Third-Family Problems
Asking About Value
When people get philosophical, they often ask questions about what is right, or about value, or purpose.
It is natural to want to be confident in the answers we give to such questions. We might want to be sure that we’re living as we should live, or to discover a new sense of purpose and meaning. We might want to demonstrate to others that the way they are going about things is wrong. Or we might seek rules for action in a particular sphere of life that society as a whole can get behind. It can feel momentously important that the reasoning behind how we live our lives is reliable and built on solid intellectual foundations.1
The need for reliable answers to questions of how we should act creates a third family of philosophical problems, for it’s not obvious how any idea about duty or value can be reliable. Unlike first-family ideas, we can’t find satisfactory answers by mapping out the objective reality of the world. Matters of value necessarily go beyond what can be observed, so value cannot be properly mapped. And we can’t put such matters aside, as we can with second-family problems, for the human condition is unavoidably one of making choices. Since we are creatures that are able to think critically about the choices we and others make, we need valid methods for differentiating between the admirable and the unworthy.
Two Types of Question
It’s possible to pick out two fundamentally different types of third-family question:
- Questions that call for general, abstract answers. We might ask, for instance, about the principles of medical ethics.
- Questions that call for specific, concrete answers. We might ask, for instance, what a particular doctor should do when they have to make a judgement about whether or not to withhold medication from a particular terminally ill patient.
The General Questions
Philosophers have traditionally focused on the first type of question. They have tried to find ethical universals — answers that wouldn’t just hold for a specific person in a specific context, but would apply to everybody everywhere.
There is an assumption buried within any such attempt — an assumption that there are indeed universal truths of value to be uncovered, as if a set of universally valid principles of medical ethics was waiting in the wings, or as if there were universal rules of ethical conduct that could, for all people and at all times, differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ courses of action.
Unfortunately, there is nowhere for such truths to reside, not in the mapping of observable experience, nor in the abstract realms of mathematics and logic.
The quest for universal answers to third party questions leads inevitably to paradox, for the structure of the questions suggests that satisfying answers are there for philosophers to discover. Yet in reality no satisfying answers are possible.
As with any paradox, the only sensible strategy is to put general third-family questions aside and look for alternative approaches.
Looking At Specifics
The obvious alternative is to seek specific answers, for specific answers are all that’s needed. People act in particular situations where there are particular challenges to be met. Any sense of meaning they find will be rooted in the specifics of their own life — in the places they are uniquely able to see value and in the outcomes that they are uniquely capable of bringing about. It is their own actions that they are responsible for.
Philosophy can’t provide people with the answers to their specific questions, but it can tell them where and how to look. Philosophy shows that an investigation is possible which explores how a person can become clear about how they personally can build purpose and become strategic and organised, and how they can learn to maintain their aim from moment to moment, perform well, and enjoy the fact that they are an animal alive upon this planet.
The clarity a particular person finds will always be unique and original. They will live meaningfully through pursuing projects that only they can pursue and act beautifully through engaging creatively with the specific needs of specific situations.
Useful Fictions
The type of investigation that philosophy points people towards invites them to aim their imagination directly at the specifics of reality and adopt a reality-first approach to living well. Let’s call this living aesthetically. If they do, they will embody the patterns of behaviour common to all people who have learnt to live aesthetically. They won’t abuse their power or influence. They will be kind. They will desist from any actions that they know would be destructive.
This gives the traditional precepts of ethics a new kind of validity. By following them, anyone can behave like a person who has completed their own personal investigations and become naturally aesthetic. The role of the precepts becomes, not to deliver ethical truth, but to function as signposts that direct people’s behaviour. By acting as if ‘stealing is wrong’ was true in some ultimate way, anyone can avoid inflicting the damage that theft can wreak. And by acting as if the universe itself decreed that we should ‘do unto others as we would have them do unto us’ we will actively explore how we can help meet people’s needs. The ethical precepts then serve as useful fictions.2
Useful fictions can easily be written into law. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, states that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services”.3 To act as if this statement was true in some absolute sense, politicians must use the power they have been entrusted with to help meet the basic needs of all our planet’s people.
We all need the help of useful fictions from time to time. We start out inexperienced at life, unable to walk or talk, and slowly gain competency as we learn one thing then another. And even when we become mature and capable adults, our minds are usually too busy to think everything through from scratch. How to shop. How to travel. How to handle the people we meet. Useful fictions provide rules of thumb that enable us to act aesthetically with a minimum of mental effort.
Nothing Philosophically Problematic
Anyone can pursue an investigation into how they might realise their capacity to live well. And anyone can follow the ethical precepts that have been found to serve as the most useful rules of thumb.
Third family questions — questions that ask about what we ought to do, or about value, or purpose — can therefore always be given satisfactory answers, though an answer might only hold for one particular person in one particular situation.
Since answers can always be found, there is nothing philosophically problematic about the third family questions. When we see this clearly the last traces of philosophical problem decisively vanish.
- “Morality is a subject that interests us above all others: We fancy the peace of society to be at stake in every decision concerning it”. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, part I, section I, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001, p. 2.
- Cf. Vaihinger’s conception of useful fictions. Vaihinger believed that “all psychical processes are useful” [H. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As if’: a system of the theoretical, practical and religious fictions of mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden, London: Kegan Paul, 1924, p. 1] and that most of what we usually think of as knowledge, including science, mathematics and ethics, involves “the fictive activity of the logical functions” [ibid., p. 12]. Vaihinger noted that acting ‘as if’ our beliefs were logical truths helps us in practice and surmised that “the purpose of thought must be sought not in the reflection of a so-called objective world, but in rendering possible the calculation of events and of operations upon them” [ibid., p. 5], i.e. that our beliefs are not objective truths but useful fictions.
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948, Article 25.