Interrogating Privilege

Most people who attended the Philosophy Conference hosted on Friday went to the first session to hear Megan Craig on philosophy of and through art, with a few (myself included) who were at the second lecture on an experimental philosophy approach to the question: "Did morality evolve?" I cannot speak for the first lecture, but the title and content of this blog are supposed to reflect some of the disconnect I felt with what was said and my own lived experience. By this, I mean that while listening to the carefully crafted words delivered by Dr. Machery (U-Pitt), it felt as I was being pushed toward the Ivory Tower dungeon: to be caged in a level of abstraction removed from the world. What I found striking was a phrase he made during his introductory remarks. To paraphrase, Dr. Machery claimed the following: Because I am a philosopher, whatever I am interested in becomes philosophy.

I want to deconstruct this claim because, as Taylor and others note, racial grammar is an important aspect of how we conceptualize our world and those within it. His words didn't sit well with me. First, it implies, to me, a sense of philosophical entitlement in which he, as a white male, is worthy and what's more, obliged to lift the folds and corners of the universe to discover truth regarding whatever his particular interest happens to be. Dr. Machery’s words remind me of an article we read in a Philosophical Issues and Contemporary African Experience course I took while in Ghana, whose central claim was a call for “conceptual decolonization”: deconstructing the primarily Western conceptual constructions with which non-Western philosophers, by virtue of being philosophers in this world, are required to not only thoroughly understand, but through which they articulate a non-Western reality. But I’m not claiming that Dr. Machery should have just added an adjective before philosophy to clarity; I think there is something deeper at stake here. The earlier statement evokes a sense of boundlessness: philosophically speaking, the world is his. This, then, begs the question by implication: what does this mean in a discipline largely void of non-whites, women, and other minorities? If the philosophy of white men becomes philosophy, then we (including white men) ought to be concerned that this conceptualization of the world and the language we use to articulate our experience within it is severely limited.

This brings me to a second point, more specific to his actual lecture. Admittedly, I am tempted to reduce his topic (“Did morality evolve?”) as little more than philosophical masturbation: a unique emphasis on issues that excite debate, which are utterly removed from the struggle and existence of everyday people, particularly the marginalized and vulnerable. Perhaps this is a prejudice of my own towards a discipline that seems largely to be more concerned with conceptual clarity than it does with the actual subjects it addresses. To Machery’s presentation, his critique was based on the presumptuousness of philosophers in assuming, as a premise, that morality evolved without considering the truthfulness of this assumption in regards to empirical evidence. Two of the three arguments for morality are empirically support and also frequently employed by scientists, while the third is not and most commonly cited by philosophers. However, such a conversation undoubtedly sounds, to me, steeped in privilege—one certainly characteristic of the academic lifestyle. I say that to say this: for example, when I experience racism on this campus or anywhere else, my inclination, even upon reflection, is not to consider whether or not it is true that morality exists; my concern is that within the framework of existing circumstances, someone has acted immorally in such a way that is harmful to my well-being. I find it important to consider the profound contrast between the marginalized and those capable of coming to the conclusion that something like morality is not evolutionary and therefore, those who are marginalized deserve what comes their way. Of course, this is a very crude way of putting it. But it is noteworthy that the debate regarding the Affordable Care Act is not very far off from using a similar language.