Philosophy Sucks
I hate philosophy. Yes, I hate it with a passion. Sure, I learned a lot and our philosophy department at Santa Clara University is rigorous, interesting and all of that. It’s a solid department. But, as a subject…it’s been asking the same sorts of questions for thousands of years. You’d think we’d have some answers by now.
As part of the core requirements at the University, we take an ethics course—one that I took as a first-year. We learned about figures like Aristotle, Plato and Descartes—whose thousand-year-old ideologies we use to discern good and evil—and how they tried to decipher the answers to everything by picking apart nothing at all. Spoiler alert: They didn’t figure out the meaning of life at all. How boring!
More importantly, through deep discussion, thought problems and philosophical exercises, I learned how to maximize every moral conundrum for evil.
There’s this one thought problem that’s one of those crazy-making, high-falutin situations that would never happen in real life; the famous “trolley problem” presupposes an out-of-control trolley hurtling down a track, where there are six people tied to the track. Then, on the other track, there is only one person. If you pull a lever, you can avoid the six and kill the one. But if you don’t, then all six people get hit by the trolley. The moral dilemma here is that in the first option, through inaction, you let six people die or, through action, kill a single person for the greater good.
Many people opt for some sort of third option, like going off the tracks completely or finding out who keeps tying people to all these tracks.
But if you wanted to be evil you could just do a circle and hit everyone. Problem solved!
Is murder wrong? Debate!
Is lying wrong? Discuss!
Is stealing wrong? Cite your sources!
What even is right and wrong? Who’s to say?
While interesting discussions, the answers seem obvious, don’t they? It can be fun to debate and stretch the mind towards existential questions or apply the intellect to the most profoundly strange things. But, we know that you and I exist, as does the ground beneath our feet.
I think—I hope—that after a Santa Clara University education, we’ll all realize that murder is wrong, if we didn’t already. It’s not that these aren’t things worth thinking about, but they’re frankly redundant.
I’ll forever remember the speech we were given on the first day of ethics. It started with a former student turned murderer and ended with the simple fact: You can’t make anyone ethical. Morality starts at the heart, and the rest we learn by example.
Philosophy deals with questions that nobody has the time for. Because the answers to life’s biggest and most difficult questions don’t sit inside a book, but in the student or human person themselves.
And for any philosophers about to get on a murder trolley, take Katie’s pro-tip and don’t!