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”.