Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [72]
Let’s consider an example, from the domain of ethics. Suppose I make the claim that torture should never be used as an interrogation technique. You, appropriately enough, ask me to provide reasons in support of this claim. I then produce evidence that torture is an ineffective interrogation technique—many people will not talk, no matter how much they are tortured, while others are so desperate to make the excruciating pain go away that they will say anything, even if they have no relevant knowledge to impart. I also produce evidence suggesting that any policy attempting to mitigate the potential horrors of a torture policy by setting in place strict controls and limits concerning its proper use are likely to fail. Given certain facts about human psychology, and about how bureaucracies work, any policy sanctioning torture will almost certainly be abused in horrific ways. This will in turn lead to the infliction of massive amounts of pain on many innocent people, even though very little if any reliable information will be yielded as a result. Now, you might well dispute any of these claims, perhaps backing your judgment with evidence and arguments of your own. But suppose you accept my supporting claims and yet remain unconvinced of the truth of my conclusion. I, after recovering from my profound surprise, point out that cruelty is a bad thing—that it is wrong to inflict intense suffering on people needlessly. Should you demand evidence for that claim, however, I would be stumped. The wrongness of cruelty seems evident on its face, which is to say that it can be known intuitively.
If one is suspicious of knowledge claims in ethics, it must be pointed that the same logic that leads to intuition in ethics does so in every other field as well. Even fields employing the strictest and most exacting standards of precision and proof, such as mathematics, must rely on intuition. For example, Euclidean geometry rests on a very small number of self-evident “axioms” or “postulates,” from which all of its other findings are deduced. Examples include “It is possible to draw a straight line from any point to any other point,” and “It is possible to describe a circle with any center and any radius.” One can no more prove these claims than one can demonstrate that any object having size must also have shape, but they are no less obviously true for that.
This is enough to show that the philosopher’s appeal to intuition differs greatly from the conduct of O’Reilly, Limbaugh, and Colbert. The claims that “whatever is colored is extended in space,” that “things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another,” and that “happiness is better than misery” are plausibly regarded as self-evident. We have a kind of insight into them. They appear to be not only true, but necessarily so, in the sense that their denial seems unthinkable or inconceivable.
The same is obviously not the case with regard to such historical claims as that George Washington had slaves, or that the Panama Canal was built in 1914. It is quite easy to imagine such claims as either true or false. Neither their affirmation nor their denial generates any insight or sense of necessity. Their truth or falsity depends on what actually happened in history, and we cannot know that merely by thinking about it. We must, instead, consult the relevant evidence. Similarly, complex, many-sided issues, such as the question of why a particular verdict was reached in a highly publicized jury trial, the question of whether or not the U.S. mass media is fair and even-handed in its coverage of