3.7 Critical Thinking and Living Well

Why Critical Thinking Matters

Introduction

• Critical thinking is essential for dignity, authenticity, and living well.
• Thinking critically requires effort, while credulity is easier. This is related to:
  • System 1 vs. 2 thinking
  • Clifford's ethics of belief
  • Fact-checking vs. echo chambers
  • The discomfort of disagreeing and admitting mistakes

Philosophy and the Good Life

• Ancient philosophical questions:
  • How should one live?
  • What constitutes a good life?
• Skeptical questions:
  • Why be moral?
  • Why care about the truth, especially if society might be based on lies?

Common Clichés

• "Ignorance is bliss."
• "What you don’t know can’t hurt you."
• Are these clichés true? What are the arguments for and against them?

Hedonism

• Hedonism: Pleasure is the only or highest value; the good life is the pleasurable life.
• What if truth and morality aren't pleasurable?

The Experience Machine

• Thought experiment by R. Nozick: You can be hooked up to a machine and have a great simulated life.
• Would you choose to do it?
• Nozick's conclusion: Rejecting a simulated life indicates that more than just pleasure/subjective experience matters.
• Truth/reality also matters, implying hedonism is false.

Variations on the Experience Machine

• What if you were unplugged periodically and had to choose to reconnect?
• What if the simulation isn't perfect, and you have a nagging sense it’s not real?
• Does this make the experience less attractive?
• Do you admire someone who tries to avoid reality?

Objections to Hedonism

• Sometimes we want things that make our lives worse (e.g., cigarettes, abusive relationships).
• Sometimes we desire things not worth wanting (e.g., crummy impulse purchases).
• Many pleasures are meaningless/empty/leave us feeling bad afterwards (e.g., junk food).
• Pleasure can conflict with other values, especially morality (e.g., temptations vs. loyalty, integrity).
• Living in a "fools paradise," where people only pretend to like or respect you, is undesirable.

Mill's Perspective

• "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."
• Mill argues that if fools or pigs disagree, it’s because they only know their own side.
• Is Mill right? Would you rather be a 'lower' animal? Why/why not?

Alternatives to Hedonism

• Alternatives emphasize flourishing, developing potential, and improving the world.
• Flourishing: growing/developing, especially in a healthy or vigorous way.
• Illustrations:
  • You could have been great, but you never got the chance (artist, athlete, scientist, etc.).
  • Maybe you never got rich/famous/powerful, but the world's a better place because of you (making people happy, lessening suffering, creating knowledge, etc.).
• Good life: Developing your potential, cultivating excellence/virtue, and doing right.
• Mill, despite being a hedonist, argues for a "hierarchy of pleasures" and insists on human flourishing.

Aristotle and Eudaimonia

• Aristotle (300s BCE)
• Eudaimonia: Often translated as 'happiness,' but it's more than just subjective pleasure.
  • Literally "good spirit," identified by Aristotle as the highest good for human life.
  • Traditional understanding: 'good life', 'life well-lived'.
• Involves developing or realizing one’s potential (e.g., acorn -> oak).
• Living a life that best expresses the 'excellences' one could achieve, given what one is.
  • The best life for a tree, fish, or human will differ, but each has a 'best life' based on realizing their inner potential.

Aristotle and Virtue

• Arête = virtue/excellence
• Traditional Question: What’s the opposite of a virtue?
• Answer: Vice.
• Virtues are excellences, vices are corruptions.
• Aristotelian example: Bravery is a virtue (excellence).
  • Cultivating bravery takes practice, but a person is better off for having it.
  • A brave person is able to face challenges, doesn’t back down, willing to fight for what’s right.
• Bravery isn't recklessness (getting into every fight) or cowardice (never fighting).
• Bravery is a “mean between extremes.”
• Recklessness and cowardice are vices (extremes of excess and deficiency); bravery is the virtuous middle ground.
• Aristotle’s “doctrine of the golden mean”: virtues are means between extremes.

Character

• Bravery is a character trait; a brave person might be described as a 'person of character.'
• Etymology: 'character' means “stamping tool, distinctive mark.”
  • Characteristics are stamped on your soul, as characters are stamped on a page.
  • Characteristics are long-standing (relatively) permanent traits, as if 'carved in stone.'
• A brave person isn’t just brave once in a while; it’s part of who they are.
• This is different from personality (e.g., friendly, charming).
• Character is ‘deeper.’
• Persona is more superficial( like a mask…).
• A virtue such as bravery is a good characteristic, part of a life well-lived, unlike being reckless or cowardly.

Connection to Lynch's True to Life

• Lynch argues that caring about truth is part of good character and living a good life.
• Consider characteristics of admired people.
  • Challenge: Is caring about truth necessary for having those characteristics/virtues?
• Bravery requires “practical wisdom” and judiciousness to discern when to (not) fight.
• There’s no one-size-fits-all rule.
• Therefore, one needs ‘good judgment.’
• This requires accurately assessing situations, likely consequences, etc.
• This requires knowing the truth!

Critical Thinking as Intellectual Bravery

• Intellectual courage vs. intellectual cowardice:
  • Facing up to the truth (even if painful/inconvenient) vs. being afraid to face the truth.
  • "Like caring about love, caring about truth is an inherently risky business."
  • No bravery without challenge/risk.
• Virtuous moral character -> cares about the good.
• Virtuous intellectual character -> cares about truth.
• Compare the straw man fallacy: feeling tough by beating up a fake opponent vs. facing a genuine adversary.

Intellectual Virtues and Vices

• One cares about truth if one has “character traits [virtues] oriented towards the truth.”
  • Examples: open-mindedness, tolerance of different opinions, carefulness and sensitivity to detail, curiosity, willingness to question assumptions, giving/asking for reasons/justifications, intellectual courage.
  • "Having courage to believe what is inconvenient or difficult…”.
• Intellectual ‘vices’:
  • Dogmatic/closed-mindedness, (over)confidence, arrogance, incuriosity, intolerance of disagreement, certainty of being right, not justifying with arguments/reasons, using force, threats, insults, intimidation.

Integrity

• Integrity: virtue typically understood as honesty, having strong moral principles.
• Lack of integrity: professing morality but only acting on it when convenient.
• Integrity as being integrated, unified, whole/undivided (as in integer).
• Someone who is inconsistent, hypocritical lacks integrity in both senses.
• Aristotelian model:
  • Integrity as the integration of all the virtues; leading a consistent, moral, excellent life.
• Requires intellectual integrity:
  • Caring about the truth consistently, not only when it’s convenient, or changing one’s beliefs to suit the occasion.
• Why some suspect politicians ‘lack integrity’/ are two-faced, etc.

Authenticity

• “To thine own self be true” (Shakespeare).
• “The unexamined life is not worth living” (Socrates).
• The authentic person is real/genuine.
• To be authentic requires truly knowing oneself/ knowing one’s true self.
• Existentialists (e.g., Sartre) argue that people often live in illusion, won't face up to reality (“bad faith”).
• Anxiety of freedom/responsibility -> “escape from freedom” (Erich Fromm).
• "Just following orders" vs. knowing what morality demands (Hannah Arendt).
• Is it admirable/noble to do what you think is right… without making sure that what you think is right is right?
• “Caring about the truth is an activity that engages the will.”
• Accepting the lie is passive (not active).
• (being authentic is something you do…)
• “False consciousness” is a thing!

Synthesis

• Caring for truth is an essential part of living a good life, having a good character, and displaying virtue/excellence (Aristotelian).
• Confluence: we should care about the truth for its own sake; recall the “truisms”.
• Virtues such as authenticity, integrity, and bravery require caring for/about truth.
• It's not enough to say you care; you have to live it!
• Intellectual virtues, such as curiosity and open-mindedness, are required for cultivating one’s character, living well, and developing human capacity/flourishing.
• Fish swim, birds fly, humans reason (Aristotle).
• Developing intellectual capacities develops our distinctively and instinctively human potential.
• Therefore, you don't flourish/ live your best life/ you sell yourself short if you don't think critically.
• Aristotle defined humans as “the rational animal”.

Dignity, Authenticity, Living Well

• Dignity: being worthy of respect; one who fears the truth isn’t.
• Authenticity: being true/real/genuine; one who indulges in lies isn’t.
• Living well: developing one’s full capacities; one who fails to develop their mind doesn’t.

The Challenge of Critical Thinking

• One could choose propaganda/staying in the bubble/echo chamber.
• Don’t question, don’t examine beliefs/assumptions, filter out those inconvenient truths.
• But what kind of person does that?

Songs

• “If ignorance is bliss, then knock the smile off my face”.
• “Don’t believe the hype”.