empirical types “hating philosophy,” there’s little risk of that. For one, as I mentioned, there’s the familiar is/ought stuff; as I like to say, “normative relevance is contestable.” I might say “essentially contestable,” if I knew what that meant. If a 1 in 3 mortality rate doesn’t settle normative questions about the rationality of smoking –“here for a good time, not for a long time” – what empirical consideration could?
Are you being too conciliatory? I mean, even a priorists are reporting 'internal' psychological states like intuitions, just using ineffective methods for doing it, no?
I don’t often get accused of that! Self-report, though notoriously fraught, is certainly a source of information, and maybe the best source of information for some things, including inner states: you may be a better judge than I as to whether I’m talented, but the reverse might be true as to whether I’m anxious. Psychiatric diagnosis relies heavily of self-report, and while there are certainly problems, I’m guessing we do a reasonable job, say, of diagnosing major depression. And introspection has historically had a role in psychological science – for a serious – and fun – look at this, check out Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel’s, Describing Inner Experience.
Do you think journals are harsher on empirical stuff?
PPR and Noûs have been better than most other mainline philosophy journals in including the empirical (Phil. Studies has also been pretty good). Looking at most of the major generalist journals and ethics journals, you’d be fairly hard pressed to detect that many philosophers over the past 20 years have developed empirical interests, and spurred considerable debate. Of course there specialty journals like Mind & Language and Philosophical Psychology where such work gets featured, but at many “flagship” journals, not so much.
So I think the situation for philosophy journals is generally difficult for empirical types – most all of my submissions these days are with scientists and to psychology journals, which are, obviously, more sympathetic to empirical work, and they also tend to have better quality referee reports. At one major philosophy journal recently, a referee proudly proclaimed “tldr” by way of rejecting my paper. At another one, the referee recommended rejecting on the grounds that “there are a lot of big problems with this paper,” but omitted to say what those problems were. The editor invited me to resubmit, but I said I had no experience fixing ineffable problems. I wish I thought such outrageous reports are rare. Editors are desperate for referees, and are too often forced to pass on rubbish as that would, if the system were in better shape, be returned to sender. I really, really, feel for the junior people who are forced to continually participate in this exercise for professional survival.
I’ve been lucky, because I sometimes think in books, and the situation is much better with University presses, which are more accepting of empirical stuff, and often manage to get more constructive referee reports. Peter Momtchiloff and Peter Ohlin at Oxford are shining examples of editorial leadership in philosophy, as is Rob Tempio at Princeton. I’m not sure why the business models at presses with strong philosophy presences and the big journals are so different in this respect. But it does seem to result in real substantive and methodological differences in the product. The Oxford Handbook Vargas and I are editing is what I’ve come to expect from contemporary moral psychology: lots of empirical issues, collaboration, and contributions from psychologists. It’s shaping up as a huge, and hugely interesting, volume. Cambridge also has a moral psychology handbook in the works, edited by a philosopher, Phillip Robbins, and a psychologist, Bertram Malle, and I’d expect the same from that. I suspect both will give a rather different impression of moral psychology than one would get, say, by looking at all the moral psychology papers in Ethics over the past five years. But there’s new leadership at that journal, now, so maybe things will change.
Santa Cruz seems like one of the nicest places in the world, so why on earth did you leave?
It is! But for various political and institutional reasons at both the university and departmental level, Santa Cruz has not been able to develop the resources needed for the PhD program, which started when I was there, to truly thrive. It was difficult to meet the needs of the graduate students, and some very good ones transferred out. Additionally, after Chalmers and Noë left, there was not a lot of support for empirical approaches around the department. More generally, my conception of the job requirements didn’t well fit with much of the gestalt at UCSC. When the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Program at WashU, which celebrates interdisciplinary work of the sort I do, reached out, it was hard for me to resist. I enjoyed St. Louis, but the professional advancement came at personal cost – hard to recreate the joy I found with the coyotes and bobcats.
Did you learn to love St. Louis?
I really loved Santa Cruz, especially the countryside, and while St. Louis could not compete on that score, I really enjoyed my time there. It’s a troubled urban area with lots that’s deeply wrong, but there’s lots good there too, and a lot of St. Louisans are incredibly loyal to their city. I wasn’t particularly looking to leave – between StL and Ann Arbor, I spent a lot of my life in the Midwest, and it suited me pretty well.
You’re at Cornell now…
We live in the same wetland as Cornell’s ornithology lab, so we have our share of critters: all manner of birds (I saw my first Piliated in the front yard), as well as mammals like deer, fox, and my favorite, coyotes. I grew up just the other side of the lab, so I’m probably going to be going to be one of those people who dies within 5 miles of where they were born. Now, having moved to Cornell, I’m back in a beautiful place, which, though I miss St. Louis a lot, is really welcome. Ithaca isn’t blow-your-mind beautiful like Santa Cruz – more of a small-scale bucolic splendor – but it’s certainly lovely. And it does not have many of the issues that make the price of admission in Cali so high, like ghastly traffic, unattainable housing, and fires. The winter is completely dreadful, but the glorious summers are nice compensation.
What are you working on nowadays? Any interesting projects planned in the immediate future? Longer term plans?
I’m finishing a collection of my essays on character and agency. There’s quite a bit of new material, in particular a huge essay where I return at length to the “virtue-ethics situationism debate,” which I’ve not much worked on since my initial contributions.
That and the Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology, should be out in 2021, which will be a huge relief, since I’ve a half decade or more into both of them.
Machery and I are supposed to be doing a book on the “replication crisis” in psychology for Rob Tempio, and I really hope we can finish that – lots of really cool and interesting issues, and I always learn a ton from Edouard.
I’m also collaborating with psychologists on empirical work, a lot of it with Laura Niemi and Jesse Graham, using Moral Foundations Theory. That is also really fun, and I’m learning a lot. A group of us are also working on civility using economic games, and I’m really hopeful about that.
Not sure if there’s a BIG THING, but it’s probably OK if there’s not.
How have you evolved as a teacher? You've won a few awards for your teaching!
I loved teaching from the first time I was in front of a class, and while I think a lot about the details of how to teach particular material, or work with particular groups, I don’t have much of a “teaching philosophy,” besides loving to teach.
I think I’ve gotten better in one important respect: when I started out, I always, according to student evaluations, “lost” a few students – ones who really did not like the class, even for courses I overall did very well with. Some standouts: In response to the “do you plan to take another philosophy course” prompt; “No, thank God!”. And, “Doris is not nearly so bright or insightful as he believes himself to be. In fact, he is the among the most pompous individuals I have ever met.” On that one, I guess the good news is it left some room for me being pretty bright and insightful, if my self regard was that inflated! Much less common, now, for me to have a student who is really alienated – hopefully, I’m more sensitive about what is going on for folks. I have noticed, though, based on teaching evaluations in Zoom-world, that more of my online students seem a little checked out. Not their fault, of course; I’ve got something new to try to get better at.
I look at my evaluations closely, and take them seriously, although I don’t think we have any clear idea of how to effectively assess teaching in the humanities. I once taught a senior seminar called “What good is college?” where we read various critiques of higher education, and that was one of my takeaways. My hunch is that, in many cases, if student evaluations indicate unequivocal disaster, a disaster it was, but other than that, I’m not sure we can conclude much, esp. since students don’t tend to use much of the scale – rather like their teachers’ grading, in that respect. It’s also probable, as I read the literature, that student evaluations may reflect various forms of discrimination, which is good reason to abolish them, esp. given their uncertain evidential status in other respects, such their connection to grades (on my reading, a fairly modest, but real, association).
Nevertheless, I’m happy when I get nice evaluations. Sometimes there’s actionable suggestions for improvement, though I find it’s common to get conflicting advice across evaluations from the same class. And, alas, I’m not going to be able to make my blackboard scribbling legible!
Occasionally, one has a redeeming moment. A few years ago, I had an email from a student from my wilderness studies class who was finishing at an elite law school. She had a lot of debt, which made a lot of pressure to take a corporate job. But she thought back on our work in wilderness studies, and decided to take a public interest job, debts be damned. Who saves a single soul saves the whole world, maybe – I hope so, because the world needs a hell of a lot of saving.
How does your approach to teaching grad students differ from your approach to teaching undergrads?
There’s more professional skills stuff to do in graduate education: work habits, navigating publication, and the like.
I think graduate advisors are also obligated to work more closely on the craft. Papers in good journals, famous exceptions noted, tend to well put together, so I read a lot of graduate student drafts. One thing I didn’t understand very well until well into my career is the shape of a good paper, what effective structure looks like. Fortunately, I had a lot of post-doctoral mentoring on this from Steve Stich.
Another thing that takes effort for many people is becoming an effective reader. In a world where “publish or perish” has become absurdly hypertrophied, and competitive first-time job candidates often have multiple publications, this means being able to quickly figure out what is going on in a paper. Since a high percentage of most papers involve pretty familiar moves, this requires getting the reps in so that one can grok those parts without much trouble. It also requires developing a nose for those paragraphs where the real action is. One thing that helps is what I call “writing to your reading, not reading to your writing.” Read a few things, and then start writing– your writing will tell you what else to read. If you read until you’re “ready” to write – you may never get to the writing. I think that’s a common trap for conscientious young academics.
Absolutely.
Another thing I emphasize is Q&A skills in talks. My sense is this is becoming less valued, perhaps because more of the public life of philosophy is on social media. This may be a good thing, given that various professional and societal inequities may be especially prominent at seminars and talks. My guess is some of this badness has migrated to social media, but I don’t watch closely enough to know. In any event, in my graduate days, one had the impression that conversational “chops” at talks was the most important thing. I hope that’s not true, but colloquia and conferences are still a way to get positive exposure (“every talk’s a job talk”), and the skills translate to interviews. My advice is to rehearse your question, repeatedly, before you ask it. (It goes without saying that this is doubly true for giving a talk, which ought be understood as a performance art.) I used to feel bad about doing this, since all that rehearsing means you can’t pay full attention to everything else that’s going on in discussion. I asked Allan Gibbard, and he told me that’s what he does – in his case, to outstanding effect. As Allan said, it seems like a win: you think hard about something interesting you may not have thought of otherwise, and help move discussion along. What’s not to like?
One other thing on talks: except in the most exceptional circumstances, you are morally obligated to appear satisfied after one follow-up.
And one more: Whatever you may think, it’s almost certainly not a “finger” – it’s a whole ‘nother question. The fact that you are in the same room with the questioner, or are also a carbon-based life form, is insufficient grounds for thinking you are on the same topic as she. Stow the finger and get in the queue. (As you can tell, “finger abuse” is a pet peeve.)
I think a lot about this stuff, and joke about “Doris’ Laws of Graduate Education”:
Doris’ 3rd Law of Graduate Education: Nobody got famous for reading shit.
Doris 7th Law of Graduate Education: If you can’t say what your dissertation is about in one sentence, you don’t know what your dissertation is about.
You’re probably thinking my approach to graduate education involves a lot of pontificating, so I should probably stop. Fortunately, I’m not sure what all the other laws are.
No, it’s great! What’s the first law?
Take care of yourself. Grad school is a marathon, not a sprint (even at private schools where grads teach less), and while it doesn’t leave much room for outside interests, if you’re to make it work in this job market, you need to have some other things to sustain you: cooking, relationships, hiking, exercise, therapy (please!), etc. At least a bit of time each week on stuff that sustains and empowers you. Grad school can be tough on relationships, so stuff that’s only you is important – for me, it was the martial arts, without which I never would have finished.
When I was cranking on my dissertation, Allan told me not to ruin my health. I thought it was weird at the time, but I mentioned it to someone after I finished and they said, “I didn’t want to say anything, but you really looked like shit.” Good work if you can get it, but it ain’t worth your health. Take time off if you need to (I did), and walk away for good if you need to (I almost did) – no shame in that.
At conferences, you tend to stand or pace at the back of the room. Why?
That’s easy. I have a fair bit of difficulty with my back, and sitting in uncomfortable chairs, especially after flying in uncomfortable planes, can be unpleasant. Also, I worry about my big head blocking the view of people behind me.
What's your writing routine/method?
I’m very much a morning person, and I’m usually up by 5 or so. I do some research almost every morning. Not for that many hours – my reading of the human performance literature suggests that 4-5 hours a day is about the max for intense work, and I find it is often less; a lot can happen in a good couple of hours. I also find, as I suspect a lot of people do, that more happens in one good day than in many so-so days. But I expect the so-so days enable the good, even if the connections are not apparent. For me, consistency is really important (2nd Law of Graduate Education: Achievement is the child of consistency.). I work weekends far more often than not. If I get in a couple three hours of serious research most days, I find that things happen – though many of my colleagues get more done than I do.
Afternoons are for teaching. And “managing the business” – all the stuff that comes with academics that’s not quite academics. I actually enjoy that stuff pretty well; I usually don’t even mind faculty meetings!
If you could sum up your work so far in one sentence what would it be?
Uh-oh, I might be running afoul of my own law! I’m finding that sentence hard to manage.
Substantively, it might be “our humanity is fragile.” If I recall, that’s Primo Levi, and it would be hard to improve on an immortal like him, but that’s not my own idea.
Maybe “persons are collaborations” gets at a bit more of what I’ve been thinking about lately, my “collaborativism” about rationality and agency (first hatched with Shaun Nichols) seems to piss people off less than other stuff I’ve been on about, like character skepticism and anti-reflectivism.
Methodologically, maybe it’s “you’re not entitled to your own facts,” – I stole that one too – but that’s not quite right, since as Nietzsche said, “facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations.” It’s easy to overstate that thought, and a lot of people have, but still: we philosophers can look to the science, but it’s up to us to write the story.
How does your philosophical work influence the way you live? How do your non-academic experiences inspire your philosophical work?
My experience in the martial arts probably affects how I live more than my academic work in philosophy. The philosophy of the great martial sages tends to be a very practical philosophy. And the practice of martial arts, at least for the dedicated practitioners of traditional disciplines, is a whole life practice in something like MacIntyre’s sense, and I’ve tried hard to practice it.
I don’t think of academic philosophy as being a practice in quite the same way. I suppose I think of it as a job first and an intellectual pursuit second. It’s a job I absolutely love, both research and teaching, so as the saying goes, I never work a day in my life – even though I work most every day.
My conception of my work doesn’t entail that I think philosophy, in the aggregate, is without practical significance. Quite the opposite. Any institution that encourages imagination and dissolves ignorance is of the first practical importance, and academic philosophy can certainly play a role in that, though one of course wishes the enterprise were less cloistered and classist than it is.
The distance of much current academic philosophy from thick of life seems to me a very great change from how many canonical figures, notably the Greeks, thought about their enterprise. Of particular interest to me is when and how the body dropped out of philosophy: not as much about gymnastics in Quine as in Plato! There are exceptions, like Barbara Montero, but I’m continually struck by the extent to which contemporary philosophy is disembodied (and maybe has been from modernity forward). I wonder if this is one of the reasons philosophy tends not to speak to the public very well; a good workout may be more transformative than a subtle argument. I’d wish for a philosophy with a bit more muscle and bone, which might (on another unscholarly hunch) make for a philosophy with more compelling contributions to necessities like ameliorating the ever-deepening environmental catastrophe.
I think my own field, moral psychology, is heading in a more applied direction, and this is reflected in the contributions to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology, which I’m editing with Manuel Vargas. We have many contributions on historical figures and foundational issues like emotion and reasoning, but we've also got a lot of really good chapters lined up that hasn’t seen much play in mainstream moral psychology before, like poverty and victim blaming.
I’m not an applied type myself, but I did recently do a popular piece with the psychologists Laura Niemi and Keith Payne on a topic I think is often misunderstood, implicit bias. Working on it reminded me how hard it is to do more popular stuff well, and also that the character of discourse on the internet, where some discussion of the piece ensued, can be longer on arguing than argumentation. That’s a shame, since I think the best internet philosophy on places like Daily Nous and Leiter Reports (and from earlier days, Xphi and the Garden of Forking Paths) can be very good, and there much to be said for doing philosophy in real time. But too often, the philosophy internet doesn’t seem a very welcoming place, and I contribute much more sparingly than I used to.
Could you explain why you are so pessimistic about philosophy on the internet a bit?
Pessimistic might not be the right word. I think there’s a lot to be said about doing philosophy in real time, and even more to be said about the democratizing and diversifying of perspectives virtual philosophy enables. Compare a blog thread to the Philosopher’s Annual, say: I don’t doubt that PA represents excellence, but it does seem to be excellence narrowly construed, both with respect to philosophical substance and methodology, and the venues predominantly represented. And of course, while I haven’t checked systematically, it wouldn’t be surprising exhibited some of the underrepresentation issues troubling the wider profession (though some progress may be being made in that regard). So good on the philosophy internet for that.
I’m just not personally comfortable participating very often – I hesitate to even discuss the issue. This is not a criticism of those who do, but I started to withdraw a bit when I noted adults calling each other things like “asshat” – which is on the mild side, as things have developed. (There are exemplary participants of course: David Wallace stands out.) I’m acutely aware that politeness can be a tool of privilege, and “tone policing” can be silencing, but I’m uncomfortable with name calling and the like. The problems are really hard ones, and I certainly don’t have any answers. Some of the same issues are challenging in teaching, of course. Early and uncertain days, in this particular social experiment.
I’ve been following Justin Weinberg’s experiment with (mostly) requiring signed comments at Daily Nous. My general sense is people are much more likely to be outrageously rude on the internet than they are face to face, especially when anonymous, so this move might be expected to “elevate discussion.” But I expect there are times when rude is quite appropriate, and anonymity is necessary protection for vulnerable participants. To take a very minor example, I fairly recently broke my blog abstinence to contribute on an important issue that is often badly handled by philosophers, where my colleagues and I had suggested some (pretty mild) interventions. An anonymous grad student called one of my comments “sanctimonious” and suggested it could “safely be dismissed.” I’m not sure they would say that to someone in person – I have a hard time imagining myself saying it anonymously online – but maybe what they were saying was true, and needed to be said; non-anonymous comments would stifle that, given the inequities of power. I think they were both unnecessarily rude and wrong on the substance, but I would think that, wouldn’t I? So the “would you say it to their face?” test and the “would you say it under your name?” test both seem wrong. Still, the philosophy internet, like much of the internet, leaves much to be desired, atmospherically.
Hey man, I get it. That’s why I just don’t have comments on my site!
I don’t have anything helpful to contribute here, alas. So I mostly stay out of it. I am working with some scientists on a project about attitudes towards civility, so maybe I’ll learn something more helpful.
I mean, twitter can get really nasty.
I expect so! I don’t often look, except in cases where an interesting play from a sports story I’m reading is linked.
You mentioned Leiter and Nous. What was your take on the Leiter Weinberg…dialog?
Brian is a good friend, from my early days in grad school actually, and we still interact quite regularly, which I value a lot. I know Justin much less well, but we’ve also interacted a fair bit over the years, and that’s been very positive. I read both blogs all the time, and think both are great. If I had a blog, I’d eschew some of the harsh, but I don’t have a blog, and their blogs are better than anything I could do. And I have to admit I follow internet dustups pretty avidly, so who am I to say? If I were guessing, I come out on Brian’s side on more of the issues, but a lot of that might attributable to generational affiliations, rather than deep thought. (Aside: I’ve often been often been struck by the casual ageism of some internet champions of justice.) Philosophically, Brian and I are both good Michigan naturalists, and I always welcome his philosophical advice, even where I disagree – for example, I’m more sanguine about current psychological science than he is.
What's your take on the Trump phenomenon, in light of your work on virtue and character?
On the one hand, that Trump’s personal qualities must be well-known to at least some of his supporters suggests that folks are not “voting character,” in any easily recognizable sense. On the other hand, some of the issues around his leadership, like pandemic mask-scoffing, seem to suggest that the character of political leaders does matter. Both of these circumstances would seem to be awkward for my “official” account of character skepticism. Years ago, I pitched a book, The Character Hoax: Marketing Personality in American Politics, that would have argued that perceptions of character are electorally important, and that they shouldn’t be, because other things, like party policy, matter more. I even got an agent, but he couldn’t sell it. Maybe the current circumstance explains why – I was just wrong. I’m not quite ready to agree to that, though. It would take a long discussion in an already long interview, but I’ve certainly never said, for example, that questions of psychopathology are irrelevant to political leadership. But certainly, the current moment indicates that the “presidents don’t matter much” school – to which I’ve been attracted – is problematic.
How are you dealing with the pandemic?
I wish I was managing better. I’m incredibly fortunate, and I try to be mindful of that, but it does drag on a bit. There’s such a thing as too much consistency! A lot of people have mentioned the movie Groundhog Day – that one day is a perfect day does not mean that 180 such days makes a perfect 6 months! But my struggles are very minor compared to other people, so I try to stay grateful. Unfortunately, I think the deep anxiety in the air is all too warranted. Grim times for so many people, and the end does not seem close enough.
I do like Zoom pretty well, both for teaching and socialization, so I’ve managed to feel pretty connected.
Are you married?
Newly married! To my partner, Laura Niemi, a social psychologist here at Cornell. We collaborate intensively in work, as well as the rest of life. Maybe that means I work all the time, but it feels more like never work: really enriching and fun. I’m very, very lucky.
Do you have kids? Pets?
No kids, but a substantial mass of pets. Two lovely Maine Coons, Bangor and Moosie. Super friendly, outgoing cats. Perfect cats, actually. We’ve recently added a puppy (COVID-typical, I know), a Leonberger named Hugo. He’s a handful, over 50 pounds at around 16 weeks, with another hundred pounds to go. Leos seem to be a philosopher thing – I got the idea from Adina Roskies, who brought hers around to a conference she hosted at Dartmouth, and Eric Barnes got a pup from the same litter we did. Since Eric is nearby, at Hobart, Laura and I have doggie playdates with him and his partner Helen.
Favorite movie? TV show?
I like movies, but they seem not to stay with me. Generally light, standard Hollywood fare; we just enjoyed Ford vs. Ferrari – I like cars – which is about as demanding as I get.
For years, I was a conscientious objector about television, and didn’t have a TV.
How dare you.
My students helped get me back into it, by insisting I watch The Walking Dead. I really enjoyed it at first, even though I’m not a Zombie-phile, but it became too grimly repetitive. Now, Laura and I watch a fair bit: recently, Big Little Lies and Dead to Me (the former more artfully produced, the latter funnier), and the delightfully cheesy Yellowstone, which is in effect a remake of old primetime soaps like Dallas and Dynasty, plus wonderful high country scenery (though much of is shot in Utah, not Montana, where the show is ostensibly set). It does feel like we are in a golden age of television, but I wonder if we will think that in 15 years. Maybe we are just rationalizing our vegging in front of the tube.
Books?
Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, the masterpiece by the greatest of all the martial sages, and Grizzly Years, by Doug Peacock. In philosophy, Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, and MacIntyre’s After Virtue.
Election night 2008? 2016?
Precipitously different. As things have turned out, I wasn’t nearly so worried as I should have been.
Last meal?
No thought required!
Lots of thick-cut bacon, not very crispy, and lots of sunny side up eggs, done perfectly (which ain’t easy) with nice runny yolks and cooked whites. And good coffee, black. What the hell, since it’s my last meal, let’s spring for duck eggs.
Thanks John!