Monty Python and Philosophy

by Gary L. Hardcastle

  The professional contradictor does, in fact, display an ability to argue in this sense: he correctly distinguishes ‘argument’ from ‘good argument’ and rightly points out that an argument can consist of mere iterated contradiction. But his arguing about the argument just makes it even more frustrating for the client. He will not engage in a true argument about anything substantive.

  Philosophers like the sketch for at least two reasons. First, argument is just about all we are good at: it is not at all uncommon for a philosopher to exclaim dismissively “but that’s an empirical, not a philosophical, issue,” and by that they mean that evidence is irrelevant: argument is the only guide to the truth. Second, frankly, the idea of a world in which our narrow range of skills find a market like the market for accountants and hairdressers strikes us both as delightful and absurd; we fantasize that in that world we might make more money.

  But the sketch also poses a puzzle. As I mentioned, viewers at the time would have known that contradiction could be accessed for free just by walking into any shop or workplace. Why, though, would someone go to an argument clinic for a “good” argument? What the client wants is for someone to show him what is wrong with his own beliefs and reasons for those beliefs. Why would he pay for that? Doesn’t it seem, as I said earlier, absurd?

  One possible reason would be, simply, for intellectual stimulation: a kind of work-out for the mind, or mental game of tennis. But there is another, rather different, reason, which I shall spend the rest of this chapter explaining. It is, in short, this: that only through a process of argument with other people can most of us hope to come to have true beliefs about matters of any complexity. In explaining this, I am going to focus on my own area of expertise within philosophy, which is moral philosophy. But I think the claim is true in other areas of philosophy, and even beyond philosophy.

  The Philosophical Argument and Reflective Equilibrium

  What constitutes a philosophical argument? How does somebody go about constructing one? What, in other words, would the client be getting if he got what he wanted, at least if he got it from a philosopher? Assuming that most readers have a limited exposure to professional philosophy, I want to describe how philosophers go about making arguments, focusing on a particular method popularized by the American philosopher John Rawls (1926-2002), known as reflective equilibrium.25

  Philosophy is the systematic study of questions, the answers to which cannot be determined simply by gathering observational data about the world and making hypotheses about those data. “What is on the telly?” is not a philosophical question, because ultimately it has to be addressed through observation. “What is the nature of knowledge?,” by contrast, is philosophical. Without experiences we could not address it, but its answer does not rest on observation. Philosophical questions may well have determinate answers. There is a truth about them. But theoretical, rather than empirical, reason is the means to arriving at the truth. My own particular interest is in moral philosophy, the field within philosophy that asks questions about how we should live our lives, and what constitutes goodness. It addresses large general questions such as “What makes a flourishing human life?”; “Does the moral value of actions lie in their consequences or in the motives behind them?” and “Are states of affairs or the characters of persons the ultimate bearers of value?” and also much more specific questions such as “Is abortion morally wrong?” and “Is it ever right to lie?”

  These questions simply cannot be answered by gathering empirical, or scientific, evidence. So how do we try to work out the answers to them? Philosophy rejects appeals to authority. Good philosophers never offer anything like “As the great thinker Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson argues . . .” as support for their claims (although they might preface an explanation of what is wrong with Arthur’s views with a comment on his greatness). So they can’t resort to The Holy Bible, the Ten Commandments, or the sayings of Spike Milligan, profound as they are. Such appeals replace the question “What is moral?” with “Why are Spike Milligan’s, or The Holy Bible’s, sayings morally authoritative?” But we can’t answer that question without establishing what is moral in the first place. So we might as well have started with that question.

  Since neither authority nor empirical evidence is decisive, how do we do it? As suggested above, the method that most contemporary philosophers use is what Rawls called reflective equilibrium. This method invites us to approach questions about morality, and philosophical questions generally, in the following way. Taking up a topic like justice, or punishment, or lying, we first list our considered judgments about specific particular cases, and look at whether these all fit together consistently. Where we find that they don’t fit together we reject those judgments in which we have least confidence (for example, those in which we have reason to suspect there is an element of self-interest pressing us to that particular judgment). We also list the general principles, or rules, we judge suitable to cover cases, and look to see if those principles fit together as well, again rejecting the principles in which we have least confidence. Then we look at the particular judgments and the principles in the light of one another—do they fit together? Do some of the principles look less plausible in the light of the weight of considered judgments, or vice versa?

  Of course, all that this method gives us is, at best, a set of judgments that fit together; what philosophers call a consistent set of judgments. But if we engage in the process collectively, in conversation with others who are rational like us, we can have increasing confidence in the truth of the outcomes. Other people can bring out considerations we had not noticed; they can alert us to weaknesses in our own judgments; they can force us to think harder and better. If we converge on conclusions about particular cases with people with whom we otherwise disagree a great deal, we should have even more confidence in our judgment. We can’t ever be certain that we have arrived at a final, true view of justice, or punishment, or lying. But this method at least gives us a way of making some progress.

  What exactly do I mean by “judgments about particular cases” and “principles”? An autobiographical comment which, I’m afraid, does not reflect particularly well on me, will help. In the late 1970s I held a view that, I think, was quite common among British teenagers with my political outlook, which was that there was no reason to grant free speech to racists, or anyone with anti-social views, and that it was entirely fine for the government to censor offensive films. So, the principle I held was something like this: “Governments should have the power to censor expression when it meets some objective criteria for being anti-social.” One morning I turned on the radio and heard Jimmy Young (a DJ) announce that he was soon going to be talking to a Church of England vicar who was trying to have a new film, “Rimbaud,” banned from his local cinema. My reaction was outrage—“How dare this busy-bodying minister try to shut down a film about the great homosexual French poet Arthur Rimbaud?” (Here we have a judgment about an individual case: it is wrong to censor this film). When the discussion began, however, it turned out that the vicar objected not to the film’s portrayal of homosexuality, but to its excessive violence. The film was, in fact, entirely devoid of reference to homosexuality or poetry, and had I heard the vicar without having been confused about his topic, I would have agreed with every word he said (the judgment about the individual case I would have had: “It is fine to censor this film”). The film was, of course, called “Rambo,” not “Rimbaud,” and starred Sylvester Stallone (who would have been an eccentric, not to say Pythonesque, choice for Rimbaud). The two judgments are not strictly speaking inconsistent, but what the incident brought home to me was that my real reason for defending one rather than another film from censorship was not that one met some objective standard of anti-sociality, but that one reflected my values and the other clashed with them. In other words my judgment did not reflect the principle I brought to the cases, but self-interest of a certain sort; the same sort of self-interest that had, incidentally, led only a year o
r two earlier to calls for censoring Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

  Suppose You Were Attached to a Dead Parrot: The Role of Thought Experiments

  How do we isolate our judgments about particular cases? Usually we are not so lucky as to be forced by a disc jockey to think things through. There are several methods of isolating our particular judgments, but I am going to focus on one of the most prominent, what philosophers call the thought experiment. Thought experiments tend to be very unrealistic inventions, in which the theorist imagines a situation in which implementing a principle has an unacceptable consequence, or in which two judgments that we previously thought were consistent in fact conflict. Often the thought experiment is supposed to be analogous to a real life case in all relevant respects, but shows up the inapplicability of some judgment to the real-life case. The most famous, and in my view the greatest, thought experiment in moral philosophy is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “violinist” case, in her article “A Defense of Abortion.”26 Thomson makes an analogy between the case of abortion in which the prospective mother has conceived as a result of rape, and the following case: a famous violinist is dying of a rare blood disease, which can only by cured by having you (the reader) hooked up to him for a certain amount of time (say nine months) so that he can use your body to cleanse his liver. No one else will do—because, say, you and he are the only people in the world with a certain blood type. A Society of Music Lovers takes it upon itself to kidnap you and hook you up to the violinist. When you awake you find yourself able to unhook yourself and walk away. Thomson asks whether the violinist has the right to your body in this manner, and assumes that most of her readers will say “no.” But, she says, what is the difference between this case and the case of abortion, where the pregnancy arose from rape? The prospective mother is being used by the fetus, and only she will do for its purposes. She is not in that situation out of choice: she was forced into it by someone else (not, admittedly, the fetus, but nor did the violinist force you into being hooked up to him). So, abortion, at least in the case of rape, is not wrong.

  Thomson deploys other thought experiments to show that abortion is permissible in a much wider range of cases, but I want to focus on what this, very limited, thought-experiment actually shows. When I teach Thomson’s article I find that most of the students who oppose abortion are not persuaded that there is anything acceptable about abortion. But in fact Thomson’s article is less directed at showing there is a right to abortion than to showing something quite different: that whatever is wrong with abortion has nothing to do with the right to life of the fetus. Whereas supporters and opponents of abortion rights frequently argue over whether the fetus has a right to life, Thomson concedes at the start that it does. Her thought-experiment is so striking because the violinist, who is supposed to be analogous to the fetus, is an adult, with all the rights and moral standing that adults typically have. When we say that we are entitled to walk away from the violinist, we do so in the knowledge that he is an adult who certainly has a right to life, and that he will die if we walk away, and, crucially, that even though he will die we will not be violating his right to life. Opponents of abortion believe the fetus has a right to life, and that the violinist has a right to life. They are not forced by Thomson’s thought experiment to give up the view that abortion is wrong, even in the case where pregnancy arises from rape. But, if they want to say that it is permissible to walk away from the violinist, they are forced to look for some other grounds than the right to life of the fetus for justifying the wrongness of abortion. In my own experience I find that students are, like Mr. Vibrating, quite ingenious. They can almost always find other grounds for supporting what they believe, but what they have given up is the central slogan of the anti-abortion movement: “right to life.” Sure, fetuses have rights to life, but that cannot be why abortion is wrong.

  I’ve dwelled on this example, because it neatly displays both the power and the limits of thought-experiments. Good thought experiments are powerful because they can force us to interrogate judgments we had previously simply assumed, and show them to be groundless. But they are also limited. By themselves they do not support substantive conclusions about what is right and wrong, but only show that certain kinds of reasons support (or fail to support) such conclusions.

  Moreover, we have to recognize that individually and collectively we are subject to all sorts of biases and prejudices that we cannot readily filter out about these matters. We are reluctant to see our own behaviors as systematically wrong, and, like it or not, we have a tendency to normalize the values of our own social framework. For example, a world in which women are systematically barred from using certain occupational skills is one in which they will tend to be seen both by men and women as less capable of exercising those skills. We all, now, see what was wrong with slavery or witch-burning, but when these practices were in force they were seen as normal by nearly all involved. So reflective equilibrium, when conducted as a variant of personal meditation, gets us only so far. Getting to the full truth requires that we have an array of interlocutors: people with different perspectives who can challenge our biases and help us to transcend the limits of our own efforts. When women entered the debate about women’s status in society they presented arguments and perspectives that were not previously in play, and which the men involved in the debate may not have been able, or at least may not have bothered, to imagine. The wider the participation in reflective equilibrium, the more likely the process is, other things being equal, to lead us toward the truth.

  This brings us back to the Argument Clinic. One’s own perspective on moral, and other, matters is necessarily limited. This doesn’t mean that one is completely stuck in one’s own perspective; one can, and should, think as far beyond it as one can. But often, one needs help: someone or, preferably, many people, to present alternatives, with whom one can then uncover agreement and disagreement. Mere contradiction, entertaining as it is to a pantomime audience, simply does not serve this purpose.

  This philosophical point also tells us something about Monty Python’s humor and why many people find both Monty Python and thought-experiments ludicrous when they first encounter them. Good thought experiments have a great deal in common with good absurd sketches, of the kind the Python team excels in (and, I think, the kind of creativity required to produce them is very similar). They both depend on an internal logic, which may look absurd from the outside. So the Pet Shop owner in the Parrot Sketch (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 8, “Full Frontal Nudity”) has at his fingertips a huge array of alternative possibilities to the Norwegian Blue being dead; and the customer has an equally rich array of ways of making the point that the parrot is, in fact, dead. The structure of the sketch depends on this contrast, and the pieces of the sketch have to fit together. Thought experiments and Python sketches also both depend on a connection with the world. The thought experiment has to be connected in a way that isolates the intuitive judgments that are at issue; the absurdist sketch has to connect with some aspect of the audience’s experience enough so that it is possible to suspend disbelief for the duration of the sketch. And, in fact, some sketches are themselves rather like thought experiments; they say “Of course, this couldn’t happen or isn’t going to happen. But let’s ask what would make sense if it did happen.” The “Argument Clinic” works better than it otherwise would precisely because, as I am arguing, argument—much more than mere contradiction or abuse—engages us aesthetically as well as intellectually.

  Far from being absurd, then, it is entirely sensible to go to an argument clinic (as the client understands it). If one has strong ideas about parrots, it may even make sense to go to Michael Palin’s pet shop. If we are committed to uncovering the truth about matters of human value or other matters of great complexity, we usually need other smart, good-willed, and intellectually serious people to alert us to perspectives and reasons we would not have been able to conjure up on our own. If more people sought argument clinics the world
would be a better place, and not only because philosophers would be richer.

  6

  A Very Naughty Boy: Getting Right with Brian

  RANDALL E. AUXIER

  How I Was Saved

  Let’s start by just facing it. We’re all sinners—not me so much as you, because I’ve actually done pretty well, but I could stand a bit of regeneration and I can see that you are in real trouble with you-know-Who. He told me so Himself, last night, over a bottle of Two-Buck-Chuck. He likes cheap wine because, well, He loves a bargain. Here is the point. I have a message for you from Him, so listen up: “You are to regard the following essay as revealed, on peril of your eternal soul” (and if you are reading this, I’m sure the peril is quite real). I don’t ask any more of you than would any other inspired being.

  How came I to possess such particular favor with He-Who-cannot-be-named? I was a delinquent of fourteen, wandering down a street in Memphis, when a small band of renegade Baptists sidled up to me, sincerely inquiring as to the likely destination of my soul.27 I said I was late to meet my dealer. They were undeterred. I told them he would be armed and dangerous, and that he was a Methodist. That just encouraged them. They said that if I would pray a simple prayer with them and ask Brian into my heart, my life would be changed, Brian would take away my sins and save me a seat on that Great Greyhound to Chicago (you can’t go to hell or heaven without a layover in Chicago). I could see these were no ordinary Baptists. These fellows had something. That was long ago, and many things have been revealed to me since, including the actual code for the Microsoft Operating System, which I now know to have come directly from Satan. I stand before you today an altered man, yes, some of it was surgical, but some came by direct action of the Almighty. If you care for your soul, turn back.