Philosophical Engineering

To start, I want to layout a quick distinction before I jump into what I mean by philosophical engineering.

In freshman physics (yes I used to major in physics), the physics majors took their intro class with the honors engineering students. The honors engineers, as the title would suggest, are brilliant people (so were the physics students. Well, we hoped we were). However, we often sneered at their insistence to just know the equation. A homework session of physics and engineering students represented and ideological divide between how the problems in a physics assignment should be approached. We, the physics majors, insisted at starting at first principles (we had two to work with, the momentum and energy principles) while the engineers looked at the problem, the variables, and said “what equation do we use here?”

This is not to say the engineers did not have a grasp of the intricate subtleties of physics, that they were not inquisitive people. They were brilliant individuals who had a very different focus. They understood how to derive the equations they wanted to use, they could do what the physics majors did, they just didn’t see themselves as needing to reinvent the wheel for every problem. “Yes, I get it, and I’ve demonstrated I know the basics. Now, where’s my d*** equation?”

I bring this up to frame a similar divide in the current field of philosophy. I’ve discussed with classmates the relative merits of different fields of philosophy. We’ve decided I’m like a philosophical engineer. My view of philosophy is that it can (and should) be able to engage with real world problems and situations. Ethical and moral theories in particular have been brought up and discussed in many disciplines outside of philosophy (see Joshua Greene’s experiments http://www.pon.harvard.edu/faculty/joshua-greene/ , discussion of norms in sociology, biology, etc http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/Papers/Framework_for_the_Psychology_of_Norms_7-23-05.pdf).

So why philosophical engineering? A metaphysician on this analogy is like the physicist. They want to know the deeper truth about the makeup of the world and traditionally this work has been done via thought problems, intuition, and traditional armchair philosophy. And (much to the frustration of my metaphysics professor) I’ve made the naturalistic assumption, meaning I’m willing to accept the structure of the world is as the natural sciences describes it (maybe with some qualifications). So I have my first principles in a sense.

And now I want to work on finding answers to more pressing problems. Like the engineers in physics classes, I’m the ethicist in metaphysics. “Thank you, this is all well and good, but do we really have to start from here?”

Have I committed a gross philosophical injustice? Or like in the physical sciences, do we have room for those of us more application minded over theory?